This January we’re starting the Faber Fiction Book of the Month promotion with Y, the debut novel by Marjorie Celona. Running until June, Faber Fiction Book of the Month will be shining a light on a compelling new titles from both new and established authors, and giving reading groups the opportunity to enjoy them without having to wait for the paperback. In this exclusive offer to Reading Groups For Everyone, if you order four or more copies of the same title you will receive a 50% discount. Copies can be purchased from Faber & Faber.
About Y
A mesmerising debut that begins with a baby left on the steps of the YMCA and uncovers the true meaning of identity, family and the place we call home.
Abandoned as a newborn then bounced between foster homes, Shannon eventually finds stability with Miranda, a single mother with a daughter of her own. But as Shannon grows, so do her questions. Will she ever belong? Who is her true family? And why would they abandon her on the day she was born? When Shannon turns sixteen she decides to go in search of answers. As she will discover, they lie in the heartrending tale of her mother, a headstrong young woman trapped in a series of events that will change her life for ever.
An interview with Marjorie Celona
Who are some of your inspirations and influences, on both your writing career in general and on the creation of Y as a novel?
I’m more indebted to singular books and stories than I am to any author’s oeuvre, with the exception of Alice Munro, Kurt Vonnegut and Raymond Carver. So: Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping, Flannery O’Connor’s The Complete Stories, Alasdair Gray’s Unlikely Stories, Mostly, Mona Simpson’s Anywhere But Here, Richard Ford’s Rock Springs, Michael Ondaatje’s In the Skin of a Lion, Dorothy Allison’s Bastard out of Carolina, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, Salmon Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, and Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Sharer. These books and stories either made me want to be a writer or, now, make me want to continue.
Tell us about how you came to write Y. Where did the idea first come from?
I was 23 and had just gotten an internship at the Malahat Review, and was so nervous about doing a good job that I spent a month in the archives of the library, reading back issues. For whatever reason, I noticed that a weirdly large number of stories began with a word that started with Y (MR uses a drop cap—and so the first letter of the first word was huge). I thought about the letter on the bus ride home, then started the short story that evening. It was the first story I published in an American literary journal – Indiana Review – and was later anthologized in The Best American Nonrequired Reading. Some years went by. I moved to the U.S. in ‘07 and spent two years at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Though I loved my time at Iowa, I didn’t anticipate how much I would miss Vancouver Island. I used to spend hours doing image searches of Emily Carr paintings, just to feel like I was in the damp shade of the forest again. I started thinking that adapting Y into a novel could be a way of transporting myself back to the place I so missed, but I didn’t have the time or headspace to begin writing (if you must know, by this time I was working as a housekeeper in Wisconsin—I’m always struck by how many ups and downs a writer must face in the course of his or her career).
Then, in the fall of 2010, I received a one-year writing fellowship from Colgate University. I wrote the first draft of Y in a cottage in the woods of upstate New York. Sometimes I wrote for twelve hours a day. I saw almost no one that year. There were eight chickens on the property and two guard dogs and sometimes it snowed so much that I couldn’t open my front door. The cabin was heated by a tiny propane heater and a fireplace and I chopped more wood that winter than I care to remember. I finished the book in a castle in rural Scotland, while living with five other writers—with a no-talking policy during the day—as part of an international writers’ retreat. In some ways, writing Y was wonderful; in others, it felt like an almost ten-year slog.
The novel is written in a very interesting narrative structure of alternating timelines and sets of characters. What were some of the challenges and rewards of this structure? Which story thread did you first conceive of, Shannon’s or Yula’s? Did their stories turn out how you initially intended or were there any unexpected turns along the way?
The challenge was keeping the chronology—and everyone’s histories—straight in my head. The reward was that I could switch storylines. One day I’d work on Shannon’s, the next on Yula’s. Each storyline took a very different part of my brain to write. Some days I could only work on one and not the other. I never wrote with any kind of intention or premeditation in mind—except, of course, I knew I wanted Shannon and Yula to find each other.
Describe your writing process: how and where do you write? What part of the process do you find most rewarding: the initial inspiration, the writing, or the rewriting? Do you prefer a lot of editing and revising?
I write in bed, on my laptop. I write for long stretches of time. I find rewriting to be taxing, laborious, gruelling, intellectual work. To avoid it, I edit as I go along, revising sentence by sentence, until the rhythm sounds right. Almost always, there’s music.
Shannon’s troubling experiences with the foster care system are illustrated with fine attention paid to realism and detail. What sort of research did you do into the lives of foster children?
I talked to social workers and foster parents. I read about foundlings, about adoption, about the search for birth parents. I reconnected with one of my best friends from childhood, who is adopted, and we talked on the phone night after night.
One night I drew a little graph where I examined the distance between things that had happened in my life and things that had happened in Shannon’s—and I asked myself whether there was enough similarity in our experiences for me to write this book. I still ask myself this.
One of the central questions of the novel is whether Shannon is better off not knowing who her parents are. Do you think it’s possible for an adopted person to live their lives not knowing his or her biological parents?
So many of us—adopted or not—grow up not knowing one of our birth parents. I think the yearning is always there, regardless of whether that yearned-for parent is biological or not. Shannon yearns for her former foster parents, too, and eventually attempts to reconnect with her abusive foster father, Julian. We always want the person who has left us behind.
Shannon’s story is filled with a lot of tragedy and pain, but as she grows into adolescence, we do see examples of good memories, and some humour. How important was it to inject some lighter aspects into the story?
Hmm. I suppose I could launch into a discussion of how comedy and tragedy are intrinsically linked in fiction, or how a story wouldn’t be truthful if it lacked any levity, but, really, I just like to laugh, no matter what I’m doing.
What do you hope that the reader will take away from the story?
I just hope it’s an honest account of something—an attempt to portray the world as it truly is. In my wildest dreams, I hope he or she feels the way I did as a young girl when I first read books like Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping, Kaye Gibbons’s Ellen Foster, Alice Munro’s Lives of Girls and Women, and Mona Simpson’s Anywhere But Here—all these books are about unhappy girls, so satisfying when you are one, or used to be one, or will always be one, or whatever.
Extras
Download the A4 poster here.
Download the discussion notes for your book club.
Watch to Marjorie Celona give a short interview about her book Y:
Get involved
Have your reading group read Y? If so, we’d love to read your reviews. Simply leave them in the comment box below.
