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The 700-page-plus novel, MacDonald’s first in eight years, was a marathon effort from the lauded Canadian author and playwright

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Ann-Marie MacDonald is seen in the recording studio at Penguin Random House in Toronto on September, 28 2022.JENNIFER ROBERTS/The Globe and Mail

Judging by her creative output, you would never know the monumental struggles Ann-Marie MacDonald has faced these past few years. MacDonald has just published Fayne, her first novel in eight years, an epic set in Victorian-era Scotland. This follows the world premiere this summer of her play, Hamlet-911. And the world premiere of a stage adaptation of her hit debut novel, the Oprah-approved Fall on Your Knees, is scheduled for January, 2023.

Leading up to this period, MacDonald was very unwell. In so much pain that she might not have been able to lift the 700-page book – her longest – she was writing (it’s 14 pages longer than The Way the Crow Flies, her second novel). “For the better part of three years I was very limited in how much I could literally move,” MacDonald says during a Zoom interview from Toronto. “But I could type.”

She was also grieving.

The idea that sparked the novel came to MacDonald in the fall of 2015. Partway through writing it, in November, 2017, her father died. Her symptoms began a year later. She was initially diagnosed, in February, 2019, with polymyalgia rheumatica – the same diagnosis her father had received a few years before his death. But it was ultimately determined, more than a year later, that she was suffering from seronegative rheumatoid arthritis.

Large swaths of Fayne were written with MacDonald propped up just so, in a comfortable chair, with shoulder supports, bands around her forearms, supports for her hands, neck, back and knees. She had a big chair to sit on, a little lap desk, a post to lean on, a kneeling chair, a saddle chair. She became well-versed in ergonomics. “I realized I could do everything that I needed to do, slowly. So I learned that. I learned how to go slow,” she says. “Everything would have to be just so. And I’d get my hours in.”

“It’s bloody-minded. It’s just determination,” she continues. “And we keep going.”

Through the grief, too. Her mother died in the midst of all of this in September, 2020.

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Immunocompromised, MacDonald spent long periods of lockdown at the family cabin in New Brunswick, away from her wife and children. She brought the dog, Chester, a Husky-Shepherd cross.

Knowing all of this, it’s hard not to imagine that sense of isolation worming its way into the book.

Fayne is the story of Charlotte Bell, who is 12 when the book begins. Her only sibling, a brother, died before she was born, and her mother also died, in childbirth. Charlotte lives with her father on a remote estate called Fayne on a misty moor on the Scottish-English border. She has been kept away from school because of a curious unnamed condition. When her father finally allows Charlotte to have a (male) tutor – who notes that she has an excellent memory for facts, an appetite for knowledge and “may learn to think” – one (the tutor, the reader) has to wonder: Was Charlotte’s condition real? Or was it just invented by an anxious, overprotective father worried about losing yet another loved one?

The story takes many unexpected twists, the reader often catching on before the characters do. It is written from various perspectives – sometimes first-person, sometimes third. It illuminates the experience of being queer before such things were discussed openly. It is a feminist novel. It is engrossing, gorgeous, funny – and excruciating at times.

The idea began with an image, “a mysterious brooding landscape,” MacDonald explains in the Advance Reader Copy. “A windswept moor that looked to me like an ocean whose turbulent surface had been stilled by the wave of a wand.”

While MacDonald was grieving her own parents, she found solace in bringing to life this youthful protagonist full of hope and aspirations for her own future. She calls it her “youngest book.”

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Approaching the project, she wanted to go back to the “fun stuff,” she says. “The fun I had as a kid, even as a teenager, making stuff up. Imagining I’m somewhere. And then I thought: I want to go to a place that I really want to be, and if I really want to be there, then the reader’s going to really want to be there. And there’s going to be secrets. And, oh my God, I don’t even know what they are. I’m going to have to find out. And if I want to find out, the reader’s going to want to find out, right?”

Beyond the gripping yarn, it is a novel that deals with gender and class issues, women’s health, and even – surprisingly and critically – the climate emergency. “Nature is full of hints,” the book observes. “And warnings.” The modern age was being incubated at the time the novel is set: the world wars, the cold war, civil rights, the sexual revolution. “All of that is percolating in that moment,” MacDonald says.


MacDonald, who turns 64 in late October, is sitting in a studio at Penguin Random House Canada, where she was recording the Fayne audiobook. It’s a monumental task given how epic the novel is, but second nature for MacDonald, who is also an actor and former broadcaster.

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JENNIFER ROBERTS/The Globe and Mail

She was born on an air-force base in what was then West Germany to parents from Cape Breton, N.S.; her mother was the child of Lebanese immigrants and her father was of Scottish descent. As a child attending school on the air-force base in Centralia, Ont., outside London, she loved to read aloud, to savour the stories. Because of this, she was placed into the slow readers group. “I was a tortoise,” she says.

(But who doesn’t want to be a tortoise? The intelligence, the longevity – she can now observe with the benefit of hindsight.)

She spent many years in Toronto, but has lived in Montreal since 2014. Her wife, Alisa Palmer, is artistic director, English section, for the National Theatre School of Canada – which MacDonald herself attended, graduating in 1980. They have two daughters in their late teens.

MacDonald’s first solo-written play, Goodnight Desdemona (Good Morning Juliet), which premiered in 1987 at Nightwood Theatre, won several awards, including the Governor-General’s Award. She published her first novel, Fall On Your Knees, in 1996, and it was a stunner, a critical and commercial success. In 2002, it became the second Canadian book to be named an Oprah’s Book Club selection.

“This book is a perfect cold-weather page turner with the kind of pleasure you get from cuddling up with dark classics like Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre,” Winfrey told her viewers.

Fayne harkens back to the Brontes (both of the aforementioned books make an appearance in the story) and the kind of literature that made MacDonald fall in love with the craft. She was 10 when an older sister suggested she read Jane Eyre. “And it just totally changed my life,” says MacDonald. “So I’ve had a relationship with late 19th century Victorian fiction from a very early age.”

“And then I have an abiding interest in medicine, illness, pain, the history of medicine, especially as it pertains to women and children and other ‘chattel.’” And sexual identity. “That’s something that I feel very passionately about as well, having come of age as the wrong kind of girl,” she says.

During the writing of the book, MacDonald travelled to Scotland twice. In the northwest highlands, she visited the inlet from which her ancestors departed for Nova Scotia, in a boat unsuitable for an ocean crossing. She took a formative trip up the rugged coast with a group of botanists and geologists.

“I get very viscerally, physically excited when I’m in that landscape. I literally start running and I can’t stop. I find it so thrilling,” says MacDonald. She recalls one of her first experiences with that kind of wild, natural environment. She thought: “This is the Earth without her makeup.”


MacDonald’s interest in righting inequity – one might say rewriting it – embodies her newest work of theatre as well.

While Fayne is her longest novel, Hamlet-911 is her shortest play – an hour and 42 minutes, she says, including laughs. It is set at the Stratford Festival, before a performance of Hamlet, with a middle-aged white actor set to play the lead role.

Her play is a Shakespeare corrective, dreamed up by Palmer after a dinner party she attended with a bunch of men and one other woman. Everyone at the table had either directed Hamlet or played the titular character – except for the two women present. After delivering Fayne’s manuscript last February, MacDonald was consumed over the spring and summer with getting Hamlet-911 to the stage in the midst of the pandemic. At Stratford, seven performances had to be cancelled owing to COVID; the opening was postponed twice. And in one memorable preview performance, owing to illness in the cast, MacDonald herself (who does not normally perform in the play) took on four roles, with six costume changes. “It was all I could do to come on, say the lines, be wearing the right thing, go the right places on the stage.”

Love, anger and pride: How Ann-Marie MacDonald learned to let go of the past

For the stage version of Fall on Your Knees, which was co-adapted by Palmer and Canadian playwright Hannah Moscovitch, MacDonald is a consultant. The music-driven piece in two parts, meant to be viewed in sequence on the same day or over consecutive days, will have its world premiere at Toronto’s Canadian Stage in January.

“We want people to feel like they feel when they read the book. Which is, immersed in a world, and you can’t look away,” says Palmer in a promotional video for London’s Grand Theatre, where the production will end its tour next spring.

MacDonald is well now. But the world, she knows, is not. Fayne is being published at a difficult time – for women’s rights, in particular. And she worries about LGBTQ+ rights.

She sees literature as a possible corrective. The power of story only increases, she says, when the world is so polarized and dealing with urgent issues such as climate change.

“I think story by definition and then some stories by intention illuminate our interconnectedness,” she says. “That’s the only antidote. It’s not just our interconnectedness with each other, but with our planet. With our beautiful, beautiful, alive entity of which we are a part.”

Her recovery has helped her tap into a belief – in the world, in herself. Her rheumatologist and her psychotherapist were both essential to her healing, she explained in an e-mail after our interview, looking back on that time when she had lost her parents, the pandemic was in full force and she was in so much pain.

“The fearsome duo of grief and guilt was like a comb pulled inexorably through every capillary of my body, by turns igniting with heat or flooding with fluid, every part of it,” she wrote – noting a couple of exceptions: She could wiggle her ears and rotate her ankles painlessly.

Faith – in her caregivers and in her own strength – has helped her power through and be released from the pain, allowing her to publish this novel. (And even lift it if she needs to.)

“Faith often feels like a rag to me, a splinter off a spar in the ocean. And occasionally I lose sight of it altogether,” she wrote in her e-mail. “I am coming to accept that in my case, the examined life is the only one I can live. Because the unexamined life leaves me vulnerable to states of pain that I know I would not be able to endure indefinitely. So, I am well. I am grateful. I am hopeful.”

Editor’s note: An earlier version of this story indicated Fall On Your Knees would have its world premiere at the National Arts Centre in Ottawa. The play will premiere at Canadian Stage in Toronto.

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