Billie Livingston's first novel rooted in her colourful upbringing.

 

February 28, 2000.

 

By Susan Walker

Toronto Star Entertainment Reporter

ABSORBING TALE: Billie Livingston's Going Down Swinging examines mother-daughter relationship.

 

Billie Livingston once wore a sweaty Garfield costume at a meeting sponsored by a kitty-litter company. She didn't speak through her giant cartoon cat head, because she feared the overly friendly "suits'' might discover there was a woman inside. We've heard about the demeaning jobs aspiring authors do to support their fiction (such occupations are often fodder for their stories), but this one takes the prize for whacko resumés.

 

Stories just happen to Livingston, the 34-year-old Vancouver author of the unusually accomplished first novel Going Down Swinging (Random House). "If you don't have a story by the end of the day, you just call someone,'' says Livingston, deadpanning, over high tea at the King Edward Hotel. She's had good reason, and not just in her kitty-litter days, to protect herself from pawing strangers. With a face fit for a Vogue cover and a figure to match, Livingston was initially recruited into modelling at 17, a profession she reluctantly plied into her late 20s. But eventually modelling disgusted her and in the early '90s, Livingston met the end of her career on a Toronto shoot for Wedding Bells magazine. "They called to say `You have to have your face waxed,' '' she remembers. "And I burst into tears.''

 

Tired of being treated like a piece of tenderloin, Livingston took up writing with a vengeance, applying to the writers' studio at the Banff Centre for the Arts. "I did it on a lark and didn't think they'd take me in a million years,'' a printed bio in her press kit reads. "I got accepted. First I screamed, then I laughed. Then at the airport, I bawled all the way through security. I was sure there'd been a computer glitch; they had made a mistake and were going to send me back home once I got there. They didn't. It was fantastic.''

 

So fantastic that she came home with the beginnings of a novel. The inevitable disappointment followed. She sent it to publishers, and although she got a nibble from Random House the first time around, the company wasn't acquiring heavily. After a change of editorial policy, Random editor Sarah Davies made an offer to Livingston, just before the young author left on a research trip for her second novel. Her contract in the mail, the author set out on a road trip to Bodega Bay, a little village on the coast of northern California where Alfred Hitchcock shot The Birds. As art imitates life, the central character in her second novel, now under way, also drives down the Pacific Highway.

 

The 326-page Going Down Swinging is written in highly evocative, wryly humorous prose. An absorbing tale of growing up disadvantaged with an alcoholic mother and an absent father, the novel is no coming-of-age weeper. The mother, Eileen, and the 9-year-old daughter, Grace, often tell the same anecdotes from separate vantage points. A social worker's notes provide a third perspective. The reader has to figure out which one to trust.

 

Livingston fashioned her characters out of her colourful upbringing. A wonderfully entertaining single (but attached) woman with a self-deprecating sense of humour, Livingston may have chosen laughter as the best medicine for an unstable childhood. She attended more than 16 schools, between Hamilton, where she was born in 1965, Toronto and Vancouver, where her mother eventually settled. Life was not the placid rural existence she'd so often glimpsed in Canadian fiction. ". . . as part of her AA program, (Billie's mother) was (sponsoring) this stripper who wanted to get sobriety,'' the press-kit bio goes on. The fictional mother, Eileen, becomes a hooker at one point in Going Down Swinging. She falls off the wagon, then gets back on. Meanwhile, Grace is sent by children's aid to live with a family of Jehovah's Witnesses. It's hilarious; it's also horrendous. Livingston admits she was briefly in foster care, although not with religious fanatics. An unsuspecting reader might assume the novelist has projected precocious thoughts on to her 9-year-old narrator. Not so says Livingston: "I had to find that kid part of myself, and I had a hard time stopping my adult self from intruding. "Then I started looking at old pictures and short stories written when I was 9 or 10.'' The language was more sophisticated than she'd remembered. Soon she had her theme: how kids and parents in trouble often end up changing roles.

 

Authorship, however, has not conferred on Livingston the luxury of avoiding promotional gimmicks. On her first night in Toronto, Jaymz Bee, host of a CFRB radio phone-in show, invited Livingston to pick from telephone contestants vying for a brunch date with the two of them. She picked the male caller who used the word "erudite'' in his spiel. We're still wondering if she wore her Garfield suit to brunch.