by John Moore

February 5, 2000.

 

 

A corrosively realistic account of a mother and daughter's life is drawn from the author's own experience on the skids with Mom.

 

For Billie Livingston, the publication this month of her first novel, Going Down Swinging is just the latest episode in an eccentric career. Here in Vancouver, she supports herself by working in film production: good work if you can get it, although not exactly glamourous. "I get to do things like standing in for the back of Kirstie Alley's head for four hours," she explains.

 

Livingston, 35, modeled briefly, when she was just out of high school, thanks to her mother, a woman who "created costumes" for exotic dancers. One of the strippers saw a picture of Livingston and suggested to her mother that she should try the runway." I modeled in Japan for three months. It was quite horrible," she says with a finality that closes this line of questioning.

 

Livingston, who skipped around the world for some years before returning to settle in Vancouver, is not the coddled product of a creative writing department; she came to writing fiction by instinct, if not by accident. " I lived with a record producer in England and he was very encouraging about my writing. He encouraged me to write anything but songs. He suggested I write poetry or fiction. I'm sure he was just trying to get me to stop pestering him with songs, but I'm grateful to him for pointing me in the right direction."

 

After returning to Vancouver, she committed herself to fiction. Memories of a somewhat dysfunctional childhood - the result of years spent drifting with her restless mother from her birthplace in Hamilton to Toronto, the Maritimes and the West Coast- provided the inspiration for this book, but Going Down Swinging is much more than a memoir.

 

"I don't want to get 'Evelyn Lau-ed'," she says, reading my mind over coffee at Sophie's Cosmic Cafe. "When the media makes an angle out of identifying your life with your writing too closely, it turns into a trap. I can't help feeling people know a lot more about Evelyn's personal life than they do about her writing. It strikes me as a bit of a prison for people to know every skeleton in your closet on a first-name basis."

 

Still, it's impossible to avoid the autobiographical aspect of Going Down Swinging, a corrosively realistic account of two years in the life of Eileen and Grace Hoffman, a mother and child on the skids who have nothing to hold on to but their lov for each other. The novel is set in the early '70s in Grace's early childhood, but Eileen Hoffman is a child of the 60s. Her biggest problem is a bad taste in men, a failing that drives her to drink, drugs and the attention of the child welfare authorities.

 

"Tell me you're not Grace. Tell me this isn't your life," I challenge over the second cup of coffee. I'd done the math while reading the book, checked the flyleaf for her age and got a sum that didn't add up to the poised, self-possessed person across the table. By my reckoning, Livingston should be sporting heavy foundation to cover a lobotomy scar and wearing a white-jacket with extra-long sleeves.

 

"Grace is probably the one character I have the most in common with," she admits. "The book is about 50 percent autobiographical. My mother did drink and I was in foster care as a kid. That much I had to tell my editor because she had never been exposed to the idea of having a personal file in which pointless and questionable information is compiled. She questioned the realism of a social worker making personal remarks about a case. I've been through the system and I know how it works. I sent away for my own file and was fortunate enough to have a couple friends show me theirs. I think what struck us all, looking at those files, was how many little inaccuracies there were and how they all add up to create a certain impression. For instance, at one point in the Hoffman file, the social worker remarks on how the Hoffmans live in a one-room apartment and Eileen's sexual activity must be obvious to Grace. I got this idea from a friend's file. Her family lived in a one-bedroom apartment and nobody was having sex - her mother groaned a lot when she had a hangover. But there it is, part of their permanent record."

 

Though Livingston still has a close relationship with her own mother, the resolution of the novel drew suprisingly heavy fire from some publishers' readers and editors.

 

"I got the impression from some of the editors who turned down Going Down Swinging that they wanted Eileen not only to be deeply repentant but more thoroughly punished. People wanting your female lead character to get her comeuppance seems such a common desire from film audiences and readers, especially with sexually aggressive or promiscuous characters. Apparently in the original short story Fatal Attraction is based on, there's very little about the 'crazy' Glenn Close character. The man gives a woman his number, has a tryst while his wife is out of town and the rest is about the guilt he'll have to live with. But audiences have an evil-Eve syndrome stuck in their craws, the idea that men are helpless to our feminine wiles. The script was re-written several times, Michael Douglas looking more and more heroic, Glenn Close becoming more and more insane. The first version they shot had Glenn end up in the loony bin, but test audiences wouldn't stand for that. The slut stole another woman's man. They wanted her dead. God, I hated that movie."

 

Livingston is adamant about not wanting to intrude on Going Down Swinging with an omniscient narrator's judgement. "When I went to Banff a couple years ago a bunch of us had a big debate over dinner about whether or not the author has an obligation to pass judgement or at least make it obvious who the bad and good guys are. I, as you can probably guess, was on the nay side. I figure our obligation is to tell a story. The readers can judge if they choose. After a few well-crafted stories about nothing I start hollering at the page, "Can somebody do something soon for godsake!" It's enough to bore you into a coma. All these magazine editors publishing each other and all these poets developing this monotone reading style that rises a half-note at the end of each line. I don't get that CanLit voice. Why would anyone want to sound like that in front of an audience? I wonder if I'd sound like that if I'd gotten a creative writing degree?"

 

Livingston already senses the flak she'll have to ride out as a woman writer. My own flagrantly sexist observation that she "writes like a man," based on an excerpt from the novel in Vancouver's underground literary magazine, Sub-Terrain, made me wonder if she was about to redecorate my face with her vegetarian sandwich. She restrained herself.

 

"I hated that magazine when I first saw it five or six years ago. I thought it was full of stories about guys jerking off on dead hookers...'real cutting edge, man'... I refused to submit to it. I figured they'd turn me down anyway. Then a Banff friend, Suzanne Buffam, got involved with it as a reader and editor and she agreed with my past feelings about it but insisted that they were changing. And they have. I've loved the last few issues."

 

My observation that the excerpt in question - an interlude between Eileen and a scrip-quack skid row doctor she services in exchange for a drug ticket - reminded me of a Charles Bukowski short story appears to ruin her appetite, but she recovers quickly.

 

"I have been influenced by a lot of male writers. I loved J.D.Salinger's Nine Stories, Tobias Wolff and I'm thinking of Richard Ford, Richard Brautigan, Richard Price... I must have a thing for writers named Richard. But I also love Margaret Atwood's deadpan humour, Barbara Gowdy, Lynn Coady, Dorothy Allison. I guess the women are all sort of 'tough broad' writers, aren't they? Lynn Coady's Strange Heaven was the most recent. I loved that book."

 

 

"Why should male writers get to be rude dogs while women writers are supposed to be political and toe some sort of party line if they're deemed to be intelligent and strong? Christ, I guess it could be worse. I could be black or gay and have those politics to contend with too. I read a review of Anne Fleming's book (Pool Hopping) which said essentially that she could have done a lot better if she'd studied gay and lesbian literary theory. 'She's not lez enough' is what I took from that. And in the same magazine a review of David Odhiambo's book (Diss/ed Banded Nation), said the book would have been better if he'd talked more about Africa. He wasn't 'black enough'. Chicks and minorities, we're all supposed to be spokespeople. If you're part of any group who has ever been or felt oppressed, Lord help you if you don't write about your roots and write loudly. Black writers who don't write black, Jews who don't write Jewish may come under fire from the community if somebody decides you're in denial and have sold out somehow," she says, irritated by the politically correct Balkanization of contemporary culture.

 

"Frankly, I'm guilty of it too," she says. "When I'm looking at female artists in any genre or field, if a woman comes across as an absolute bimbo I'm off in the corner shaking my head and massaging my temples. When I turn on the TV and see a woman who's had every kind of surgery you can imagine, her hair's bleached platinum so many times it's the texture of candy floss and she talks like Minnie Mouse with a head cold, I'm on the edge of my seat barking at the screen. I'm not a victim, I'm a rude bitch."