Laughter is the Best Medicine

 

April 8, 2000

 

Gina Miller talks to Billie Livingston about her tragi-comic new novel and sharing lewd jokes with her Saint John relatives.

 

Billie Livingston is 34, she published her first novel, Going Down Swinging, in February and her mom is from Saint John. She talks a hundred miles a minute and most of her sentences end in a laugh. Billie Livingston is what some folks call "a hoot." You hoot with laughter when you talk to her and all the while you think she has a wise-old-owl crossed with stand-up comic sensibility.

 

Part social commentary, part comedy and part tragedy, Going Down Swinging is an unapologetic tale of a woman and her daughter whose lives are marked by hard times. The tragedy is not grandiose: there are no grisly deaths nor ghastly infanticides. The tragedy is simply this: sometimes when people fall down, they have one hell of a time getting back up. Livingston's characters are scrappers. They're canny and sharp and share a dark streak of humour that comes from the love of family and the communal understanding of knowing who is the enemy. Laughter, in this book, is generally the best medicine.

 

The Reader: Who was Billie Livingston before she was an author? What is your work or educational background?

Livingston: I never liked school very much and after high school I didn't know what to do with myself so I started modelling. My mother was involved in AA and there was this stripper who had decided to quit drinking, and she was over and saw pictures of me in my mother's house...so she collected those and I got an agent and into modelling and I was off to Tokyo (at age 17) for three months.

    I had a kind of slimy agent and I couldn't leave because she told me I was in debt and they would sue, so I had to work there for three months before I could earn enough money to come home. When I came back to Vancouver, I worked as a temp and I waitressed. Then I went to Toronto and started doing a lot of modelling and commercials and went to Germany and did more modelling. Then I went back to Vancouver and got fired from some temp jobs -- I wrote poetry on some office stationary and got caught (the supervisor wrote a letter of complaint to her temp agency) and my skirts were considered too short.

    Then I went to England and fell in love-- or developed a mad crush -- with a producer of Hip-Hop records. But that didn't work out -- he was too dramatic and he cried a lot. I was like, "Hey, that's my job: being dramatic and crying!" So then I came home and went back to Toronto but by then my look was out of style. My hair was too big and my legs were too short. So I worked as a waitress at a comedy club and also at car shows, where men would ask stupid questions like, "So, do you come with the car?" (she laughs)

    I did a stint in a Garfield costume for a kitty litter conference, and all the businessmen didn't know whether or not they could touch the Garfield because they didn't know if it was a boy or a girl Garfield, and I wasn't talking. I quit modelling around then because I got tired of the whole thing. It gets frustrating the way they order you around-- some wedding magazine told me I had to get my face waxed because we were doing close-ups.

    I applied for a scholarship to go to the writing program at the Banff Center for the Arts shortly after that and that was exciting. I was scared though, I kept thinking they'd made a mistake, that they would turn me away when I got there. I cried all the way through the luggage check at the airport terminal. I started writing fiction there. I had three chapters of Going Down Swinging written and handed them over to Susan Musgrave who gave me great support.

 

The Reader: Where did the character of Eilleen come from?

Livingston: Eilleen was kind of an offshoot of the characters that Ellen Barken plays. I've always had a fascination for those thick-skinned, tough women who are soft in the middle. Eilleen was so sensitive that she would use anything to dull her senses so that things wouldn't hurt so much. I met women like that modelling.

As for Grace: I was in foster care myself as a kid and Grace's character -- and the people she was with -- was the experience I knew as well. Grace's experience in foster care is true to my own, if not in actual fact, then in emotional fact. I borrowed the character traits of Grace's foster family from my own...they were a little odd and quite religious.

 

The Reader: What has the public repsonse to the book been like?

Livingston: The response has been largely good and very strong. The interesting thing to me is that even when the response is negative, it has been passionate, but most reviews have been really positive. I'd been warned ahead of time that I'd broken some taboos. Part of it was Eillen's character. People thought she han't been punished enough. I didn't feel that my job as a writer was to be a judge. I wanted to create a stong picture of Eilleen and then let the reader decide. I find that with female characters in fiction (film or books) the audience desires that the woman be punished. Like in Fatal Attraction, audiences yelled, "No, drown her! Drown her and stab her! Drown her and stab her and shoot her!!!!"

 

The Reader: In Going Down Swinging you use case documents from social workers' files to develop the plot. Where did you get the format for these case documents?

Livingston: I applied through the information and privacy act to get my own files (from the period I was in foster care). At the time I had friends who were doing the same thing, so they looked at mine and I looked at theirs. What struck me most was the inaccuracies in the files, and I comment on these in the book. One of my reviewers didn't like the use of case files, she thought they were a cheap way to develop the plot. She didn't seem to understand that the inaccuracies in the novel's case files showed how people on the outside couldn't have a clear picture of what was going on with Grace and Eilleen.

 

The Reader: What are you working on now?

Livingston: I'm working on a new novel and doing research on stalkers and organized crime and Burlesque strippers in Montreal. I'm planning to drive down to California to go to Exotic World, which has exhibits of all the famous Burlesque strippers of the forties and fifties.

 

The Reader: When was the last time you were in New Brunswick?

Livingston: I was down last year. I have a great heap of family down there, four or five aunts and uncles, cousins and second cousins as well as my grandmother. I love New Brunswick, I think it's beautiful. Some of the best times I have with family is when they're telling jokes. It's hilarious because someone will tell a lewd joke and usually it's one of the ladies over 60. I laugh the whole time. And I love driving there at night. The sky is a sheet of black and there are a thousand pin pricks.

 

Gina Miller is an editor with the Telegraph-Journal