Linwood Barclay and Wayne Johnston dish on Canada Reads strategy — and the magic of writing a life's story
Canada Reads will air March 17-20 on CBC TV, CBC Radio and CBC Books
As a prolific writer himself, Linwood Barclay knows a thing or two about crafting a narrative. After reading Newfoundland and Labrador author Wayne Johnston's Jennie's Boy, Barclay is now preparing to come up with his own argument as to why this memoir is the book all of Canada should read.
Barclay is the bestselling American-born Canadian author of over 20 books including I Will Ruin You, Find You First and Broken Promise. While he usually publishes thrillers, he also wrote a memoir called Last Resort about his difficult teenage years. So when it came to picking a book to champion on Canada Reads, the vulnerable and surprisingly funny way Wayne Johnston wrote about his childhood in his memoir stood out among the rest.
Ahead of the debates, Barclay had a moment to speak with Johnston on The Next Chapter and talk about the unique process of writing about your own life alongside fellow memoir-writer and Canada Reads host Ali Hassan.
Ali Hassan: This certainly seems like a great match up of panellist and author. That's just my opinion, but you're the one who made this choice. Tell us why.
Linwood Barclay: I've been a huge fan of Wayne's novels for a long time. I was thinking the other day that a troubled childhood, a dysfunctional family are the greatest gifts sometimes that an author can have.
But I don't know if maybe Wayne was too doubly blessed here, that maybe he had more material than he ever needed … The characters are so vivid and the situation is sort of fascinating and desperate and it just carried me right through the pages, right to the end.
It's a beautiful book.
A troubled childhood, a dysfunctional family are the greatest gifts sometimes that an author can have.- Linwood Barclay
AH: Wayne, this isn't your first rodeo, as they say. Back in 2003, you had another book in contention for Canada Reads. Tell us what that book was and who happened to champion it.
Wayne Johnston: That was The Colony of Unrequited Dreams and the champion, the defender of the book, was the then 31-year-old Justin Trudeau, who at the time was a high school drama teache.
Canada Reads had a different format back then. It didn't have the profile that it does today close to its infancy.
At the end, when you know the big reveal is supposed to come, a big reveal did come, which is that Justin, as he later told me in a telephone conversation that was taped on CBC Radio, decided that he was going to set the bar of Canadian literature higher by deciding at the last minute that he was not going to vote for my book, but he was going to vote for another book, which was a book by someone who was deceased.
It was a book called Prochain Episode by Hubert Aquin and it astonished the other panellists. It astonished the producers of Canada Reads. It was quite a thing.
AH: Wayne, the memoir is called Jennie's Boy and Jennie was your mom. She was small and mighty, as you say. Paint a picture of her for us.
WJ: We called her Jennie, we didn't call her mom or anything else. I'm not sure why everyone called her that. She was a dynamo. She basically lived on cigarettes. She would eat half a chicken wing and a slice of tomato a day. She tried to raise and did raise a family of six kids.
Four are written about in this book, me and three of my brothers. She somehow held the house together, but it was the kind of a situation where she simply didn't have the luxury of playing favourites.
Back then I had never known anything else and I read a lot early on and I tended to compare myself to characters in books. And one thing I found out really early about books is that unless something goes wrong, there's no book so I was used to characters encountering problems. I kind of thought of myself as a fictional character and it never occurred to me to wonder, "Am I going to survive at the end of this story?"
When you're going through this, you don't really appreciate how desperate or how bad it is.- Linwood Barclay
LB: I wonder if that's why this book connected with me so much. To your point about when you're going through this, you don't really appreciate how desperate or how bad it is.
When I wrote my memoir years ago, it was a difficult time I went through in my teens and lost my father and so forth. But it wasn't until many years later when it even occurred to me that it would be interesting to anyone.
AH: Let's focus on this competition here, Linwood, how do you see your strategy for defending Jennie's Boy when the week of Canada Reads debates begins?
LB: This is, first of all, just a wonderful book. But I think that sometimes memoirs try to do too much, sometimes people want to tell an entire life story. They want to just put every single thing in and I think what really makes the best memoirs work is to take a slice.
I think the best movies that are based on true lives, people's real experiences, take a moment in time in that person's life and have a look at it and allow you to really get into that period.
And taking this slice out of Wayne's childhood tells us so much about Wayne, about his family, about life at that time, what it was like in Newfoundland. The social mores, the conventions, all of that's in here, even though we're looking at the span of a decade or two, not someone's entire life. It's a story that's told in a kind of a wonderful literary fashion and as a package, to me, it's just one of the best memoirs I have read. I'll take great pleasure in championing this book for Canada Reads.
AH: From what I've seen, it's not always easy for authors to listen or watch during the debates. We've given you about 22 years. How do you plan to approach it this time?
WJ: Probably the same way that when I was in my late teens and I started going out with this girl. I was a big Montreal Canadiens fan and they were a very good team at the time but sometimes they would play the Boston Bruins and I considered them to be the arch enemy. And if it went to overtime, I literally could not watch the game so I would ask her to watch the game and I would go out and walk on the street. We had a system, I would say if they won, come out and wave. But if they didn't win, just come out of the house and don't wave.
Wave if you haven't been voted off the island and otherwise just come out and look sad.- Wayne Johnston
But that's not easy to remember when you're not a hockey fan and you're just terrified you'll get it wrong. I remember, once she waved and I thought, "Oh my God, they scored in overtime!" until I went running back to the house and she was looking so glum.
I'm thinking about asking my wife Rose to do this: wave if you haven't been voted off the island and otherwise just come out and look sad.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
