Some days her partner took over at home and sent Lyon to the library for a full day of work. That had to stop, though, during her second pregnancy, once she could no longer make it home up the hill from the SkyTrain station. (She wound up delivering a 10-pound boy.)
Her own children became the models for Aristotle's daughter and son. The age gap worked, and she loved using her children's looks and personalities in her book.
The Golden Mean is a blend of historical fact and Lyon's imagination. The events the story is set around are factual. But much around those facts is imagined.
Lyon turned to historical texts for clues. Her Aristotle is bipolar, something Lyon extrapolated from two of his works. In Problems , he mentions a link between melancholy and the creative temperament. “It's a very short little passage, but it sounds like he knew what he was talking about,” says Lyon. The manic part of the equation came from how prolific he was. And in his Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle explains his idea about the golden mean: To live a good life, you have to find a balance between two extremes. “I thought, ‘That sounds like somebody who struggles with it, who desperately wishes he could do that.'”
For her research, Lyon contemplated a trip to Greece, where she could feel the air and see the ruins of the world she was writing about. But how to do that with a young family? Take the babies? Leave them behind? She was nursing. It would be complicated – and expensive. In the end, the only travelling she did was to the library.
Lyon isn't done with ancient Greece. After finishing a sequel to All-Season Edie, she wants to write about Aristotle's daughter, Pythias. But there will be no capitalizing on The Golden Mean's success by hurrying out a sequel. “I'm not in a rush to start it. I haven't put a word down.”
Right now, Lyon is concentrating on teaching (she teaches an online creative-writing course at the University of British Columbia) and reading. She's making her way through the other books on the three short lists to which she's been named, and will attend the Giller Awards next month with her parents.
Between juggling her work, her family, “and all the craziness that's happening right now,” Lyon has not herself found the golden mean. “You try and strike a balance, but I don't even know what that would look like,” she says with a laugh. “No, life is crazy for me, as it is crazy for pretty much every working mother that I know.”
The children do keep her grounded. “They're about the only people in my life at the moment who don't want to talk about this. They're just: Come and do puzzles, come and do Lego, I'm poopy come change my diaper.' When I was writing this, that was my break from them. And now my break from all this is to go and do stuff with them. Because this just means nothing to them.”
Still, it seems all the excitement has somehow permeated her daughter's brain. In the car in the middle of Wednesday's craziness, the four-year-old suddenly piped up from the back seat: “Alice Munro!” Who, Lyon asked, is Alice Munro? The answer couldn't have been more thrilling: “Somebody Mummy works with.”
