Zoe Whittall

Holding Still in Toronto

Zoe Whittall charts new ground for Canadian literature in her novel Holding Still For As Long As Possible. The themes of the book are contemporary, queer, and Canadian, a rare combination. The focal point is a love triangle involving three central characters, Josh, Amy, and Billy, all in their mid-twenties. The lines of this triangle are drawn in the vicinity of Queen Street West in Toronto, from Spadina to Roncesvalles. Whittall takes the reader deep into both the relationships and the settings of her story, highlighting neighbourhoods such as Trinity-Bellwoods and Parkdale. The result is intimate, raw, and ultimately invigorating.

The novel offers insight into the thoughts and actions of a group of young people who are representative of an unsettled generation. The boundary between their private and public lives is constantly shifting. There is an overwhelming sense that stability in love or work is unattainable. Josh, Amy and Billy float in a flood of text messages, anti-anxiety medications, employment upheaval, alcohol, and fear.

Josh is a transgendered paramedic. Amy is an aspiring filmmaker, bisexual, and from a wealthy family. Billy, the name she salvaged from her given name Hillary, is a former pop star, briefly famous in her teens but currently hanging in as a waitress and occasional student. She is just out of a long-term relationship with a social worker named Maria. Billy suffers from obsessive-compulsive disorder and anxiety attacks. The triangle works this way: Josh and Amy are nearing the end of a meaningful, enriching, but unsustainable relationship; Josh meets Billy and they become involved cautiously. Josh, Amy, and Billy have a friend in common, Roxy, who serves very much as the ‘community hub’ and rooms with Billy. The tensions that are built into the group dynamic eventually achieve release through the climactic accident of the novel, which appears to settle their lives at least temporarily.

The story is told from revolving viewpoints. It is an interesting writing device and Whittall pulls it off well. Josh, Amy, and Billy are each given the opportunity to describe their own thoughts and feelings. The reader gets the panoramic view of each character by seeing them through the eyes of the other two individuals as well. In this way the primary characters all seem very complete, and honestly portrayed.

Whittall peppers the pages with names of restaurants, bars, businesses, and parks in Toronto. She slips in mentions of Broken Social Scene and Arcade Fire, and films such as waydowntown. The story is embedded in Canadian culture. “It sounds kind of dorky,” Whittall says with a laugh, “but I feel quite invested in writing about Canada. It doesn’t mean that I won’t write about other countries eventually, but right now that’s what I want to write about. I like playing with ideas of what Canadian literature can be through exploring all these different types of people.”

In the following interview, Zoe Whittall addresses a wide range of topics. She talks about her preferred conditions for writing, her research into the life and work of paramedics in Toronto, as well as her view of celebrity culture and how we relate to it. The conversation moves beyond a straightforward discussion of her book to touch on the great distance that separates many young people from formal politics, which is reflected in Holding Still For As Long As Possible, and why there seems to be a fundamental lack of energy in the Canadian political system. Here is an author who has only just begun to unfold her unique vision of Canada.

CI: Let me begin just by asking you to paint a little portrait of how you work. What are the best conditions? Are you at home and alone, or in public with people? How does it work?

ZW: I like to do a bit of both. I enjoy having long stretches in the morning, for example, at my house, waking up. I used to have a great routine where I would wake up and go to the gym, and then come home and have a really good coffee and write. If I got a little bit stir crazy by the afternoon, I would go to a café and write from there. I had a friend of mine who was working on her PhD dissertation. We would meet at cafés and make each other work, so to speak. I feel like I can work amongst the cacophony of sounds of a café, and I also sometimes need the time to quietly focus.

CI: In Holding Still For As Long As Possible, the city of Toronto really comes through as the home of these characters. Knowing that many of your readers would be from outside the city, how did you want to portray Toronto?

ZW: It was important to me to have it set in that certain neighbourhood because I felt like it’s a really interesting neighbourhood, but it’s also not unusual. It could easily be very similar to a lot of other urban neighbourhoods undergoing gentrification. I felt that, even if you don’t know exactly where that Starbucks is being built, you probably know in a city that you’ve been to. I did hope that I painted it in enough particulars that you could imagine it, and it wouldn’t matter if you hadn’t been there.

CI: One of the central characters, Josh, is a paramedic. In the acknowledgements in the book, you mention a group of paramedics, ‘blue shirts’ at 33 and 34 stations in Toronto. What was the most challenging aspect of researching the paramedic life? You do a nice job of opening up some of the psychological terrain involved.

ZW: The most challenging aspect – well, in general, being a paramedic is something that I could never do! I am very ‘wussy’, and I have my moments of hypochondria. It’s just such an adventure. Every shift is such an adventure for them. They really have to have this sort of resilience that I am enamoured by. I feel like they do an amazing job, and they need to have a specific sort of personality, which I’m drawn to. I did two twelve-hour ride-outs with two different shifts, a night shift and a day shift. I was really concerned with making sure that I wouldn’t be in the way, just sort of observing things as they were going. I saw some really interesting things! I was very afraid that I would see something that I couldn’t handle, but it turned out that I could handle more than I thought.

Then I spent a lot of hours interviewing, about ten or twelve paramedics, over the years that I was writing the book. Just taking them out for beers, bringing a tape recorder, and asking them questions about their first days on the job, how their perspective on life - specifically on life and spirituality and purpose, that sort of thing - changed from when they were a student to when they had been on the job for a number of years. I got to interview people who had been on the job two years, five years, fifteen years, and it was really interesting to me. I felt like it really helped Josh to become who he was in my mind. He did exist as a character before I made him a paramedic. It just really suited him.

CI: Regarding your comment about paramedics and faith, and the way that they perceive the world, there are a few sections early in the book that touch on faith and a sense of order. In particular, you introduce a secondary character named Diane, a paramedic, and you describe the way she responds to death: “Every time a patient didn’t make it, she thought quietly to herself that it was God’s will. Even though she could sometimes bring someone back to life with her hands, the decision was ultimately in His.” Did you want to set up that sense of calm obtained through faith as a way to measure how other characters, particularly Billy, respond to similar sorts of chaotic moments?

ZW: I did. I wanted to explore how all these characters, the paramedics and the non-paramedics, deal with chaos, and the fact that you can’t control anything and the fact that we’re all going to die. I wanted to have an example, through Diane, of someone who could really compartmentalize and believe, use her beliefs to get her through the day and help her to understand the odd predicament that she’s in every day.

It’s funny. I didn’t actually, when I was interviewing paramedics, meet someone like Diane. That’s one of the few moments in the book where I just made it up. Most of the people that I interviewed were just sort of like, ‘you know, you get used to it, you get used to people dying, and it’s sad, and you don’t want to think about it too much’ – sort of like how Josh deals with it, in that he doesn’t really deal with it. You get this vague sense that there is a lot of post-traumatic stress, lots of compassion fatigue going on, but it’s like any job when you do it all the time – you get used to the weirdness. So I did want to set up, through Diane and through that chapter, a sense that there could be all these different ways of dealing with the fact that you didn’t save someone. It made sense to me that someone who had a really strong faith in God would be able to deal with it in a certain way sometimes, even if it wasn’t particularly that thought through. Diane’s an exception in that she really thinks it through.

CI: As fascinating as the relationship between Josh and Amy is in the book, the character of Billy starts to take over the story after a while, at least from my perspective. Her background as a briefly famous musician gives you that opportunity to look into the celebrity culture and how we relate to it. How difficult was it to get her anxiety attacks just right in words, and tailored to her character? I thought that those moments were very much alive …

ZW: Oh good! Well, I’m glad that they seemed true. Yeah, Billy’s anxiety – you know, I’m a fairly anxious person, and I’ve had a lot of people in my life who’ve had anxiety disorder. I’ve done a lot of research on it in general, so I wanted to really explore that through Billy, and look at how fame, specifically fame early in life, can really fuck you up! I don’t know that personally, but I’m a voracious reader of pop culture blogs, watching the Lindsay Lohans of the world melt down. I’m just fascinated by how that would skew your worldview and your sense of self. I think anybody who is just waking up and going to their job can have anxiety disorder, but I thought that looking at it through the lens of somebody who had had this overwhelming exposure was particularly interesting to me.

CI: I think it’s fair to say that gender and sexuality are quite fluid concepts in the book, and intrinsic to the personalities of the characters and how the story unfolds. I must admit that there were a few points where I was a little tripped up. As the author, how enjoyable is it for you to have gender and sexuality as concepts that you can play with to keep the reader off balance?

ZW: It’s funny. I don’t use it as something that I play with to keep the reader off balance. The world that Billy and Josh and Amy live in, you know, the ages are different and the surroundings are different, but it’s very much my world as well. Someone like Josh, or Amy or Billy – they could really seamlessly be in my world. I live in a queer, urban environment, and so transsexuality, bisexuality, and people having different concepts than your average reader, I guess, is the norm for me. I didn’t specifically want to trip anyone up. I just wanted to present their world accurately and organically.

I’m interested when it trips people up! Because I forget, you know, when you live in a bubble, you forget people outside that bubble sometimes.

CI: As much as the book is set in Toronto specifically, there are a lot of distinctive Canadian touches, even Tim Horton’s and Shoppers Drug Mart, and the book is also a portrait of the generation of people currently in their twenties. Generally speaking, from your experience, have you found that there is a reluctance on the part of writers, or maybe publishers, to present writing that is, first of all, that close to Canadian culture, and also that close to the culture of young people in Canada right now?

ZW: Do I think there is reluctance on the part of publishers?

CI: Well, writers or publishers, but I’m guessing publishers.

ZW: Absolutely, I think there’s reluctance sometimes for publishers to take on contemporary-themed books, to take on queer-themed books, to take on Canadian books - these are all marginal, marginal, marginal! You’re cutting down your readership. That’s what’s happening, right? But at the end of the day, a good book is a good book, and you hope that it gets to the audience that it can get to. I’ve thought about writing books that take place ‘anywhere’, which vaguely means ‘America’. I just really love living in Canada and writing about Canada. It sounds kind of dorky, but I feel quite invested in writing about Canada. It doesn’t mean that I won’t write about other countries eventually, but right now that’s what I want to write about. I like playing with ideas of what Canadian literature can be through exploring all these different types of people.

CI: There’s an interesting juxtaposition in the book between the way that Josh and Amy and Roxy react, in a flashback that Josh has, to September 11th, and then the way that the same characters react to the climatic accident that impacts their lives. It struck me that both these events – one distant, one immediate – had the potential to really break these people out of their obsession with themselves, but it doesn’t seem very clear that that is going to happen. Do you find that for young people - let’s say eighteen to thirty-five right now – that the obsession with themselves is really the defining characteristic of their lives?

ZW: I think it’s a human thing. When a crisis happens, I think there’s always that moment when people band together, and all the petty things in your world fall away and you think about what really matters. But when you’re just getting through your day, no matter what age you are, you’re thinking about the story of your life, and the things that are most important to you and how to get through them all by creating certain narratives around what’s important in that moment. I don’t think that this generation is particularly more self-obsessed than any other. We’re children of the boomers, and there’s no more self-obsessed generation, as awesome as they are! I think it’s just a natural part of humans trying to get through and understand the complexities of the day – to look inward, for better or for worse.

CI: The book is very encompassing of a lot of different aspects of contemporary life, but one thing that is almost conspicuous by its absence is any formal politics. Apart from the mention of September 11th and a reference to George W. Bush, I didn’t get any sense of a relationship between these people and their elected representatives, whether in Toronto, provincially or federally, or beyond. Did you think about that at any point, that these characters, much like many young people right now in Canada, are completely disconnected from the political process, or was it just something that was too distant from the story to matter?

ZW: Well, I think that, if I had told Roxy’s story, there probably would have been more of a connection. She’s organizing walks in the neighbourhood, for example, around gentrification and the history of Parkdale, that sort of thing. I think she would be a pretty hardcore NDPer! And I think that Josh, if we explored that part of him, would probably be really pro-union. They’re all very lefty. I think it’s sort of implied that they are all really left-of-centre, just by virtue of who they are. I think in a lot of ways they came into a political identity young. It’s less an overt, less of a systemic kind of politics than it is more a personal politics, more of a way that they look at the world.

CI: That’s an interesting point. I find that, as I do interviews with musicians in Canada, a lot of them are attached to a particular cause – an environmental cause, a social issue, or an international justice issue – but very rarely in Canada do you see musicians or artists get behind a particular candidate or political party, whereas in the United States we saw a huge lineup of people behind Barack Obama in 2008, and a few still behind John McCain. I am just curious about your opinion. It seems that, for the eighteen to thirty-five group in Canada, their politics are very much usually centered on one issue. It’s not a broad politics where people are seeking to get involved in the larger sense. Does that seem fair from your experience in Toronto?

ZW: I think that, for progressive people, and certainly for the characters in the book – like, I’m very pro-NDP, but I know that they’re never going to get elected. There’s never going to be a Barack Obama in Canada, sadly. I mean, maybe there will be, but my voting history is all about trying to make sure Stephen Harper doesn’t get elected! It’s not about who gets elected, but just who doesn’t get elected. I think there’s a lack of energy in that system. I think it’s just that the differences in the way that our political systems are set up mean that it’s easier to actually see progress with smaller issues than it is on the grander scale right now, in Ontario anyway.

CI: Last thing for you: so I pick up the book, and on the back it says “what is it like to grow into adulthood with the ‘war on terror’, SARS, and Hurricane Katrina as your backdrop?” It very much sets the author up, sets you up, as portraying this generation that has not been portrayed very often in literature. How comfortable were you with that set-up of your work?

ZW: I think it was a great way to set it up. I think that it was a smart way to set it up. I think, like all marketing copy, it’s just sort of a teaser. If that’s a really good way to draw people into this subject matter, then I think that’s fabulous. It’s not like a Generation X of its time. It’s really about three specific people and their lives, and not about all lives of all people their age, but I do think that’s an interesting lens through which to look at these particular people.

Date of Interview: 12/02/2009
Location: ‘B’ Café, Queen St. East, Toronto, ON
Link: http://zoewhittall.blogspot.com