I don't have any sisters but thanks to Jennifer Quist's new novel, I feel like I've just taken a crash course through the lives, the dramas, the personalities and the many, many conversations of five sisters. Quist, newly transplanted to St.
I don't have any sisters but thanks to Jennifer Quist's new novel, I feel like I've just taken a crash course through the lives, the dramas, the personalities and the many, many conversations of five sisters.
Quist, newly transplanted to St. Albert after shifting north from Lacombe, is now back on bookshelves with a new title. Her first was the well-received Love Letters of the Angel of Death, which went on to the longlist for the IMPAC Dublin prize. It also made her a finalist for the Whitney Award and helped her scoop up one of eight Lieutenant Governor of Alberta Emerging Artist Awards just last year.
Not bad for a first timer, that. Success has not stopped her from striking twice in as many years while the iron is still hot.
“That first book was written in 2013 and here we are two years later with one that was written at the same time but took a little longer to get out the door,” she said.
Her literary sophomore effort is Sistering, a kind of black comedy about how family bonds can make all the difference in dire situations. In the story, one of the five sisters places a lot of importance on her relationship with her mother-in-law but makes a terrifically bad decision during a particularly bad moment. Who couldn't use the sage counsel and tough love of a group of siblings during such moments?
The author knows a thing or two – or seven – about the dynamics of a family with several children. She's well versed in sibling relationships and rivalries as the eldest of five sisters and two brothers herself. She took that same prodigious philosophy to her own brood with five sons of her own, between five and 18.
“I have lived with men before I made my own,” she joked, suggesting that it's a good thing for her work to have always been in a crowded room, even if it means long days of mothering and all of the endless duties that that entails.
And she still has energy to write, you ask.
“I don't know!” she laughs. “I don't know if energy is what it takes. I would write anyway whether it was something anyone was interested in reading or not. It's nice that other people are interested in it. It makes me happy to do it. It's a source of energy much of the time.”
“What I find most inspiring – the most fascinating thing to me in the universe – is other people. The more people I am around and listening to them talking and watching how they deal with their lives … that's where I get my stories from.”
That doesn't mean that the sisters in Sistering are she and her sisters. They aren't the characters in the book, she insists.
This didn't make it any less of a challenge though. Without simply retelling all of the interesting stories from her own family's life (with names changed, naturally), she delved into creating her own characters and let the plot progress organically.
Writing without outlines is her strategy and it seems to be working.
“I don't write from start to finish with something in mind. I just plug away at it chapter by chapter, rearranging things and adding stuff. Years after I finished writing the first draft, there were a lot of drafts of this novel. I wouldn't say it wrote itself but it started to make sense what had to happen and became far removed from what my sisters do.”
While she didn't take too much inspiration from them, true to form, the preternatural bond of sisters did still play an interesting role in a reverse way.
For the book, Quist wrote a scene involving the middle sister waking up from a nightmare and screaming the name of the eldest sister.
So I spent all week working on this scene and then on Friday my middle sister calls me and said, ‘It was so weird. I woke up from a nightmare yelling your name.' I was like, ‘Oh, come on! I'm trying to write fiction!'” she laughed. “It's all serendipity.”
Sistering was released on Aug. 15 and Quist is bringing it to the public with a book launch at Audreys on Tues., Sept. 29 at 7 p.m. The bookstore is located at 10702 Jasper Ave. in Edmonton.
So far, it has been well reviewed by commentators including on CBC's Daybreak Alberta. There, the reviewer suggested that the book might be a solid contender for the Stephen Leacock Award for Humour.
“That's just my voice. My first novel was not a humour book but it stayed light because my writing voice is like that. There's just funny stuff going on all over the place. Humour is dark humour. It counts, right?”
