North Shore News
[Interview appeared in both the North Shore News & The Vancouver Courier]
For writer, Billie Livingston, every person she encounters is a potential character in a novel.
Author Finds Comfort in the Company of Strangers
June 9, 2006
Caroline Skelton
Every bus stop, greasy spoon and city park has one: that slightly off-colour stranger who sends most people surreptitiously scurrying to the next bench over.
But for Billie Livingston, every personality is a potential character in her novels and poetry - the oddballs of urban life, therefore, are welcome to drop by her restaurant booth to share their story.
"I have a hard time being in very quiet rural areas, because I really do love talking to strangers," said the Vancouver author. In her latest novel, Cease to Blush (April 2006, Random House Canada), many of the characters are plucked from meetings with strangers on solo road trips to the U.S., down the coast to L.A., or through the desert.
There's something that bothers people about someone dining alone, said Livingston - as a result, she had many invitations to join dinner tables, and always accepted.
"Even when they're really odd or sort of creepy, there's a little part of you that kind of - what do I want to say? - it's almost like you fall in love with them a little bit, because they're so fascinating. They're so at odds with anything you've ever see seen up until that moment," she said.
Her latest novel has a lot to do with these moments of sizing-up strangers, interpreting others, and piecing together life stories.
Cease to Blush tells the story of Vivian, a rebellious beauty struggling to make sense of her deceased mother Josie's past lives. While she knew her mother as a feminist thinker and university professor, it is a glamorous world of stripping, partying, and '60s icons that emerges from her mother's personal effects, stashed away in a basement trunk.
Billie Livingstone
Livingston's second novel, the book has been widely lauded for its dark humour and poignant take on the inner lives of mothers and daughters. Livingston is also the author of Going Down Swinging (2000), and The Chick at the Back of the Church (2001), which was shortlisted for the Pat Lowther award. You Sound Tiny, a collection of short stories that may be released as a series of novellas, is forthcoming from Random House Canada.
In Cease to Blush, Livingston allows her main character to tell half the story, alternating narrative voices while Vivian works to put together her mother's history and put to rest her own personal demons. "Vivian ends up figuring out who her mother is, but according to herself," said Livingston.
In researching the book, Livingston delved into the archives, reading biographies and reviewing old films. She found that many of these works, thought claiming to look objectively at the same subject, took widely different stances - something that moved Livingston to think about ideas of projection, and the question of whether there is any objective truth in any one person viewing another.
"It's a recurring interest or theme of mine," she said. "Point of view and the way people project themselves and their own views onto another person in trying to understand who that other person is."
Livingston also turns a critic's eye on the feminist movement that grows and blooms throughout Vivian's mother's life. Josie struggles with demanding feminist colleagues at the University of British Columbia, and Vivian inherits the battle, questioning both feminist and backlash visionaries.
Cease to Blush looks at the pitfalls of dogmatic feminism that, suggests Livingston, can create new and equally binding roles for women. "Instead of the '50s where men were telling us what to do, and how we should behave, and what is a lady, then you have women telling you how to behave, and what to do, and what is real womanhood, and what is femininity."
It is a problem dear to Livingston's heart. In a particularly poignant moment in Cease to Blush, Vivian's mother desperately bleaches the leg hair her colleagues have scolded her for shaving; that scene was taken from Livingston's own experience, circa early-1990s, of finding herself with bleach in hand, wondering, "what am I doing, what is wrong with me? I'm bleaching my leg fur!"
Though far more fiction than fact, some of Livingston's real-life experiences were folded into Vivian's story.
Like Vivian, for instance, Livingston has worked as a model, although she admits Vivian and she wouldn't be competing for gigs. While her character works sexy shots with a party-girl image, says Livingston, "I got all kind of nature girl stuff . . . you know, kind of earthy, yoghurt-eating (stuff)."
While most of Cease to Blush was gleaned from her research and imagination, the few connections between her character and herself has Livingston fielding questions about her own place in the story.
"It's funny to me (that) as wild as this thing is, people still ask me if it's autobiographical," she said. "And I want to just say, 'Yes, every word - in fact I think Bobby Kennedy is my daddy!'"
