Globe and Mail Profile
Dealing with the mother-daughter dance
Alexandra Gill -
Friday, April 14, 2006
It was easy for me to fall for Cease to Blush, a new novel by Billie Livingston about a proudly slatternly, post-feminist rebel who discovers her mother's secret past as a burlesque showgirl. I found it so juicy and gripping that I stayed up until 5 a.m. and devoured the 462-page book in one sitting. Of course, I'm biased. Livingston, who will be reading at Harbourfront Centre next week, is one of my best friends. That doesn't make it any easier to write this article. In fact, our friendship makes this assignment somewhat torturous.
"Ask me whatever you want," she says with a Cheshire grin and exaggerated batting of eyelashes when we meet for cocktails, trying to act as if this is a straight interview just like any other.
Livingston said the same thing six years ago, the first time we met, during an interview for her debut novel. Going Down Swinging told the story of an alcoholic, single mother, her precocious seven year old and the social workers that kept trying to tear their fragile family apart.
The two of us clicked instantly, which rarely happens during interviews. Then I had to write her profile. Because the novel was largely autobiographical and Livingston had been so candid, I thought it important to spell out that her real mother, Irene, unlike the character in the novel, was never a prostitute. Livingston was upset.
"Did you have to put it so baldly?" she cried a year later, after I moved to Vancouver and looked her up.
We went on to become bosom buddies, and her mother was never bothered by what I wrote, but this prostitute issue has always remained a bit of a sore spot between us. I didn't understand until years later that her mother, although never a prostitute, did have a promiscuous past, which she now writes about quite freely. In fact, Irene has become somewhat of a legend in Vancouver's spoken-word poetry circles with her animated performances and raunchy tales about the orgies of her youth.
"It wasn't my story to tell," Livingston explains, as we clear up this matter once and for all.
Now Livingston has written another mother-daughter novel, one that takes every sexual stereotype ever held dear and squeezes it through the wringer. Good, Lord. Here we go again.
Cease to Blush is told from the perspective of Vivian Callwood, a blowsy bottle-blond actress who "wields the word slut like a machete" and dabbles in Internet porn. She is rebelling against her mother, Josie, a "knee-jerk feminist dyke" who teaches women's studies at the University of British Columbia. When Josie suddenly dies of cancer, their mother-daughter "scorpion dance" still stinging, Vivian inherits a secret trunk that hides a mink coat, gold-tipped stilettos, sexy stage photos of her mother lying across a piano in a full-length satin gown and other cryptic clues about a mysterious past. Vivian sets off on a road trip, eventually discovering as much about herself as she does about her mom.
Considering that I now know Livingston quite well, I can confidently say that her mother never worked as a stripper. She didn't hang out with the Rat Pack in Las Vegas or date Bobby Kennedy.
Livingston isn't anything like hard-ass Vivian either, although she certainly does shoot from the hip and works as a film extra to pay the rent. If anything, she reminds me more of Josie (or Celia, as the character was called in the fifties) -- adored by men for her brains, bold and brazen in public, yet paradoxically demure, almost old-fashioned in her notions about courtship. Livingston is currently dating a guy who's studying to be an Eastern Orthodox priest, and there was that period of self-imposed celibacy. (Oh, I'm going to get in trouble for that!)
Knowing Livingston while she was researching and writing this novel -- in addition to a book of poetry (The Chick at the Back of the Church) and a forthcoming collection of short stories (You Sound Tiny) has certainly given me a much better understanding of how a novelist works. While reading Cease to Blush, I recognize the gold dress Vivian finds in the trunk, I see hints of Livingston's ex-boyfriend in one of the characters and I know all of Louis Prima's songs by heart thanks to all the times we've danced to them. But I also realize that this is the work of imagination -- the true details might be there but it's a completely unique, distaff interpretation of that swinging era.
"It was hard to find anything written from a woman's point of view," Livingston explains. "I learned as much as I could and then threw all the facts all up in the air like a deck of cards."
Celia, a burlesque performer who causes a sensation with a tribute to Ella Fitzgerald, Dinah Shore and other black singers, never actually existed. In fact, it was only in the more daring black clubs that women sang while stripping.
"I don't know of anybody who did it," says Livingston. "Maybe they could have. That's the opportunity I was trying to create -- the right circumstances at just the right moment to create enough of a scandal to cause a sensation. There was just a hint of possibility."
I also realize that our interview about the banality of chick-lit, the limitation of strident feminism and the extreme swings woman have gone through, seems a bit like a conversation we've already had. Livingston and I already had these same talks, often late into the night. But instead of merely relaying the philosophical musings of friends, she's created a suspenseful page-turner. Both never let you stop thinking; both amaze me.
Billie Livingston reads on April 19 in the Brigantine Room at Harbourfront's York Quay Centre, 235 Queens Quay W., 7:30 p.m., $8, 416-973-4000.
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