Debut novel paints unflattering familial portrait: novelist’s family upset

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By Steven W. Beattie
March 23, 2009
11:50 AM

Filed under: Quillblog, blog, book, Canada, CLA, Events, Interview, memoir, National Post, ob, The Afterword, The National Post

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Apologize, Apologize! is not just the title of Elizabeth Kelly’s debut novel, it’s also what her estranged brother is demanding she do on account of the way their family is represented in the book. According to the National Post‘s Afterword blog, Kelly’s brother, Arthur, responded to a review of the novel by sending an e-mail to the Post, which demanded that the newspaper

alert readers to the fact she is maligning her family, which she identifies as the book’s inspiration. Her interviews distort our family life, much to the dismay of her 85-year-old mother, myself and sister Susan … none of the book’s characters have any redeeming qualities, so you can understand our objections to the author’s claims they are based on her own family.

The novel, which is described by its publisher, Knopf Canada, as “a rollicking and generous story filled with characters that are a delight to get to know and impossible to forget,” features (among other things) a mother who reacts to the drowning of her son by asking the dead son’s brother, “Why did it have to be him…. Why couldn’t it have been you?” and a father who makes public displays of himself:

Pop, impeccably dressed and manifestly drunk, had apparently decided to crash the party and was threatening to take apart anyone who tried to interfere.

“What’s he saying?” one of the guests asked while I watched, aghast and disbelieving, as Pop, shouting and red-faced, spewing spit and rage, trumpeting and heaving like a rogue elephant, wrestled with security. He was bent over at the waist, his stomach straining against three sets of arms, hotel employees vainly trying to drag him back outside.

While these portraits may lack a certain sympathetic veneer, Kelly’s brother seems to have forgotten that the novel is, um, fiction. In her response to Arthur’s accusations (also posted on The Afterword blog), Kelly states:

Obviously, the book is fiction – no part of it corresponds to any of the events of my own life, which should be apparent to even the most disinterested reader.

If there is a soupçon of disingenuousness here – what novelist doesn’t cull from real life to some degree – it is nonetheless appropriate to bear in mind the novel’s generic classification. This whole tempest in a teacup should rightly remain a “private and personal matter” – at least until Kelly writes her family memoir.

michel

“This whole tempest in a teacup should rightly remain a “private and personal matter” – at least until Kelly writes her family memoir.”

well, then, why post about it?
This Is The Zodiac Speaking

Dear Society:

Okay so why do authors have to talk? Did anyone ask them to? Oh yeah, I guess so. The publicists encouraged them to talk. I wrote a book about cooking. Where did you get your ideas from? The grocery store. Brilliant! Let’s do a feature.

Why can’t they just shut up and write. We get it, you wrote a book, oh god, now you want to explain to us its based on your family you’ve got tied up in your basement? Boring. Do something different. How about a reading? Or why don’t you kidnap your actual family and make them read it on air. You’d sell more copies and it would be more honest than this stupid pinching fight that the whole office is following like a tennis match in the rain.

It’s all Knopf’s fault. I’m sure the publicity people saw the word “family” and “struggle” in the synopsis and were like “shit, we better use the word ‘delight’ or something, and maybe write it in second person so the reader gets that we’re talking to them. Me no speak human. Maybe we should make it sound like its a wine bottle description? The novel has a lasting rich oaky finish, that anyone with a family and a life cycle can relate to.”

I’m writing about my family, yeah well my family scars are deeper than yours. Are not, are too, yeah well my dad drank and my grandmother had
rabies, yeah we’ll I’m going to adapt my book into a movie and the guy who is playing my dad must dress and look like Hitler, yeah well my dad is going to be covered in vasaline and weilding hammers! On Christmas morning!

Just based on the fact that this is a big fat cat published book by Random House or whoever CTV has bought out etc., in an never ending game of monopoly and so much gross income is made just to put this book out and to think about what we should do, counter-soundbite, ugh! with all the diva bullshit out there, forget it.

I hope that I am not the only “most disinterested reader.”

When books stop being about all this extra industry and reader reaction and spokesperson camp stop and sob crap and are about the actual writing, let me know Quill-money.

I’ll be in my burglarized BP office

NGM

also this is stephen king’s dialogue from The Body which was also a little film called STAND BY ME (scene is will wheaton at his finest)

“Why did it have to be him…. Why couldn’t it have been you?”

Oh my what a boring terrible web we weave when first we write about what
we bemoan…

Bemoan of Arc,
Bowlbrawl, Ontario

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