Femmes Fatales

Heather O’Neill was born in Montreal. When her parents’ marriage broke up, she lived a peripatetic few years with her mother in the US before returning to Montreal as a teenager with her father and two sisters. In the flurry of media surrounding her literary debut, O’Neill suggested certain personal experiences had inspired the novel, but regrets it now, specifying that “the novel exists in the childish realm of make-believe.”

Slim and tall, with strong, sensuous features, she favours the casual Bohemian style of Plateau Anglos and plays with her tresses of loose, dark hair as she speaks. There are flashes of Baby’s guileless savvy in her mannerisms, as though some corner of her psyche is still a little girl. She was twenty when she graduated from McGill, and a few months later gave birth to a daughter, launching a difficult stretch as a single mother.

“I worked my guts out in clubs at night and tried to write during the day. It was killing me, burying me alive. My dad lived nearby and would babysit if she was sleeping. It’s odd when you have a kid that young; all your friends are living such a different life. I was still getting a thrill out of buying a pair of foxy boots, and yet I had all that responsibility.” At thirty-four, O’Neill has settled into a serious relationship with fellow writer Jonathan Goldstein, and is weighing the option of maternity once again. In contrast to Baby in Lullabies, the central character of her novel-in-progress is “someone who really likes sex, and that’s kind of fun.” She agrees with Arcan that sex is bound to be central to fiction reflecting the lives of women her age.

“If you’re young and attractive, it’s like having a walletful of money. It gets you things. Some people don’t want to admit it, but youthful beauty is powerful. No one is immune.” Reliable birth control and advances in the science of fertility mean women can play the field for thirty years and then become mothers. “The trajectory of a woman’s sex life is completely different now from that of previous generations. You have a long time to exploit your beauty.”

Lori Saint-Martin, a literature professor at uqam, has published widely on contemporary Québécois fiction by women. She points to Alina Reyes’s erotic novel Le boucher, published in France twenty years ago, as a breakthrough. “Reyes and others who followed made women the focus, not the object of desire, proving that transgression and taboo weren’t essential to the genre. This writing was mainly about having and giving pleasure.” With La vie sexuelle de Catherine M. (2001), by Catherine Millet, the well-known editor of a prestigious Paris art journal, the boundary between pornography and literature faded. Saint-Martin believes Millet’s novel, detailing the sexual exploits of a woman in her fifties, and L’inceste (1999), by Christine Angot, represented forays into a new feminine (though not feminist) discourse on sex, one in which the line between fiction and real life is blurred.

Marie-Sissi Labrèche, also of Montreal, embraces a loose, colloquial language, veering toward effervescence, which may explain why her breathless account of growing up wild has generated considerably more warmth among critics and readers than have the novels of Arcan. Borderline, published by Boréal in 2000, recounts the troubled childhood of a character named Sissi, brought up by a manic-depressive, schizophrenic mother and an abusive grandmother. Her second, La brèche (a pun on the author’s surname, which means “the breach” ) deals with a young literature student’s tortured affair with her married professor, a power struggle in which abuse seems to works both ways: the lover is described as “a man cornered by a small blonde bombshell.”

Sex is alternately the narrator’s weapon, her obsession, and an escape from the anxiety of a troubled identity. In Sissi’s words: “I’m borderline. I have a problem with limits. I make no distinction between exterior and interior. It’s because my skin is inside out. It’s because my nerves are on edge. I feel like everyone can see inside me. I’m transparent.” At twenty-three, she is desperate for love. The moment a man flashes interest, she opens her legs.

Literature exploiting lived experience is a genre Labrèche and a number of other young writers take seriously. A graduate of the uqam literature program, she wrote her thesis on auto-fiction; her first novel began as a course assignment. Her recently published third novel, La lune dans un hlm, is more conventional in structure. Personal details recur — mentally ill mother, difficult grandmother — but the main character (now called Léa) has gained distance on the past. And Labrèche, now happily married, says, “I’ve made up with all my demons.” A film drawing on her two first novels, which she co-wrote with director Lynne Charlebois, opened in February to great reviews and brisk box office. She has put prose aside for the time being to develop a TV series.

yvon Rivard is a respected novelist and literary critic. This year, he wraps up a distinguished career as professor of literature and creative writing in the French department of McGill University, during which he shepherded over a hundred theses (written in French) through the academic mill, half of them works of fiction. He counts dozens of published writers among his former students, notably Shanghai-educated Ying Chen, who began writing fiction in Rivard’s course and has gone on to publish six internationally acclaimed novels. Rivard has made it his mission to instill the virtues of storytelling and “finding the bones” of narrative structure. With a syllabus some might consider old fashioned — Raymond Carver, Mavis Gallant, Alice Munro, Katherine Mansfield — he disdains the poetic novel. Good fiction, Rivard maintains, is “planted in something real.”

“I don’t want to get killed by my male friends,” he says with a grin, “but women are writing the best books. Feminine writing is where one finds originality these days. If I can be permitted to generalize further, I’d say women have a more complex and subtle notion of time; males tend to be abstract. When I look over my classes, I’d say that the hybrids, the fusion of immigrant and old stock, and, yes, the women — they are the future of literature in Quebec.”