Mary Novik is the author of Conceit (2009) and Muse (2013). She will appear at IFOA on November 1 for a reading, and on November 3 for a roundtabe on writing historical fiction.
1. What are three words you associate with your first relationship?
Tongue-tied terror.
2. What’s the worst thing you ever did for money?
Picking fruit and packing tulip bulbs as a teenager. It was “piece work” and I was too slow and meticulous to make decent money. Actually, now that I think about it, I make the same mistake when I’m writing novels.
3. What is your least favourite song?
“Happy Birthday” when sung to me, because I’ve heard it far too many times.
4. What is your favourite song?
“Que Sera, Sera”, because it was the first 45 rpm single I bought. Since I didn’t have a gramophone, I had to take the record to a friend’s house to play it on her machine.
5. What’d you have for breakfast this morning?
Organic steel cut oats. I like to feel virtuous first thing in the morning, because the sensation will soon fade.
6. How do you feel about Joni Mitchell?
She makes me nostalgic for the seventies when we believed that art could change life. However, they are still paving paradise and putting up parking lots. Leonard Cohen expressed his disappointment this way:
I once believed a single line
in a Chinese poem could change
forever how blossoms fell
7. How did you learn what sex was?
I can tell you how I learned about sex in novels. Sex is important in establishing intimacy between your characters, but straight erotica sounds clichéd, so it was an eyeopener to discover the comic sex scenes in Margaret Atwood’s The Edible Woman. It was very liberating for me as a novelist.
8. Where do you imagine all our lost T-shirts go?
I hope they’re being turned into rag content letter paper with watermarks. But then I also hope that fountain pens with oak-gall ink will come back in style.
9. Who do you consider the funniest person in the world—that we would know?
John Cleese in the early Monty Python skits. Remember the Ministry of Silly Walks? The Lumberjack Song?
10. What’s the worst insult you’ve ever said?
“Get a life.” To my husband. I still feel guilty saying that.
11. What’s the worst thing you’ve ever been called?
One reviewer called me a flea and a parasite for fictionalizing the life of the poet John Donne in Conceit. She couldn’t get her head around the idea that it was a novel.
12. What’s a deal breaker for someone you’re in a relationship or in love with?
Egotism. Very unsexy.
13. What’s something you do every night before bed?
I arrange my arms and legs in Shavasana, corpse pose, to trick myself into falling asleep because that’s what happens when I do it in yoga class.
Image credit: Janet Baxter
