Writer’s Muse was a Corpse

 

 

 

May 20, 2006

By Stephen Hunt

 

There have always been people’s poets, guys such as Al Purdy and Charles Bukowski, and even Jack Kerouac, who wrote plain spoken sentences about work, sex, drinking, all the different places they did these things and to whom they did them. Not surprisingly, considering what they put their muses through, they’re all dead.

 

 

While Purdy and Bukowski were burly guys who did burly guy jobs — mailman, factory worker — Livingston, the Vancouver author of Cease to Blush (Random House Canada, 480 pages, $34.95), is an attractive woman who has always made her living doing the things good looking women do for a living, such as modeling and acting, something she continues to work at in Vancouver even though early call times frequently require a 5 a.m. wake-up.

 

Sipping a Pinot Grigio late Tuesday afternoon in the Oak Room at the Palliser Hotel, the 40-year-old Livingston, a charming, blunt storyteller, shares the details of one of her favourite acting gigs: playing a corpse.

 

“They called and asked if I wanted to do a photo shoot for a show called Touching Evil, playing a dead body,” says Livingston, dressed in soft pastels that make her look more like a 1950s prom goer than a straight-to-syndication corpse. “It pays really well,” she explains ($250 for four hours, and $65 an hour thereafter).

 

“I was dead by the side of the river, and they put strangle marks on my neck. Then they changed their mind. They said, ‘No, wrong corpse.’ Then they put all this white makeup on, wrapped me in a shower curtain and photographed me strangled, on a bathroom floor. So that’s why I was there so long. All the other (dead) girls were sent home after three hours.”

 

Not only did Livingston earn close to $900 for a day spent playing a dead person, but she unwittingly stumbled upon a perfect job for Vivian, the heroine of Cease to Blush, the author’s second novel. Vivian, a boozing, cynical model and movie extra in her mid 30s, is a woman struggling to come to terms with the death of her radical feminist mother, who stumbles upon a box of memories that reveal Mom was once a stripper linked to, among others, Frank Sinatra and Bobby Kennedy.

 

This sets Vivian off on a real and sometimes imagined journey of discovery of her late mother, with whom she never got along very well when she was living. The catch is that, frequently, Vivian’s notions of what happened didn’t; she’s an unreliable narrator of her mother’s own past, one who strings the fragments together and —as often as not — comes up with the wrong story.

 

“Part of what I was looking at with both books — besides dealing with mothers and daughters — is perspective,” Livingston says. “What is truth? This ends up even more so examining what is truth because I read all those biographies so that I could recreate all of these people, yet you read three biographies of the same person and they’re completely different. It calls into question, if four people are in a room and an event happens, they all have a different observation about how it all went down.”

 

Livingston is a restless spirit, the youngest of three daughters who grew up in a messed-up home environment. Her mother was an alcoholic, and Livingston, who is 10 years younger than her other two sisters, was pretty much running the household by the time she was a teenager while Mom attended to her demons.

 

“I ran away from home at 16,” Livingston says. “When I left, it was rock bottom for my mother and the woman who was 12-stepping her was a stripper. She saw my picture on the mantle, and said, oh you should bring her in (to her agency), so I went in to see them.”

 

The next thing you know, Livingston was 17, living in Tokyo, working as a model.

 

“I liked the idea of going to the other side of the world and modelling sounded very (cool),” she says. “Then you get over there. Every time reality sets in, it’s the same crap. Then it just becomes another grindy job. The bars all have some kind of mob ties, and they all want models in them, so you can go and drink for free and get in for free . . . so most of the models there are drunk half the time.”

 

The thing about Livingston that separated her from the other models was her tendency to constantly jot things down, to reinterpret and order her chaotic world into words. She wrote poems, some literary magazines published them and, in 1995, she was accepted into the Banff Centre’s fiction program, a prestigious gig for someone with more modeling than literary experience.

 

At Banff, Livingston met novelist Susan Musgrave, the bad girl of Canadian letters — she’s married to a bank robber — who fell in love with the first three chapters of Livingston’s novel (which became Going Down Swinging) and helped place it with Random House, where the book was published in 2000.

 

Between Going Down Swinging and Cease to Blush, Livingston published a book of poetry called The Chick at the Back of the Church, which might have been inspired by another of Livingston’s enthusiasms: churchhopping. For Cease to Blush, Livingston visited a number of evangelical churches to watch people speaking in tongues. If Bukowski had his bars, Livington — who once wrote a poem about having a dream where she sleeps with Bukowski — has her churches. Churches and highways leading to the perpetual traveller’s favourite destination: Anywhere but here. “I’ve always had jobs that I wasn’t tied down to,” Livingson says (although that doesn’t preclude being tied up and left for dead at $65 hour), “that I could make money off of and bugger off any point in time. Go on a road trip or something. I wrote a lot of that (Cease to Blush) on road trips.”