Please join us for a Q&A with Heather O’Neill, author of The Capital of Dreams.
Heather O’Neill is a novelist, short-story writer and essayist. Her work includes When We Lost Our Heads, a #1 national bestseller and a finalist for the Grand Prix du Livre de Montréal, The Lonely Hearts Hotel, which won the Paragraphe Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction and was longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction and CBC’s Canada Reads, and Lullabies for Little Criminals, The Girl Who Was Saturday Night, and Daydreams of Angels, shortlisted for the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction, the Orange Prize for Fiction and the Scotiabank Giller Prize two years in a row. O’Neill has also won CBC’s Canada Reads and the Danuta Gleed Award. Born and raised in Montreal, O’Neill lives there today.
Heather’s latest novel, The Capital of Dreams, was featured in our January 15 ezine.
Please use this space to ask Heather questions about her work. As a reminder, to reply to an existing comment click the grey Reply on the right side under the comment. To ask a new question, click the blue Reply button a little lower down.
Heather, thanks for being here! Please tell our group a little about yourself.
Hello Readers!
So lovely to be meeting you! I live in Montreal, Canada. I was raised by my father in a tiny apartment. He was an ex-con with a beautiful gift for telling stories. I began keeping a journal when I was 8 years old. And I became addicted to the process. I was known for always scribbling something down. I continued this into adulthood. I love to mix darkness and light. I offer metaphors and imagery to invite the readers to places they have never been before. We go to the heart of darkness together, and there find that all human experience, no matter how strange and uncomfortable, is worthy of dignity and filled with mystery and beauty. The Capital of Dreams is a fairy tale about a child surviving abandonment and a war.
Feel free to ask me anything about me, The Capital of Dreams, or writing in general!
Thanks, Heather! That seems like a challenging environment in which to grow up, but it also sounds like you really made the most of your opportunities and talents. Is it fair to say you channeled your childhood experiences into many of your novels?
I enjoyed The Capital of Dreams very much. It’s told almost as if it was a children’s story, yet the content is mature. Did you have a specific audience in mind as you wrote it?
Did you have any current conflict in mind as the backdrop for The Capital of Dreams?
There are particular themes that arise in my work that are a direct result of my childhood. The absence of mothers in my work, for example. And the acceptance of dysfunctional people has become a keystone to my creation of characters. I love to invent a character that should be unlovable, but the reader falls deeply in love with them. I also learned, growing up in a violent home, to look for beauty wherever I could find it. If I found something poetic or funny, I considered myself to be lucky and blessed. So there is a deep attraction to the sublime and magical life.
It is a fairy tale. But it was not written for children. It is worth remembering that fairy tales were not originally written for children. They were tales that were grotesque and spoke of horrors that were unspeakable in polite society. That is the spirit of the fairy tale in which I write. I also admire fairy tales for their use of the plucky young heroine who faces psychopathic monsters and manipulative wolves. I like that girls and women were the center of these oral tales, and defy even contemporary notions of what a girl is capable of.
Thanks! I’ve never looked at the older fairy tales as defying the notions of what a girl is capable of. That’s a fascinating way to approach them, and one I haven’t considered. I liked that not only was Sofia strong and able to overcome the obstacles in her path, but that Rosalie was the Black Market. What are your thoughts about Celeste, though? She’s certainly not someone who overcame circumstances.
Ah Celeste! I love her so much! But she is a tragic character. Celeste embodies all the virtues that are celebrated in young girls. She is pretty, always happy, friendly, and welcoming. Before the war, she led a girlish life filled with laughter and compliments. And Sofia is always envious of her, because she is so much less successful as a girl. But when the war comes, and both girls have to overcome adversity, we see that Celeste’s sweet ways are a liability. She puts her trust in the kindness of soldiers, who then abuse and exploit her. In fairy tales, it is often the disobedient and mean girls who are punished (like Cinderella’s sisters.) But in my fairy tale, it is the girl who embodies feminine virtues who faces an unhappy outcome. Feminine charm and prettiness are seen as liabilities in this fairytale. As I think they can be in the life of any young woman.
What prompted you to include the goose as a major character?
How did the story evolve as you wrote it? Did you run into any challenges, or did the plot head off into unexpected territory at any point?
The Capital of Dreams is set in an imaginary country, enduring an imaginary conflict. I wanted it to work like a fable. I wanted it to represent what happens when a country is invaded by another that claims the land is theirs. Everything that happens in the book has its mirror in history. It had to, in order to give the book an eerie feeling of being real.
I am such a fan of absurdist theatre. The dialogue in those plays tries to reconcile the lack of meaning in a brutal world with the human desire for hope. I was hoping to create an existential conversation between Sofia and the Goose that would get at how a child interprets trauma. Often when we are subjected to cruelty as children, we have no one to turn to. So we invent imaginary friends, make our dolls real, and turn our animals into companions and philosophers. I became very attached to the Goose as I was writing The Capital of Dreams. I didn’t realize how much of a person he would prove himself to be, not only to Sofia, but also to me.
I have to admit I think I was more upset about the goose than Sofia was. During that scene I was all “Not the goose! Nooooo!” haha. Poor goose.
Your books often feature traumatic scenes that are described without a trace of sentimentality. Was this distance a conscious choice on your part?