Globe & Mail Profile
Coming up swinging
February 12, 2000.
Billie Livingston is wary of people seeing only autobiography in her debut novel of an alcoholic mother trying to hang on to her young daughter.
By Alexandra Gill
Billie Livingston has survived a messed-up childhood in the down-and-out home of an alcoholic. She fended off a sleazy lesbian modelling agent who lured her into three miserable months of indentured servitude in Tokyo. She's worked as a cocktail waitress, office temp, film extra and kitty-litter mascot. She went to Germany to model her feet and came limping back to Canada with a few thousand undeclared dollars stuffed in her boots. She ran away again, this time to England, where she fell "in crush" with a hip-hop record producer.
None of these adventures prepared her for the contemplative community of writers she found at the Banff Centre for the Arts. "You hear all these seventies stories about these sexual free-for-alls and the drugs and the booze. Then you get there and they're all in their rooms, typing away all day," she recalls, laughing. "I thought I was heading for an orgy. It turns out I was horribly wrong."
Wrong, but not disappointed. The solitary life of a writer may seem a strange fit for someone who lives what Livingston herself describes as a "flibbertygibbet lifestyle." But the result was Going Down Swinging, Livingston's affecting debut novel.
The book plunges into the murky waters that threaten to drown a family of tough-talking yet fragile women. There's Eilleen, a self-righteous welfare mother with a taste for booze, pills and abusive men. Eilleen has already lost one daughter, the runaway Charlie, to a vicious cycle of self-destruction. She's determined to hang on to Grace, her seven-year-old saviour and protector, whose sprightly voice lifts the family saga beyond the sordid. And then there are the moralistic social workers, who drift in and out of the family's transient life without ever really grasping what lies therein.
"My intent with the book was to show these different perspectives," explains Livingston, toying nervously with her tea cup in a Toronto hotel-lobby bar. "There is no so-called truth. Facts are just that. What is truth and what is fact? Each emotional truth is as valid as the next."
Livingston, 34, had to grapple with some hard home truths in writing the novel. "About 50 percent of the book is autobiographical," she hesitantly admits. Yes, her mother was an alcoholic, who hauled Livingston and her two older sisters across the country. Sometimes they were ducking out on rent; other times, her mother was just trying to escape the Aerosmith tunes spilling out from next apartment. At one count, Livingston attended 16 schools.
And, yes, like Grace, she was taken away from her mother and put in a foster home with a strange family of Jehovah's Witnesses. Researching the novel, Livingston went through the painful process of looking through her own social-work files. She was returned to her mother, but ran away at 16, a mouthy survivor following in the footsteps of her siblings. That's when her mom sobered up.
Irene Livingston never did prostitute herself. "Though I think she had boyfriends who helped out," Livingston notes, unperturbed by the question. After a couple of months living with friends and gorging on peanut-butter-chocolate-chip-licorice sandwiches, Livingston moved back home to finish high school.
Livingston is wary about revealing all this: she fears "people associating me so closely with my work that there's no delineation." She's also concerned about what people might make of her modelling past. "I don't blame them because I make those assumptions myself. Remember, I worked with [models] for years. I know what twits they can be."
She's seen the traps laid for other beautiful women who have written about their unconventional lives -- writers she admires, such as Evelyn Lau and Susan Musgrave. "Sometimes it becomes kind of a prison. It's expected over and over."
She displays a flash of impatience with purists who sneer that if you can't make it up, it's not real fiction. "I think it happens more with women," she says. "I find that kind of ridiculous because then you've got to knock Tolstoy and you've got to knock Kerouac . . . Not to mention Salinger. I don't believe for a second all that was made up. His characters are all recurring . . . There's still this double standard. Oh, they say, she's trading on her sexuality."
So, though professing reluctance, Livingston pours out her life in great detail. "I kind of figure what's the point in going through all that crap if you can't use it for something in the end." Besides, she has permission from her mother, who just read the book last week.
"I talked to her about it before I left [Vancouver]," Livingston explains. "She said, 'You should just go for it and say whatever, because I'm fine with it." Though much of the book is fictitious, Livingston recalled how she kept telling her mother, " 'Mom, it's not really you.' Because she's a much more gentle person than Eilleen."
Her mother's recovery process led to some unexpected twists in Livingston's life. Soon after she finished high school, she was scouted by a stripper in her mom's AA program. The stripper took her picture to a modelling agent. Two months later, Livingston found herself in Tokyo, thousands of dollars in debt to the shady agency.
Livingston stayed in Tokyo for three months, until she earned her airfare home, dropping to 112 pounds in the interim (she's 5 foot 8). She says she stayed sane by writing a lot of bad poetry and angry, homesick letters. Back in Vancouver, the 18-year-old Livingston got some fake ID and started working as a cocktail waitress. She did a bit of modelling and other odd jobs -- she was fired from a secretarial job once because her skirt was too short and she was caught using office stationery to write on during her lunch break -- before moving to Toronto and then Germany to pursue modelling. She was deemed too short, but her hands, legs and feet were considered photogenic. Eventually, she returned to Toronto -- there was a failed love affair in England in between -- and began working on a draft of Going Down Swinging.
"It's like a fidget," she says about her insatiable urge to write ever since she was a little girl. "If I wanted to talk and there was no one around, rather than talk to the walls, I'd talk to the page." She had some of her poetry in literary magazines and then, a few years ago, applied to the Banff Centre for the Arts on a lark. "I was crying at the airport. The whole way there, I kept thinking that they had made a mistake and were going to turn me back."
Even after she arrived, she couldn't shake that feeling of not belonging. "It seemed like everybody there had a degree. A lot of times, I'd be sitting in these workshop situations and I didn't know any of the vernacular. I'd be thinking, 'What does that mean?' "
That feeling changed the day Susan Musgrave, one of the Banff instructors, put a note in her mailbox. "I'm in awe," Musgrave wrote. "I just read your first three chapters. Meet me at 3 o'clock."
The novel wasn't easy to sell. After a year, Livingston parted ways with her agent, and started a new novel. She was driving down the California coast when she called home to check her messages. A Random House editor had called about her manuscript.
Livingston now lives in Vancouver. She still holds down three jobs -- as a stand-in or extra in films, as an actor in commercials (she plays a proud dog breeder in one), and, occasionally, as a print model.
She lives with a stunt man named Ken. "He's a big man," she says affectionately. "About 6 foot 5, and built like Superman." In her biographical notes, she writes, "My boyfriend says I had to take up with a stunt man because no one else could take my abuse." The comment still makes her laugh. "Sometimes I get in this kind of flapping, frantic rage," she says, elbows flying all over, "and go 'Ken, pin down my arms before I fly away.' "
He might need to. With Going Down Swinging, Livingston's career seems set for a swift take-off.
