Zoe Whittall, THE SPECTACULAR: A Novel
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[0:41]Zoe Widdell is the author of This Spectacular, a novel.
[0:44]Zoe is also the author of three previous novels, including The Gillish or Listed, The Best Kind of People,
[0:49]The Lamb to Winning Holding Still for as long as possible, and her debut, Bottle Rocket Hearts.
[0:54]She has published three collections of poetry, The Best 10 Minutes of Your Life,
[0:58]Pre-Corgil Sump, and The Emily Valentine Poems.
[1:01]She is also a Canadian Screen Award-winning TV and film writer with credits on the Baroness,
[1:07]Von Sketchau, Shoots Creek, Degrassi, and others.
[1:11]Welcome, Zoe.
[1:12]Thank you so much for coming on Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books to discuss this spectacular.
[1:16]Thank you for having me.
[1:17]I'm really excited to be here.
[1:19]It's such a pleasure.
[1:20]Would you mind telling listeners what your book is about?
[1:23]Sure.
[1:24]So the spectacular is a book about three generations of women.
[1:27]It spans a lot of time.
[1:29]So there's a scene in 1910 and 22, and then it goes right up to 2015.
[1:34]And it's a hard book to pitch in a log line.
[1:37]It's basically a book that looks at the idea of whether or not each of the three characters,
[1:43]whether or not they want to have kids at three different points in their life.
[1:46]And so they all at one point choose to have a kid and choose not to have a kid at various points in life.
[1:52]And it's also a story just generally about sexual autonomy, attachment, and motherhood.
[1:58]I think that was a good job at the log line.
[2:00]I mean, you know, I read your beautiful essay about your own experience with your pregnancy and pregnancy loss.
[2:10]And it was so moving and beautiful and amazing.
[2:12]And I felt like it put the book into more of a context for me.
[2:16]Or, you know, just as background, can you speak to that a little bit?
[2:20]And if you don't want to talk about it, that's also fine.
[2:22]No, that's fine. Yeah, it was really weird.
[2:25]Like, when people ask me for, you know, what inspired the book,
[2:29]I basically spent every single day of my 30s waking up and asking myself,
[2:33]should I have a baby today?
[2:35]Like, I just have always wanted a kid.
[2:37]And, but my life never really supported it.
[2:40]Like, I never had, I had two back to back, back to back when all of him's partners in my 30s and 40s,
[2:45]who the first one didn't want children.
[2:47]And the second one already had two kids and didn't want more.
[2:51]And so, you know, I left that original relationship because she didn't want to, she didn't want to have a kid.
[2:57]And, and then when I fell in love with my ex partner, I felt like, oh, I can be a stepmom.
[3:03]You know, I was trying to look at my life, you know, because you always have dreams of what your life is going to look like.
[3:08]And it never looks the way you anticipate, even if you do and, you know, get certain things that you've dreamed of.
[3:14]And so, I really took this like emotional reckoning I've been having for a long time and this sort of procrastination about whether or not to have kids or not.
[3:22]And put it into these characters and sort of took this emotional problem, made it a little bit of an intellectual project.
[3:28]And funny thing is I wrote most of the book when I was with my ex partner and then we had right before the pandemic he left me.
[3:36]And it was really devastating and I was 43 and did not think it was possible for me to get pregnant.
[3:44]I don't know why I had read a statistic about it being like 0% chance of doing it on my own and a lot of my friends have been trying for years.
[3:52]So many of my friends have gone through my BS and anyway, I just was careless with a new lover and it happened.
[3:58]And I felt like it was, you know, I'm not a religious person, but I did feel like fate or God or someone had intervened to be like here is your last chance.
[4:05]And it was a beautiful feeling because I had so much anxiety about whether or not I would be a good mother, whether or not I should do it.
[4:13]I never really had money before the previous five years and so like that was also a factor all the practical because it felt like this moment of everything coming together to be like here is your moment, you could do it now.
[4:25]And it was just amazing and I felt incredible pregnant and it was devastating when I lost the meaning.
[4:30]And that happened right at the beginning of the pandemic as I was sort of going through the final draft of the spectacular and I felt like how weird like how strange to be writing, you know, I knew that I wanted the book
[4:42]and the way it did and I won't give it away, but I knew that I wrote that ending before I actually broke up with Max partner.
[4:49]And so it was already there, but I did feel like it was a little twist of irony when I was pregnant that I was going to potentially be touring the book with a four month old because originally the pub date was earlier.
[5:00]And so yeah, I mean life just works out that way sometimes and we have to roll with it.
[5:04]And I think that's a lot of what this book is about.
[5:06]And you wrote also about the devastation not only and I'm so sorry for that happening and your loss and thank you, you're being left.
[5:15]I mean, this is so I mean, you seem like such an amazing person and don't deserve not that anyone deserves that I'm just so sorry that it happened to you.
[5:22]And how you had to go through it like alone, you know, as so many people who have lost people during the pandemic, you know, you were morning, you're like you wanted to be with your friends and get what could you do except for Zoom therapy
[5:34]hanging with your TV screen or whatever. I mean, that's like one of the most horrible parts is this lack of connection, right?
[5:42]Especially when you need it emotionally because there's really just nothing.
[5:46]The same as a hug on a day when you feel like life is just not going to get better.
[5:51]And it was that time of the pandemic where we didn't really know anything.
[5:55]Like I think it was even before people were really wearing masks and like anyway, it was terrible.
[6:01]I'm sorry. Do you feel like you worked through some issues so to speak writing the book like analyzing it and, you know, I always feel like if I can quantify something that's really emotionally out an issue, like if I could somehow change it into like an equation or something that maybe it can help like do you feel like it had any sort of therapeutic or do you feel like you've come to some resolution with it now or anything like that?
[6:26]I think it's an ongoing thing for me, but I do think that like, you know, I'm in a query. So I don't know if you believe in a strong day.
[6:33]I do.
[6:34]Nice. Oh, okay.
[6:36]It's a good friend.
[6:37]And so I do feel like somehow even if you know, even if I'm very if I approach the art of storytelling from a very intellectual place and I think about it in aesthetics and style and language.
[6:49]I'm also sort of always underneath wrestling with ideas like there's always a question at the heart of everybody's body of work.
[6:58]And I think, you know, I think it was the poet Tony Hoglin had a great line in one of his books of the poetic essays about how every rest every writer has an irresolvable obsession and that it infiltrates all of their work.
[7:11]I feel like all my irresolvable obsession is like existential, it's about anxiety, I've struggled with anxiety disorder.
[7:18]And so in some ways, in every book, anxiety comes up at the core.
[7:23]And so I feel like in some ways, the book was a way for me to put ideas in my head about about motherhood and being pregnant and having a family and all of these things, put them into to three different perspectives and was able to kind of play it out in these various things.
[7:40]And so in some ways, in some ways it helped me resolve, you know, I've also been one of these people that I've always wanted kids, but I've also always had a really full life without them.
[7:51]And so in some ways, it was interesting to play out the characters in their lot in the fullness of their lives with outside of their identity as parents.
[8:03]I loved your opening scene with where all the doctors are trying to dissuade Missy from having her tubes tied and saying like they know more than her because she's so young and she's the granddaughter obviously in the story and you go through, you know, setting the stage for how she even came to be and seeing all the different
[8:21]points of everything, but you know, this whole notion of are you really in control of your own reproduction, I feel like is at the center because the doctors and particularly male doctors are telling her like you can't do this and you shouldn't do this.
[8:36]And when is it okay for you to make up your mind, doesn't you have to wait to a certain age, you know, is it fair that men can have it reversed right and women cannot right.
[8:46]So all these issues.
[8:48]It's crazy. And you know, I took that scene from the real life experience of one of my friends who was 38 years old at the time.
[8:56]And knew her entire life that she didn't want children and was just so tired of the way different birth controls made her feel and affected her life.
[9:03]And so she went to like that many doctors in Montreal to try to get the procedure done even though she missed 38 and single and knew what she wanted in her life.
[9:13]They wouldn't allow her. And so I just couldn't believe that I couldn't believe that, you know, you can get vasectomies for any, any time you want.
[9:21]And women don't have that option and I just think it's so weird.
[9:25]And it's weird, especially, you know, because you can't, because abortion is legal here and it's just it's so bananas to me. And I felt like what, what would that scene, how would that scene play out if somebody was younger and that's sort of where the inspiration came.
[9:40]And you've had a lot of writing, you've had a lot of experiences with both men and women and you have a whole essay.
[9:47]I think it all or somewhere else about sort of this notion of femme and how it's how the sort of mainstream depiction of a certain type of person has shifted over time and all of that.
[10:00]How do you feel like that has influenced your writing?
[10:03]Well, yes, so I came out in 1995 when I was 18,
[10:09]and I came out as by, but I was very lesbian-identified
[10:14]for a long time, just had many girlfriends over and over.
[10:16]So it was sort of just culturally felt like a good fit for me
[10:20]to be to identify as queer.
[10:21]And then, but I always sort of knew I was by
[10:24]and then, you know, when my 30s began dating some men.
[10:27]And it's not easy, I don't think I've ever felt like an ease
[10:32]with the word bisexual.
[10:33]I feel like it's an awkward word.
[10:35]And there's so many misconceptions and stereotypes
[10:38]that from both sides, from the queer community
[10:41]and from straight world.
[10:43]So that's another thing that, you know, in my 40s,
[10:45]I'm getting more at peace with, I guess.
[10:48]And so in terms of my writing,
[10:50]it's always been very important to me to write about queer community.
[10:54]And to, you know, it's very funny how,
[10:57]when we were preparing the promo materials for this book,
[11:01]I was trying to think of other examples of literary work
[11:06]about queer fems who date,
[11:08]which is our masculine people or trans men
[11:11]or people along the masculine spectrum.
[11:13]If you need definitions, just feel free to interrupt.
[11:15]But it was really hard.
[11:17]It was hard to find contemporary work.
[11:19]And I feel like there's been this explosion of trans writers
[11:22]or more acceptance of gay male writers in the literary establishment.
[11:27]And it hasn't been the same with queer women in some ways.
[11:31]And so I was really, I've always been really excited
[11:33]to sort of put the world I know,
[11:36]even though I don't write nonfiction necessarily,
[11:39]I've always been really thrilled at the idea
[11:41]of like representing the world that I live in in literature.
[11:45]Not that it's always been easy
[11:47]because it's really, you know,
[11:48]up until five years ago,
[11:49]it was very, very difficult to sell.
[11:51]And in fact, my first major commercial success,
[11:53]the best kind of people wasn't queer themed at all.
[11:55]So, you know, it's a bit of a struggle
[11:58]in terms of trying to make a living, telling queer stories.
[12:00]And I think it's getting easier now, which is lovely.
[12:04]But so important.
[12:05]I mean, this goes back to, you know,
[12:08]from the dawn of time sort of how, you know,
[12:11]people of color couldn't find themselves in literature.
[12:13]And so, I mean, I just had Jewel Parker Rhodes on my show.
[12:17]Again, I love her.
[12:18]I've done like four things with her.
[12:19]And she literally didn't know like that black people
[12:21]could write until she was in college.
[12:23]She like didn't even know that was a thing.
[12:24]And it's the same, if you don't have the model,
[12:27]if you don't read it and hear it, it's such a lost
[12:30]because there's so many people who identify the same way.
[12:33]So, you know, you're writing about it as like a mitzvah
[12:36]to all these people who are coming after you.
[12:39]So that's really awesome.
[12:40]How did you even get your start writing?
[12:42]How did you always know you wanted to write
[12:44]or how did it begin?
[12:46]So I started as a poet and I always loved,
[12:50]I was a super like book nerd as a kid.
[12:54]And I, when I was trying to figure out
[12:56]what I wanted to do in university,
[12:58]my mother asked me, she said,
[13:00]oh, I heard this thing that if you don't know what
[13:01]she'd like to study, you should think about
[13:03]what you really love to do when you were three.
[13:05]And I was like, well, I don't remember.
[13:08]And she said that I used to dictate stories to her
[13:12]so that she, and she would write them down
[13:14]before I knew how to write.
[13:15]And I actually, you know, was the,
[13:17]when I got to kindergarten,
[13:18]I was the only one who already knew how to read.
[13:20]And it was just always such a passion
[13:22]from a very young age.
[13:23]And so I applied to study creative writing
[13:26]in university and started as a poet
[13:28]and was sort of more of a hobby.
[13:30]And the idea of writing a novel felt very lofty.
[13:32]It felt very like, only very special.
[13:35]You know, it kind of feels like an elia occupation.
[13:37]And so I was really, I wasn't confident enough
[13:40]to try for a number of years.
[13:42]And then finally, I wrote a collection of short stories.
[13:44]And one of the stories just kept getting longer and longer.
[13:47]And the editor I was working with at the time said,
[13:50]why don't you just make this into a novel?
[13:52]And that was a real gift of an observation
[13:55]because I ended up really loving the form of the novel.
[13:59]Like I love having that much space to work in.
[14:02]And so then it kind of went from there.
[14:03]And that was a real revelation.
[14:04]And that was in, you know, the early 2000s.
[14:07]So yeah, my first poetry book came out when I was 25.
[14:10]So it's been over 20 years now
[14:12]that I've been hustling.
[14:14]And what do you do when you're not writing?
[14:16]When I'm not writing, well, I'm really fortunate
[14:19]that I have been able to write full time
[14:20]for the last six or seven years.
[14:22]And I also write for television.
[14:24]And so that's mostly what I do is write.
[14:28]And before that, I had lots of different odd jobs.
[14:31]I used to teach.
[14:32]And I was a freelance journalist for a while.
[14:34]And I worked in publicity and did a lot of things.
[14:37]So I'm really happy to be waking up
[14:39]and being able to write in my own house
[14:41]is just like a dream come true for me.
[14:43]But I mean, and also what do you do,
[14:45]like outside of work?
[14:46]Like what are yours?
[14:47]Oh, right.
[14:48]Right.
[14:49]Well, in the pandemic, like not a whole lot.
[14:51]I feel like I'm going to learn to cross country ski
[14:53]this year because I just need to be country.
[14:55]And I feel like, okay, that's the thing I can do.
[14:57]I have a yard that I'm going to start gardening in the spring.
[15:00]It's my new goal as well.
[15:02]And yeah, I just really love pop culture and theater
[15:05]and comedy.
[15:06]I do stand up comedy as a bit of a high up hobby sometimes.
[15:09]That's how I got into TV.
[15:11]That's awesome.
[15:11]I love it.
[15:12]And what are you reading now?
[15:13]Like what types of books do you like to read?
[15:16]Well, right now, what am I reading?
[15:17]I'm reading into the scenes.
[15:19]And it's not in front of me.
[15:19]So I can't remember the author's name.
[15:21]I apologize.
[15:22]I also just finished the Sally Rooney,
[15:24]which was the new Sally Rooney,
[15:25]which was incredible, of course.
[15:28]And I read, I feel like this is such a boring answer
[15:30]because everybody has read these books in the last few months.
[15:32]But I finished Crossroads by Jonathan Branson.
[15:35]And I love his work.
[15:37]I'm a bit of a pathologist.
[15:38]I feel like it for a long time,
[15:40]wasn't very cool to love Franzen.
[15:42]But I just feel like he's the kind of writer
[15:44]where you're just sort of immediately immersed.
[15:47]And I think this book is pretty funny as well.
[15:49]And I appreciate that.
[15:51]What advice do you have for aspiring authors?
[15:54]Oh, interesting.
[15:55]Advice for aspiring authors.
[15:57]I feel like this is advice taken from my own mistakes
[16:02]to not submit work and tell you've rewritten something
[16:05]like often I say 10 times.
[16:07]Like I think the draft you submit should look almost nothing
[16:10]like the first draft.
[16:11]And if you can, if you can be patient enough
[16:14]to put the work in a drawer for a few months,
[16:16]then go back to it before you submit it.
[16:18]And also just to make sure that if you want
[16:21]to write a contemporary novel,
[16:22]that you read a lot of contemporary novels,
[16:24]that you know what's out there and what kind of books
[16:28]your book's book will be in conversation with.
[16:32]And also just to, there's a lot of mystique
[16:35]around like how you get a book published,
[16:37]the specialist of having a book out.
[16:39]But really like the difference between someone
[16:41]who has a book and someone who doesn't
[16:43]is that you just sat your butt in a chair
[16:45]and did it road every day.
[16:46]It's a lot about staying the course
[16:48]more than any kind of magical talent intervention.
[16:52]And are you working on anything new that you can talk about?
[16:54]Yes.
[16:55]So I have a book of short stories called Wild Failure
[16:57]coming out in 2023.
[16:58]And also I have another novel called The Fake.
[17:01]And it's actually, it's a book about two people
[17:04]who get taken in by a con artist,
[17:06]a really charismatic con artist.
[17:08]And it's sort of inspired by the experience
[17:11]I had dating women when I was in my late 20s,
[17:14]who lied to me about having cancer.
[17:16]And so inspired by that experience,
[17:19]which was why they took it to take in 15 years
[17:21]to be able to write about it.
[17:23]So it's a little bit of a thriller
[17:25]and an emotional suspense book that I'm excited about.
[17:29]Wow.
[17:29]Isn't that, I'm going to sound stupid now.
[17:32]Isn't that what Munchhausen's disease is
[17:34]when you pretend that somebody has cancer?
[17:36]I think it's the same, right?
[17:38]Yes, yes.
[17:38]And I don't really know what her pathology was in particular.
[17:42]I think there was some element of Munchhausen's in there.
[17:45]And so trying to create a character with similar story,
[17:48]it was been really just interesting to do the research
[17:51]and to figure out how what makes somebody
[17:54]that immersed in a fallacy, you know, that thing.
[17:57]Wow.
[17:58]Do you know an author named Andrea Dunlove?
[18:00]She's done a lot of public work on that same theme.
[18:05]I can introduce you.
[18:06]I would love to write that name down.
[18:08]Yeah, she did.
[18:09]Does she have a book?
[18:10]She has a book, she has,
[18:12]I can say, I'll send you more information.
[18:14]Okay, great, thank you.
[18:15]But yeah, she's awesome.
[18:17]Okay, great.
[18:18]Well, thank you so much.
[18:20]Did I forget anything?
[18:20]How can people find you?
[18:21]How can people follow you and find you and all that good stuff?
[18:24]So I'm on Twitter, so we would all, all one word.
[18:28]And I'm also on Instagram
[18:30]and I have a link tree that you can link to.
[18:34]Yeah, that's about it.
[18:35]I thought it was so cool.
[18:36]You don't have a website, right?
[18:38]It's only on your link tree.
[18:40]It's just my link tree.
[18:41]I felt like keeping my website updated
[18:43]is really arduous and like,
[18:45]I felt like a link tree is a little more,
[18:46]is a way to have it more contemporary.
[18:48]Like, yeah, it's an update and relevant, yeah.
[18:51]I wonder if we're all moving in that direction.
[18:53]Maybe, anyway.
[18:55]All right, well, thank you so much.
[18:56]This has been really nice
[18:58]and I'm delighted to get to know you
[19:00]and thank you for sharing all of your personal stuff.
[19:03]So early in the morning,
[19:04]as I look you into all the nitty-gritty.
[19:08]So I really, I wish you all the best
[19:11]and wherever you end up on this childhood spectrum.
[19:14]And anyway, I'll be thinking of you.
[19:16]Thank you.
[19:17]Thanks so much for this
[19:18]and thanks so much for the Good Morning America blog.
[19:21]That was really amazing.
[19:23]All right, no problem.
[19:25]Okay, bye.
[19:27]Thanks for listening to this episode of Moms.
[19:29]Don't have time to read books.
[19:31]Don't forget to follow me on Instagram
[19:33]at zibi Owens and at Moms.
[19:35]Don't have time to read books.
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[19:43]Thanks so much to Steve and Ryan,
[19:44]that texture sound for the sound editing.
[19:47]And thank you to Morning Moon Productions
[19:49]for providing this fantastic intro and outro music.