Darlene Madott is at it again with a smashing collection of short stories. Madott continues her deep dive in the world of Canadian law through a much-needed feminist lens. The prose is smooth, deliciously non-linear, and like a good meal, totally satisfying. Have a seat at this wonderful table and dig in!
What made you decide to write about your law life?
The reality is that I didn’t write out of my legal background until I effectively retired, and I didn’t decide in a deliberate way. I lawyered by day and I wrote by night and on weekends and in the margins of my life about what mattered to me at the time. The last thing I wanted to do when I came home at night was write about what I did all day, the same way I could never watch legal dramas on television or Netflix. Last thing I wanted to do. Writing was my secret lover who wooed me away from the practice of law, and therein lay the real pleasure of writing for me. I kept my double life in separate compartments. It’s only lately that the boudoir farce has become more openly promiscuous.
Truth be told, I went into law because of a writer’s block. My mother, who had watched me flounder too long on the threshold of adult life, admonished me with exasperation: “Why don’t you make something of your life, like your friend Irene?” My friend Irene happened to be a lawyer. So, I wrote the LSAT as a walk-in, on a kind of dare, without any preparation. If I could not do what I thought I really wanted to do, in my heart of hearts, then at least I could achieve at a mediocre level, or so I thought at the time – do something that would burn up the hours like a match to human hair, make writing impossible, make me let go of my failed dream. But in all honesty, looking back, my mother was right. I had to find a practical way of being in the world. I had to, quite simply, make a living. Everything I did to try to support myself as a writer had felt like a summer job. No sooner did I get into law school then the writer’s block dissipated and the short-story collection Bottled Roses was published contemporaneous with my graduation from law school.
My choice of profession had nothing to do with access to interesting stories. But really interesting stories did happen, and then I faced another dilemma – solicitor/client privilege. “The Question,” published three times before arriving in Winners and Losers is a riff on a real legal case I had as a junior lawyer. It delves into the mystery of an old woman being sued by the descendants of her lascivious brother-in-law. The backstory is the sister’s murder from a botched abortion. It’s narrated mostly in the form of courtroom cross examinations, and the story becomes progressively more disturbing in its implications of perverse relations.
When I surrendered my license to practice law, I just continued to write what I felt compelled to write, pilfering and embellishing to make a good story. I’ve authored nine books. Dying Times (my eighth book) took place against a legal backdrop, and now Winners and Losers draws more directly upon my experience as a matrimonial lawyer who toiled for some 35 years in the vineyards of matrimonial misery. The collection includes “Newton’s Third Law” about a sparring spouse, where every action of their separation process spawns an increasingly toxic and hilarious reaction. “Toilet Bowl Blues” is about abusive partnerships of tumultuous lovers, waring sisters and a senior partner/junior associate dynamic. This sadly funny story quite literally shoots the shit – the human excrement that feeds and fuels a working lifetime.
But coming back to the concept of deciding: I feel it is more like the stories chose me rather than that I chose the stories. I simply worked with what I was given, and in some cases, it really worked. Sometimes, I came to my material reluctantly, because I’m a basically trusting and loving person and the truth about human beings really saddens me; in other cases, I found joy in celebratory creations; and in still others I took my revenge (indulging the Sicilian part of my Sicilian/Calabrian roots) – consequences be damned.
There are several interlinked stories with the main character Francesca, where does that character come from?
Francesca is a composite of all I have been, thought, imagined, observed, and might have been, but Francesca is not Darlene. The closest Francesca ever gets to Darlene is probably in the story “The Question.” That young Francesca is keen and green, but what drives her youthful enthusiasm for her first real case is her love of a good story, not the law, not even the practice of law and cross-examination technique, though she is certainly curious about mastering the mechanics. This Francesca is a young woman, and very sensual. The imaginative leap that enables her to know the truth of what really happened between Edna and her brother-in-law, Frank Duvaliers, is only possible because the imaginative writer has been in the grip of just such a passionate physical relationship which makes no sense in one so cerebral. The narrator “gets it” because Edna is “the mirror of her own possibility.” And at some point, the romance falls away and the fiercely intelligent woman “loses the power to self-deceive.”
The least Darlene-like-Francesca is the narrator of “Lawyer By Day, Yenta By Night.” That Francesca is toughened, disillusioned, cynical, jaded. She eats nails for breakfast. I do not eat nails for breakfast.
Many of the stories give voice to the women’s perspective in a male dominated world. Was this important to you?
Yes. Call it a failure of imagination. Call it writing what you know. It’s the only perspective I know.
You’ve written both novels and short stories so well. How did you know this collection was interlinked short stories and not a novel?
Oddly, one of the editors of this collection as a whole, Sonia Di Placido, told me she thought the work was a novel, until sometime well into it, she went back and read the subtitle (Tales of Life, Law, Love, and Loss), and realized the headings were short-story headings and not chapter headings. She’s not the only reader to think it a novel. There was never any doubt in my mind that this is a collection of linked short-stories. Each of the stories is written out of a particular moment in time, or with a particular pre-occupation, such as “Betrayal,” or “Replevin,” seeking the return of that which belongs to you and which has been improperly taken; or how cases are closed without putting in every piece of available evidence, because in law there’s a “Ceiling Price” to truth. I know and the reader ultimately knows that these are linked short stories and not a novel because there’s all that space in between each of the stories, where the narrator has changed, and we don’t necessarily know what has changed her. Maybe in a novel you have to guide the reader more slowly through all of that. No, this is giving the reader small self-contained and wholly developed pieces of the puzzle. And there’s also the time over which these stories were written. Some of these pieces were written over 40 years ago. It’s only when putting this collection together that I realized this one had to go here, or there, and in this particular order.
Most of the stories in this book don’t always follow a linear plot line. Was that difficult to craft or did it come naturally?
I have a hell of a time with linear plot lines and with tenses. One of my editors quite insultingly set out the tenses for me, like a school teacher conjugating a verb. I understand tenses. It isn’t that. I believe in a kind of eternal present. By that I mean that sometimes the past is more present than the present, and sometimes the past overtakes the present. We have only this moment. Now. But sometimes the only way we understand things is in relation to what’s gone before, what’s past, and sometimes that understanding won’t occur until some distant time in the story’s future. So, we’re like dogs circling the truth, sniffing the ground for it. Except that when dogs do that, they’re wholly engaged with whatever smells are down there in the ground they’re sniffing and from which it’s sometimes very hard to pull them away. And I think humans are like that, too, always circling the truth, sometimes avoiding it, until it smacks us in the face. Maybe the way I lay out my stories is the way they happened – not chronologically – rather the way the realizations happened, sometimes dawning on the protagonist after-the-fact. So, this is why I sometimes put the past in the present tense. I hope it’s not too confusing. It’s a journey I make with the reader, with enough insights along the way to lead out of the darkness. I don’t want to be left there and I wouldn’t leave my readers there. Again, a huge part of my process is instinctual, and I think there’s a natural flow to the stories, present flowing into past, past welling up into the future – a kind of eternal present.
When do you know a short story is finished?
I have been told by one editor with whom I had the privilege to work (Barry Callaghan) that I am an “intuitive writer.” Is that what it’s called? I thought at the time. I embark upon a story with a vague sense of what it’s about. Sometimes, it’s just an image. In “Pick Up Sticks” it was the cleaners’ hangars in a tangle in the laundry basket that triggered memories of the game of pick up sticks played with the narrator’s little sister – a story that one of my readers has called “beyond heartbreaking.”
I know a short story is finished as intuitively as it has begun. I refer to this as feeling the proverbial penny drop, or like the gears of a bicycle changing and clicking into place as you climb the hill. There’s this unsettled and restless compulsion before that happens, where I keep going at the story, line by line, word after word, on walks, in the car, jotting down in my head, or on whatever scrap of paper happens to be around, then returning to the work as soon as I get home, sometimes taking the pages with me, shifting about the paragraphs, discarding, replacing, and then, all of a sudden and quite mysteriously, it all stops, the penny drops, and I have no further need to revisit. I let it breathe. I also read out loud continuously as part of my process – particularly the beginnings and endings. I know when a work has cadenced when I read it out loud. Reading out loud is integral to the process of knowing whether your story is resonating, whether it remains fresh with you, whether even you, its writer, are losing attention and when you are surprised. I love it when a story I know I have written, must have written for it to be there, continues to surprise me.
What is your favourite short story in the collection and why?
Parents are supposed to love all their children equally, but as children with siblings and parents we all secretly know that’s not the case. I confess “Pasta With The Priests (Miracle on Bond Street)” is my personal favourite in this collection. It contains a little miracle and the story itself is a little miracle. I prayed for this story. I had come through years of hell toward the tail end of my law practice in downtown Toronto – the only female partner amid 10 angry men. Resigning from that partnership after the death of our senior law partner was hugely traumatizing. It took enormous courage to walk away from what I’d built over 3 decades, but it was also the only choice I could make at the time, because the practice was quite literally killing me. And then I opened my own little practice as a sole practitioner and puttered along for three more years, and built back some of my self-esteem, and was actually starting to enjoy myself again when Covid hit. I realized that if I was ever going to do what I wanted all my life to do with total dedication and undivided attention, it was “now or never.”
I hadn’t actually written something whole and beautiful and completely new in what felt like years. I sat down at my desk and prayed for this story. I mean, I really prayed for it. And when “Pasta With the Priests” started to come, I didn’t stop, I just kept going, and it felt like it was coming from deep within me but also from outside and through me, as fast as my fast little piano fingers could catch it. I’m enormously grateful for this story and whatever force gave it to me. The buffing and polishing came later, but the original came as a result of a grace and delight for which I take no credit and maybe only comes once or twice in a writer’s lifetime. There’s a line in Chariots of Fire, the movie about the first Olympics after the Second World War, spoken by the very devout Olympian who would not run on a Sunday, where he answers his beloved’s call to give up the games, and join her in their professed purpose to go to China as missionaries: “God made me for China, but he also made me fast, and when I run I feel his glory.” I was a very good little lawyer for a long time, but I had done my time in the trenches of matrimonial misery and I’d hit the wall, and I was terrified of the implications of surrendering my license to practice, only to discover myself nothing more than a failed writer. In making the choice to surrender my license to practice, I had to make it irrevocable, so there was no going back. And I had to make it work. “Pasta With the Priests” was of vital importance to me. And writing “Pasta With the Priests,” I felt that mysterious glory, that grace. There are more and deeper layers as to why I love this particular story so much. It is the cornerstone of the Winners and Losers building. I’ll leave it for you to read the story and hope that it will reveal some of its mystery to you. It’s simple, but complex, if you know what I mean.
Did your Italian background play any role in the writing of this book?
My Italian background has played a part in everything I have written, including Making Olives and Other Family Secrets, Dying Times… There’s a story in Winners and Losers called “Toilet Bowl Blues” where the narrator describes the neighbour as “a jealous man, according to my father – jealous of my father’s success, jealous of my father’s building compared to his building, the Italian-proud upkeep, the family that grew under my father’s roof.” In “Betrayal,” fellow-articling student Margaret Meanie counsels Francesca: “You can’t wear slippers.”
Wearing slippers was as much a product of my Italian mother, her clean obsessed plight to save the carpets from dirt tracks when wearing street shoes indoors, as a preference for personal comfort. Instead, I was to wear my Lady Diana flats, at all times, to assume I would be under constant surveillance. Ever vigilant, I was to “dress for the enemy.”
In “Sins of the Father,” the child understands the real difference between his Grandpa Hamilton and his Papa Giovanni from the way they tell stories: “Grampa Hamilton’s stories changed every time he told them” whereas “the thing about Papa’s stories was the consistency. The fish didn’t become a moose.” That story, ultimately, is about integrity and how the absence thereof in the father can come home to haunt the child. On the other hand, you can read Winners and Losers and think there’s nothing Italian about it. It’s the common humanity you recognize, not the ethnic identifiers. But what I identify as Italian is the intensity. It’s in the blood. There’s no escaping it.
Do you have any advice for people trying to write short stories that are interlinked?
I have a confession to make. I didn’t know there was such a thing as “linked short stories” until I attended the 13th International Conference of the Short Story in English, and where a number of papers were delivered on Alice Munro in her Nobel year and heard talk of such a form. I had my Ah-ha moment and realized that is what I was doing with collections like Making Olives and Other Family Secrets and Stations of the Heart. I think of linked short stories as writing from an obsession – say, the way my late artist father did with his lupin series, painting field upon field of lupins in various contexts, east-coast gardens, along the sides of country roads, lupins upon lupins until he was all lupined-out. I don’t think you set out to write a collection of linked short stories. At least I don’t. I set out to write a short story about something I need to figure out or to get out of my system. And I get close to it. But then, it comes up again. Maybe like those flash fires that keep cropping up, just when you think you have it all under control. But what’s this? There it is, again, from a different angle. Again, with me, it’s more instinctual than deliberate. It’s only afterward, when I’m trying to shape it into a whole that I might realize the common threads that run through all the stories I’ve been writing over the past many years – the obsession.
What will your tenth book be?
I was actually writing Dying Times and Winners and Losers at about the same time, neck-to-neck, but then Dying Times took the lead and was published first. I’m currently at work on Closing Ceremonies (Tales of Abandonment, Betrayal and Consequence) and If This Were the Last Day. I have a feeling If This Were the Last Day may be book #10 – because of its urgency. In it, the mother addresses her son:
It’s just a matter of time and I want to live these moments as if they are my last. To wisely use this precious gift. I am one of the lucky ones, to be incarnate, enfleshed, to be here, at this place in time, from wherever I have come to where I may be going… The question I can answer is the you toward whom I direct my last words…. So, I have to cut the fat, get right to the bone, before I lose you, too, forever. My son.
This is the context. Similar to the structure of Dying Times, there’s a wisdom, or proposition, which is illustrated by a story (or parable), which is linked organically to the next in a kind of intimate modern gospel – mother to son.
On the other hand, Closing Ceremonies is a lot closer to being ready to go out to a prospective publisher. It’s me, the author, who isn’t yet ready to let go…
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