In her house in London, Ont., Bonnie Burnard landscapes her garden from the inside out.
“I don't care what it looks like from the curb. I landscape for the view outside my window,” the author says, laughing.
And why not? She works from the inside out, too – from that first thought, her imagination begins, and then a book finds its way out.
Not only that, everything in her life emanates from the domestic world, from the chair where she likes to sit to look at the trees in her garden – her writing, her happiness and the themes of her two novels, A Good House , which won the Giller Prize 10 years ago, and her new release, Suddenly .
“It's the way I live,” she says, when asked why her literary imagination draws on the intimate circles of home. “Aside from my regular life with friends and family, my working life is solitary. What I watch and see is these intimate relationships. … And part of living is noticing each other's gestures, wanting each other's gestures, watching each other's gestures, being threatened by each other's gestures.”
Suddenly is about midlife – the imminent death of the central character, Sandra, from breast cancer, and her husband, her female friends, their mates and their children. Ms. Burnard had a bout with breast cancer in 1997, while she was writing A Good House , and understands well the need for a support system. “In my private constellation, we all sit in our pattern, and part of what holds the constellation together is knowledge, an awareness of what's happening,” she says. She drew up a list of the friends she wanted to contact about her medical situation, but not because she expected or needed their help. “Just knowing keeps the tension of what holds the stars in place.”
At 64, with snowy-white hair and small glasses, and dressed in the bright floaty clothes of midlife, Ms. Burnard looks like a kindly grandmother, drinking tea in the corner of a Toronto café. In her large purse, she has an assortment of remedies – an asthma puffer, Advil. But listen to her talk, and quickly it becomes clear that if she is interested in knitting anything, it is sentences. “There are a million verbs to use, and a million nouns,” she says. “It's making something.”
The craft is private and never weighted with expectation, she says. “Most Canadian writers, myself among them, simply assume that we will write our books, and if lucky, get them published. … It's an adjustment to have numbers and numbers of readers, and also the money that came.”
She had not fully assessed the financial risk she was taking when she turned to writing full-time as a divorced mother of three children who were then headed to university. Still, she knew enough not to talk about it to her late father. “Are you able to make a living?” he would have asked, she recalls. “And I would have had to say, ‘No.' Having educated me and raised me, it would have been a disappointment [to him].” When she was nominated for the Giller in 1999, she didn't tell him. The morning after she won, someone phoned him to say his daughter's picture was on the front page of the National Post. “What's she done?” he asked.
