Because Heather O’Neill won the Canada Reads competition in 2007, her novel has been garnering quite a bit of media stir. Lucky for us, this means tons of behind-the-scenes news pieces and interviews. Here’s your definitive guide to what’s out there on the Internet on O’Neill:
About.com Interview
Highlight:
About.com: You started as a poet, with your book, “Two Eyes Are You Sleeping.” Did you make a transition to fiction at some point, or had you always written both? In what ways does your background as a poet influence your prose?
Heather O’Neill: I think there was always something very proselike about my poetry, the same way that I think there is something very poetic about my prose. After my poetry book came out, I entered a creative writing program and all the poetry classes were full so I took a prose class. Once I started, I couldn’t stop. It was so much easier to get published, too, which helped.
So she started writing prose by default? Gee whiz. That’s kind of how I ended up taking German in college, but mein Deutsch ist absolute Scheiße. It’s kind like how Goldstein ended up with his first Wiretap-esqe piece for This American Life. He told Transom.org:
The next twenty-odd years were uneventful as well as virtually worthless. I completed my public school education and then did a ten-year stint in a telemarketing office. Then one day, my friend Joshua Karpati told me about a phone message that was circulated throughout Columbia University in the early nineties. The message essentially consisted of a Jewish mother telling her Jewish son to go fuck himself. He told me about all the various lives that were touched by this message. I decided to produce a story about it on TAL.
That ended up on the episode “Recordings for Someone” and featured Josh being not-as-shrill-as-Wiretap-Josh and uttering “I diggy-don’t give a rat’s ass.”
HarperCollins Interview
Highlight: Just in case you were worried that Heather O’Neill’s childhood was absolutely ghastly, here’s this:
Q: The vivid first-person narration of your novel makes it read more like autobiography than fiction. To what extent did you borrow from your own experiences as a teenager in crafting the world Baby inhabits?
A: The novel isn’t autobiographical. The down and out world of Montreal was the one that I grew up in, though. It’s a world that is composed of what attracted and fascinated me at Baby’s age. Also, like Baby, I didn’t have a mother. I was raised by my father since I was seven years old. So the longing and absence for a mother is something that is in my bones, especially the difficulties of being an adolescent girl without a mother and looking for maternal love in relationships with boys. A lot of the children in the book were inspired by children that I was infatuated with. My dad is very different from Jules. But he’s similar in being eccentric and outrageous, but more in a tough guy kind of way. Like Jules, he tried his best, although his idea of parenting was absurd.
HarperCollins also provides a reading guide, for those of you who want to start a Heather O’Neill coffee clatch.
Lullabies for Little Criminals has an extensive Wikipedia entry, too.
Highlights: List of awards:
- Winner of Canada Reads 2007
- Shortlisted for Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers Award 2007
- Shortlisted for the Amazon.ca/ Books in Canada First Novel Award 2007
- Shortlisted for Governor General’s Award 2007 (TBA)
- Winner of the Hugh MacLennan Prize for Best Novel 2007
- Shortlisted for the Grand Prix du Livre de Montreal 2007
- Longlisted for the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award 2008 (TBA)
A Quill and Quire profile. Written more narrative style and less Q & A.
Highlight: Notes that Zouzou isn’t allowed to read the book and that Hettie has “a soft voice that is impressively smooth, given how many Camels she will smoke in the hour I’m there.” Always nice to know which cigarettes a writer smokes.
Here’s a story in the New York Times. Not an interview, but I found it in my search. It’s called “Almost Home.”
Ohh here’s a good one: TheStar.com has an article which gives us insight on Heather O’Neill and Jonathan Goldstein’s relationship.
O’Neill won a scholarship and graduated from McGill at the age of 20. A short-lived liaison produced a daughter, Arizona, now 12, to whom O’Neill is devoted. They live in Montreal with Jonathan Goldstein, host of CBC Radio’s show WireTap and author of Lenny Bruce Is Dead, a novel.
“I was 22 and he was 26 and we met when we were both reading our poetry at this little bar in Montreal,” she recalls. “He came in soaking wet from the rain and when he read, I thought it was the greatest poetry I’d ever heard. We traded our chapbooks. For years we were each other’s only fans.”
Also, the article mentions Paul Tough, who is interviewed twice by Howard on Wiretap (once in character and once as himself).
This brief article from The Aucklander News noted that Heather O’Neill was on a “celebrity panel” of judges for some kind of poetry slam.
Okay there are a lot more, won’t summarize but here are two more for now:
