That's not how we read: a conversation with author Marina Endicott

“I felt like I had some kind of weird responsibility, having had the privilege and burden of that experience that is closed to most people, to try to make it clear.”

The promotional life of a book is generally short: a year of sporadic reviews and interviews, maybe a festival appearance, with the possibility of a brief extension if the book gets nominated for a prize. After that, in book-marketing world, it’s over; we’ve moved on to the next shiny new book.

But that’s not how book lovers read. Sure, we read new books. But just as often, we’re discovering and delighting in books that have been out for years. In this segment, I want to celebrate books the way we, the book lovers, actually read them: on our own schedules. Because great books deserve more airtime.

I’m so pleased to be talking with Marina Endicott this month about her novel The Observer, which was published in 2023 and won the Saskatchewan Book of the Year Award and City of Saskatoon Book Award. In keeping with my “That’s Not How We Read” theme, I read it three years after it was published.

Marina is the author of five other novels: Open Arms, Good to a Fault, The Little Shadows, Close to Hugh, and The Difference. Her books have won and been nominated for more prizes than I have the space to list, and she’s widely described as one of Canada’s most beloved novelists.

The Observer is grounded in Marina’s own experience in Mayerthorpe, Alberta, where she and her husband, an RCMP constable, were sent on his first posting in 1992. Mayerthorpe, of course, is forever burned into the minds of Canadians as the location of the horrific murder of four RCMP members in 2005. This novel is a mesmerizing and tender examination of the fragility of life and law in a small rural community.

LG: First of all, The Observer is so close to autobiography in many ways – your and your husband’s career histories, the Mayerthorpe tragedy – that, even though you’ve been clear the story has been fictionalized, I imagine it was read very differently – by readers and reviewers and perhaps even your own publisher – from all your previous novels. Tell me about how you drew on both real experiences and fiction to create this novel.

ME: Yes, the open secret of autofiction – The Observer is as true as I could make it about me and my husband Peter (Julia and Hardy); everybody else is invented. I could not write the book as a memoir for two reasons: although the emotional reality of that time is deeply etched, our practical memories for dates and events and people are patchy, unreliable. More importantly, I didn’t want to impinge on anyone else’s story – or to presume that I could tell it accurately.

I had tried to write about Mayerthorpe many times: a novel about police wives first (while we were still in Mayerthorpe!), then a radio play, then poetry and short pieces of memoir – nothing worked. But that didn’t stop the past from nagging at me. I felt like I had some kind of weird responsibility, having had the privilege and burden of that experience that is closed to most people, to try to make it clear. When I decided that it was time to try harder, after long research and work on The Difference, but still with no idea of how I could do it, I mentioned to my mother-in-law that I was going to write about Mayerthorpe, and she said, “Oh, you’ll want the newspapers, then!” I’d completely forgotten that in my first bout as editor of the Mayerthorpe Freelancer, I signed my parents-in-law up for a subscription to the paper, thinking they’d like to know what was happening in the community. Violet ran down to the basement and brought up two cardboard boxes full of papers: she’d saved them all.

As I read through them, my semi-journalist life returned vividly, mistakes and all, and opened a door into that time that let me enter the old life again.

LG: I love that your mother-in-law saved all those newspapers! Bless the hearts of Violet and all the savers in our lives who have basements in which to store such boxes long-term. And of course it was a brilliant way for you to find your way into framing such a challenging story.

“The privilege and the burden” is a perfect way to describe your need to write this story. The two are intrinsically tied in the telling, and I felt both aspects as I experienced all the delicate emotional, situational and scenic layers of The Observer.

ME: Thanks, Leslie – they are so often linked, privilege and burden.

LG: As well as being given the newspapers, did you find that the passage of time made it easier to find the distance you needed, in order to dive back into the intimacies of the time? I don’t mean to sound flippant when I offer this comparison, but in the days after 9/11, there was a lot of poetry flooding the world, and while I fully understand the need many had to express their fears and grief through writing in those early days, for me – as a reader and fellow citizen who felt no need as a writer to publish anything on the subject – it was the writing that came a year or more later that was able to more deeply and successfully capture those simultaneously global and personal layers of grief and seismic shift we all felt.

ME: I’m sure it did – that is, I’m sure I needed that much time to pass before I could tackle that time at all. I’m a terribly slow thinker. And yes, I felt revulsion at the very idea of writing about Covid, even as I knew people who were planning to. Don’t know if I’ll ever want to examine that particular period of grief and sexism, but look, worse may lie ahead!

LG: I don’t think you know this, but I spent five years of my communications career working with the Red Deer RCMP as their communications specialist. So I have also lived deep inside that very specialized world – a civilian, but one who worked closely with the police, read all the files, sat in on briefings during unfolding situations, translated what was going on for the public, and kept all the secrets. It’s a complex, dark world, so difficult for outsiders to understand. I like how you both did and didn’t try – how Julia knew some things but didn’t know others, and how she sometimes knew things from sources other than her husband, who took the confidentiality aspect so seriously. Tell me about the line you walked during the writing of this novel.

ME: No! I had no idea. You’re an ideal reader! We’ll have to talk, some day.

Yes, try/not try – Julia’s official role with the paper was such a useful perspective. Things that she knew, even though she wasn’t allowed to know them (and Hardy certainly hadn’t told her); things she couldn’t know, had to avoid knowing. A complicated relationship for a marriage, too.

When I set out on the book I had some idea of structuring it almost as a mystery novel, but as I worked, everything I did in that direction felt false. I think this disappoints some readers. The two small mysteries that Julia figures out (the insurance scam and the string of arsons at the end) feel false to her, and don’t help her either at the paper or at home; there’s no sense of justice achieved in either one, and no master criminals, just a wasteland of stupidity, greed and selfishness. As in life.

LG: Perhaps because of my own experience working with the RCMP, those mysteries landed perfectly for me – the stories of frustrating, wasteful, bad behaviours that pepper our daily lives and our media feeds.

ME: The one case that has a solution comes early on, the door with hammer marks – that was a real incident, and Peter did figure out that it must have been done with a high-heeled shoe. Very satisfying! Oh, also which of the horses is biting off the tails of the others (the one with the long tail, duh). Also a true story and one that reveals my complete lack of an analytical mind.

LG: I loved the horse tail mystery! I was just happily reading along, then when the solution was presented, I laughed at the idea of horse feuds and at myself for not having immediately understood who the culprit must be.

ME: Oh thank you for also not getting it!

LG: By the way, every time I told one of the RCMP members I was a writer, the first words out of their mouths were always, “Do you know Marina Endicott?” They were all so proud of you!

ME: Oh, that’s very good to hear! You’ve made my day.

LG: I love the narrator, Julia. I find her a challenging and fascinating character. She – the whole novel – reminded me in some ways of As For Me and My House (AFMAMH), by Sinclair Ross. That narrator – the minister’s wife, known only to the reader as Mrs. Bentley – is also living in a small prairie town, brought there by her husband’s work, which she is deeply tied to by marriage and circumstance, and yet feels outside of. And she worries constantly about her husband’s mental health, though theirs is a very different and one-sided relationship.

Do you know this novel and, if so, did it hang around in your head at all during the writing of The Observer?

ME: I do know the novel very well, so I have strong opinions here – I’ve been convinced from my first reading that Mr. Bentley is a closeted gay man in a false relationship, and I’ve always pitied Mrs. Bentley as a bewildered victim of the societal repression that forced people to hide in hetero relationships. Yes, there is a connection, in that Mr. and Mrs. Bentley are outsiders; she is shut out of her husband’s mind, and he does seem to be suffering some form of depression.

But the problem in that book is that they don’t have a marriage. Mr. Bentley is unable to enter into a real relationship with poor Mrs. B; the necessity of his sexuality remaining hidden (perhaps even from himself?) is the poisoned heart of the book.

LG: Very true, I had the same view of Mr. Bentley’s situation as a closeted gay man. Yes, that novel contains a one-way yearning that’s very different from the beautiful bond between Julia and Hardy, in which, even during the difficult times, you see the strength of their partnership, the give and the take that’s part of every healthy marriage.

ME: In The Observer, I hope it’s clear that the strength of the bond between Julia and Hardy is what saves them both, and that their marriage is not based on false premises. External factors, not just danger but the loneliness of Hardy’s work/Julia isolation in the country, shadow their bond for a time, but it is always there. (I always feel sheepish saying that, tempted to touch wood – I think about Sharon Olds writing such beautiful poems celebrating her husband and their undying bond, and then he left her for a smooth efficient runner. Then again, Stag’s Leap, her poems of their divorce, is a great, great book.) It’s hard to write about love, and I’m sure there are moments that make a sensible reader gag a little. But it’s worth trying.

LG: Ha! I feel this sheepishness when talking about my marriage a lot, even when it’s a simple conversation about Valentine’s Day, which we don’t observe because, speaking of gag-worthy sentences, we go on dates and hold hands and flirt all the time.

ME: Hahahaha good. Stag’s Leap was on sale at the liquor store last night (only $64, sigh) and I almost bought a bottle as a good luck charm.

LG: How did you feel about writing the Julia character, who both is and isn’t you?

ME: It’s interesting, writing a character who both is and isn’t you. Julia is slower on the uptake than I was, sometimes; often, she’s calmer and a better mother than I was! In fact she’s a better person, less oblivious and silly than I was – so I laughed when a book club participant last week informed the group that she hated the main character, who was “completely self-absorbed and selfish.” This came right after a prolonged discussion of how yes, Julia is definitely me, as close as I could write her.

LG: I just laughed out loud. Poor Julia – who I liked very much, by the way. And I enjoy hearing how you made certain of her traits richer or more limited than your own.

All these years, I somehow didn’t know that your husband was also a writer (nor, I think, did any of those RCMP members in Red Deer who were so proud of you and your writing!). Tell me more about that.

ME: Yes, both artists – that’s another link. He kind of kept it quiet at work, because people in Alberta tend to think of cowboy poetry first, when they hear that word.

Peter’s first book, Purity of Arms, won the Jewish Book of the Year award for poetry; he won Best Screenplay at AMPIA for Sightings, a one-hour television drama produced by Great North Productions; before that, with his old friends Steve Heighton and Michael Redhill, he created and co-edited A Discord of Flags, an anthology of poets responding to the Gulf War.

The deal was that I’d write for five years, and then he’d quit and I’d get a job and he’d write. It’s mostly my fault that the second part of the bargain never came to pass, but not entirely – police work is absorbing and urgent, and it’s hard to quit work that deals with life and death. After working hard to overcome the terrible PTSD he experienced in Mayerthorpe, Peter carried on to have an illustrious career, and retired as a Superintendent in K Division.

LG: I’ve brought up AFMAMH a few times; it’s the Canadian novel that lives in my head, and I think of it often when I’m experiencing that distinct prairie vastness in all its comfort and awe and coldness. The Observer now lives in my head in a similar – though also very different – way, and I appreciate that so much.

ME: It lives in mine too! My father was an Anglican priest in small communities not unlike Horizon, and for me AFMAMH illuminates their marriage, rather than my own. It’s unfair to say that, perhaps – but my mother’s discontent and my father’s silence and submission are something I’m now unpacking and examining in my new novel.

LG: The Observer has such scope and emptiness and constriction, all at the same time – the huge skies, the farms and fields, the solitude, all set against the tightly constricted life of police officers – the silence, the quiet suffering. Talk to me about the prairies and how they were such an important character in this novel.

ME: I’m glad to hear that works for you. The world around me was truly my religion in Mayerthorpe – in all my life in the prairies, now longer than my life in the East. I credit my dear editor Lynn Henry, at Knopf, for freeing me to write about the natural world without being shy, and those moments are still the main pleasure I find in re-reading the book.

I’ve started incorporating this more into my teaching, in fact: after not paying much attention to setting ever before, I now start off with proprioception exercises to encourage students to do that same work, to let the reader know how it feels to walk around in the world of their stories.

The rural community: what a revelation, and what a privilege to be welcomed into what is also a closed world, like policing. I think it’s a highlight of our lives, for both of us, that we were able to live there, to come to understand it a little; and that through the support of kind neighbours and friends, Peter was able to work with those beautiful horses. I think they’re what healed him most of all.

LG: An earlier novel of yours, Close to Hugh, has a lot of humour in it. It also deals with stifling closeness competing with aspirations, but in a less claustrophobic, more expansive way. How different was it, writing The Observer? Is it fair to describe this novel as “quieter” than your other books? And if so, is this in part because of the fictionalized autobiographical nature of this story?

ME: Good question. Where’s my sense of humour gone? The Difference is contemplative, but not really funny, although I hope there is some humour there. The Little Shadows is as funny as I could make it, stuffed with vaudeville jokes, and I hope Close to Hugh is too – depends on how you feel about puns. It was written while I was immersed in the lives of teenagers, all of them artists one way or another, and draws on my own young experience as an actor and director. I had a good time writing it. And I paid people $5 if I quoted them in it, as I very often did.

Writing The Observer was entirely different, of course. It was terribly painful, diving down into a past that we had locked firmly away in the cupboard. I had to brace myself every time I sat down – the long passage mid-book, Hardy’s worst depression, was written in two days, almost in one sitting, a long quiet immersion while everyone was away. That was a rough couple of days for me. Quietness might have been the only way I could write it.

LG: I wondered how easily you could shake off the feeling of oppressiveness and isolation when you finished your writing day. One of my stories in Apocalypse is also fictionalized autobiography, (“An Old Lady and Her Hair”) and I found it harder to pull myself out of the story at the end of the day. At the same time, I was ultra focused on wanting to change other details because the story wasn’t about the other people who’d inhabited that time in my life, and concerned that people would read the fiction as fact and vice versa. Was this a challenge for you?

ME: Secretly I’ve been doing this for a long time, mining my life for fiction. So I’m kind of used to it. And I had too much other work going on, as well as lots of reasons not to stay with the oppression! But it was a huge concern for me that people might recognize themselves in the stories around Julia and Hardy, and that they’d be hurt or angry. I asked a couple of readers to help me with that, to read through and see if I’d left anyone recognizable. One said, well, Vinn, yeah… but he can take it!

LG: That moment late in the novel when Julia goes to Saskatoon for a month for a dramaturgy job – I was struck by the surprise of it. She hadn’t really talked about it, as far as our readerly eavesdropping on her. It was a moment that stood out – I thought, what else hasn’t she told us? It was such an interesting authorial choice, and made me want to immediately reread her. And her description of that month takes only a few paragraphs. Tell me about those choices.

ME: That’s very interesting – what else hasn’t she told us? I like that! It seems to me that, like me, she tells you EVERYTHING ALL THE TIME OMG SHUT UP, so I’m always happy when somebody thinks she’s reserved.

LG: Ha! I think you wrote a terrific balance with her: we are with her, seeing everything through her filters, but she doesn’t flood us with every thought in her mind. I find myself drawn to characters like her, who we know and thinking and feeling more than they’re telling us. Perhaps because, like you, I sometimes feel like I’m constantly “expressing” myself to the exhaustion of those closest to me.

The reader can feel danger looming in many forms throughout the novel, but we experience some of that danger, and the resulting sorrow, in the day-to-day moments of the town. Tell me about your choice to render the Mayerthorpe tragedy off-stage, as it were, to not make it the focus of the book.

ME: That’s a great question. I consciously did not want to write a book about those murders – I wanted to write about how that was just, you know, Tuesday. That there are seven or eight of those guys in every detachment area in Canada, dangerous, damaged, maybe stupid and weak, and in all those detachments people are keeping an eye on a range of troubled people. Not knowing which one will detonate.

Every member I’ve talked to has agreed with the decision. Phew. Some book club participants are pretty mad, though.

LG: Based on my own experiences with the RCMP, I feel that assessment – the constant presences of troubled people who might or might not detonate – through to my bones. I’m glad members agreed with your decision.

Very important question before we move on: how do you pronounce dramaturge and dramaturgy? Hard G or soft?

ME: I pronounce it with a soft G, because I’m not a pretentious toad and have never been to Berlin.

LG: HAHAHA. I shall continue, heartened, with my soft G pronunciation.

I’ve heard you read aloud from your work and it’s always engaging and lively. Does your theatrical background come into play when you’re reading to audiences? Do you enjoy it?

ME: I love reading aloud from work in progress, and also from published work. I like reading to an audience because it’s active work, trying to entertain or engage them, and if it’s unfinished, I can go home and edit places I thought didn’t work, were too long, etc… Lynn Coady made my life happier when she showed me her reading copy of The Antagonist, with long passages crossed out and whole pages skipped. You don’t have to read the whole thing! You can do a director’s cut and make it better for that night!

But I don’t re-read my books to myself after they’ve been published, that’s too painful. I can see all the spots where I meant to go back and fix some clumsiness, or address something I missed – when I do come across a copy of one, say in Value Village, if I’m really lucky the book falls open to a page where I can read a passage and think Hey, who wrote this? It’s not too bad!

LG: How and what do you read? Do you have literary influences?

ME: Oh, of course. But you’ll laugh, they’re all writers who you probably wouldn’t see in my work. Penelope Fitzgerald, now and forever; Olga Tokarczuk more recently; William Maxwell, whose clean, modest prose and deep memory are such a strong model – and who like Stewart O’Nan wrote books so varied they can hardly be shelved together. Ursula Le Guin, the far-sighted one. I love my friends’ books but I think they themselves influence me more than their novels: I already said Lynn Coady, so in alphabetical order I’ll add Gil Adamson, Caroline Adderson, Jackie Baker, the glorious Helen Oyeyemi, Miriam Toews, Alissa York. My extraordinary editor Lynn Henry at Knopf is a huge influence; so is Melanie Little, who edited Good to a Fault. I’m still influenced by playwrights I worked with in Saskatchewan thirty years ago who were fiction writers first of all: Connie Gault, Guy Vanderhaeghe, Dianne Warren. I read a lot of poetry, particularly when I’m writing a book, and there I’m pretty catholic in my taste but would say that the poets who have influenced my writing most are Karen Solie, William Stafford, Louise Glück, and the mysterious M.S. Merwin. I’m leaving so many people out!

Because I teach, I read my students’ work – tons of it. That is often very sustaining; they are so surprisingly good. Maybe especially the poets, but the playwrights are great, and the short story writers! And the novelists… well there you are. It’s a good thing they’re good or it would be a hard job.

LG: There is nothing I enjoy more than a truly comprehensive list of writers I can either look up, or shriek, “yes, I love them, too!” about. You’ve named some brilliant writers who I also admire and enjoy reading. I’m going to zero in on the wonderful Jacqueline Baker for two reasons:

I always remember the time she interviewed you at Audrey’s Books – I think it was your Edmonton launch of Close to Hugh – and it was the most hilarious book event ever. She asked such smart questions and also gave you a very loving hard time and you gave it right back to her. We were all in stitches.
I reviewed her novel The Broken Hours years ago on a friend’s blog because I loved it that much. I have a gothic heart, which only occasionally reveals itself in my own writing.

ME: She is the best interviewer in Canada! So funny and sharp and loving. We should have a radio show, somebody told me after she interviewed me for the launch for The Difference. And at the launch for this book, The Observer, she asked me to read a tough passage, and when I said I wasn’t sure I could get through it, she said, “Don’t worry, if you can’t, I’ll read it for you.” And The Broken Hours is a masterpiece. Perhaps the best ending of a book ever.

LG: I want that radio show to happen! What are you working on now? Do you hate it when people ask you that question?

ME: I’m not unwilling to talk about the current ms, but I’m very bad at it – I don’t really know what I’m doing until it’s pretty much done, and let’s face it, even then… Six months later I might sort of begin to grasp it. I’m now at work on a sprawling epic/very short book about the lives of women in Canada in the 20^th century pegged by four events: the Cuban Missile Crisis, Expo 67, the Repatriation of the Constitution, and Y2K… (what?) But really it’s about four sisters, and their marriages… No, wait, it’s mostly about a child who hears the Holy Ghost telling her things she needs to know… Or it’s about being poor/being rich, being loved or not. See what I mean? Somebody I respect said it sounds like a Jonathan Franzen novel and that made me really really laugh. I’m having a good time, what a relief.

LG: Well, I’m sold.

ME: Ha! Thanks! Delivery date tba.

LG: It’s been such a pleasure talking with you, Marina. Thanks so much for sharing your time and your experiences with us.

Learn more about Marina Endicott and her books here.