Part of TDR's feature on Toronto Books: Spring 2008

Toronto writer Maggie Helwig’s latest novel is Girls Fall Down (Coach House, 2008).

She has published six books of poetry, two books of essays, a collection of short stories and two novels, Where She Was Standing (2001) and Between Mountains (2004). 

A human rights activist as well as a writer, she has worked for the East Timor Alert Network in Toronto, the Women in Black network, and War Resisters' International. She lives in Toronto with her husband and daughter.

(Interview by Leanna McLennan - March 2008)

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MH: I'm not sure it's so much that I was aiming to create a particular kind of portrait; though I guess it's almost taken for granted that I have a pretty dark sensibility, so it was going to come out as a darker and more strange Toronto than some others might create. But I was really just trying to work with some of the things about Toronto that interest me, and places that have particular meanings for me. Something like the Out of the Cold program for the homeless at the church on College Street isn't there so much to make a specific point as because it happens to be a major part of my own life in the city; though it is also about ways that people live together, how the city as a social body succeeds or fails.

But there are also things like the PATH or the Cloud Garden that are just in there because they intrigue me on some aesthetic level or other. Honestly, the Cloud Garden is there because I think it's pretty, and it's kind of neat that there are these pretty hidden parks tucked in around the city that a lot of people don't even know about.

I did also want to incorporate some bits of our civic history that don't get much attention. There are chunks of the book that are flashbacks to 1989, which was really an overheated year in many ways. Not everything gets in, but there was a lot of political ferment on many levels, there was a bit of an explosion of local indie music, there was the impending end of the Cold War, and at the end of the year there was the Montreal Massacre; it was a strange time. 

It was also -- and this is what I focused on in the novel -- the year that Operation Rescue really went after the Morgentaler Clinic in a major way. I was living right near the clinic at the time, so I was one of the first people on call for clinic defense during the blockades, and it was quite dramatic, a very significant period for the whole pro-choice movement, and it's in some danger of just sliding out of sight. So I wanted that in there, along with the bands that were playing Sneaky Dee's back then and the whole feel of that time. It was tempting to include a lot more of 1989, and there was much more in the early drafts, but ultimately I did have to discipline that a bit.

I suppose that public transit comes into it partly because I can't drive, so that's just how I get around and how I see things. But it's also got something to do with Toronto as a civic entity that actually does work quite well much of the time, despite some large failures. It's significant, I think, that we do have pretty good public transit here, and you see a reasonable class and ethnic range among the people who are on it, unlike some US cities. As for the particular significance of subways…

LM: Why the subway? Why a pandemic?

MH: One of the early germs of this book was reading Haruki Murakami’s Underground, which is a series of interviews with survivors of the Aum Shinrikyo sarin attack on the Tokyo subway; I was fascinated with the way the story emerged in pieces from the different interviews, and with the strange eccentric human ways that people reacted to a catastrophic event. But I was also really struck by the cover design, which had a map of the subway superimposed on a human body. I've always worked very much with the idea of the city as body, the social body (body politic), and that design really evoked the role of the subway as a kind of circulatory system for that body.

So there's a whole symbolic relationship that emerges between human illness and the urban problematic; the "poisonings" move through the subway, and then into the rest of the city, the way that blood moves a whole variety of chemicals through and into the body. And so you have Alex, whose life is controlled by the need to regulate the level of glucose in his blood, and you have Derek, whose neurochemistry is its own catastrophe, you have the whole issue of how our biochemistry relates to what we think of as personality and identity, and then you have these girls, and this fainting that's going on, and this thing that may be poisoning or sickness or simply fear, and the blood tests that keep coming up inconclusive, and it's all moving through the systems of the city. Maybe when the "real" illness emerges in the narrative it's a kind of crystallization of these things, on some level.

The other thing about subways is that Toronto is a city that really has a lot going on underground, or at least below ground level. Philip Marchand wrote a piece in the Star a little while ago about Toronto literature as defined by the subterranean. He's quite right, I think. The ravines are absolutely central and characteristic in the literature of Toronto; the PATH system, the subways, these are all important in the imaginative Toronto, in a way that they're arguably not in the imaginary lives of other cities.

LM: Initially, I was drawn in by your representation of political issues in Girls Fall Down. Then, when you mentioned your interest in theological issues, I recalled your vivid use garden imagery: the girls smell roses before they faint; people visit community gardens; one of the characters lives in a ravine; and, of course, the girls are falling. Could you say more about the theological aspects of this novel?

MH: People tend to be very aware that there are political underpinnings to my writing; they tend not to notice that there's also a lot of theological stuff going on (I have always thought that I have a theological mind rather than a philosophical mind, in the end). This book, I discovered as I was working on it, is in some ways a reflection on ideas about the Fall, which I think is really quite an interesting story with a fair bit of symbolic value, though it's certainly been badly used at times. 

What I mean is, I'm playing with ideas about what it means that we are creatures (and as far as we know, probably the only creatures) who have both a conscious awareness of our own mortality, and an ability to act with deliberate evil intent; in the terms of the Bible story, we have eaten the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. What do we do with that, and what does it mean that we do wrong, conscious wrong, that we want to be good and yet seem to be propelled in flawed or evil directions by forces that are inside us, and yet out of our control? Where does this come from? Neurochemicals? Something we call original sin? Is there a bright-line difference?

One of the other interesting things about the story of the Fall in the Bible is that Eve is really the decision-maker, and yet it's always, traditionally, been treated as Adam's story. Eve gets treated more as a kind of animal and vaguely sexual force. One of the things I'm trying to do is look at these questions with women as the moral decision-makers; for good or ill, all the important decisions in the book are made by women and girls, it's women and girls who are grappling throughout with the knowledge of good and evil and how it plays out, how you make choices, how you shape your life. Women and choice; which makes it nearly inevitable that the whole issue of the Morgentaler clinic is going to enter in, but of course there's many more choices than that going on. The men are pretty passive, overall; it's the women and girls who drive the narrative.

And they drive it in the face of a lot of very confused attitudes about female sexuality, some of which come from particular ways of reading the Fall. The whole femme fatale narrative that's so pervasive in our culture is really an Eve story, a particular type of Eve story about how all problems really stem from those sexy sexy ladies and their sexiness, and that's the filter through which Alex is reading Susie for most of the book. I think at the end he is starting to have some understanding of her as an independent moral actor who has her own life, not just where it intersects his life, her own desires that don't always align with his; though he's also coming to more and more of a sense of the inextricability of their moral lives, or their whole lives really.

The one explicitly religious figure in the book is a female priest; and then you have the girl who collapses in the subway, and her encounter in a garden with the knowledge of good and evil and how that relates to her emerging sexuality, and she's struggling to make some kind of sense of this, and that's having a ripple effect that really creates the entire story that I'm telling.

So, now I've pretty much explained the title, at least.

LM: The protagonist of Girls Fall Down is a photographer who takes pictures of sick people for a living but whose true passion is photographing the city. He is also losing his eyesight due to the advanced stages of diabetes. Could you talk about your choice to make the central character a photographer who is losing his sight?

MH: Yes, Alex's work as a medical photographer is another of ways I'm playing sickness imagery, body imagery, out through the narrative; and Alex as the photographer of bodies and of the city is one way of pulling together some of the themes I talked about earlier. As for Alex himself, the original decision was to make him diabetic, for reasons I've talked a bit about already. And maybe it's just this love of tormenting fictional characters that writers seem to have, so that when you have a diabetic photographer you immediately think, wait, one of the common side effects of diabetes is vision problems! Let's do that! That'll really mess him up!

So that's probably the order of the decision-making, but once I'd settled on that, it certainly had an effect on how Alex's character emerged; it explained some of his obsessiveness, some of his self-isolation. He's always felt sort of contingent or temporary -- which we all are, but he's more aware of it -- but the vision loss is obviously reinforcing that in a major way.

LM: You describe Alex as "part of that strange elite in Western society, one of the witnesses." He is very open to different kinds of people, yet there is "still always something between [him] the world." You simultaneously render this distance and bridge it with your compassionate characterization. Do you see an inherent distance in the role of the witness: the activist, the photographer, the writer?

MH: Well -- to some extent there's an inherent tension in the roles of people whose work is to capture and portray the lives of others. This novel is, in some small part, a tribute to a photographer friend of mine who died a few years ago, and that was a problem he was always wrestling with, how far the camera separated him from the real world, from engagement, and at what point you put down the camera and just react, or act.

But Alex has really pushed himself quite far in one direction. He's deliberately using the camera as a barrier, as a distancing mechanism, and he's actually inhabiting the tension rather less than he might, because he's put himself so much on one side of the problem. I wouldn't say that he's exactly "open" to people, actually. He's certainly accepting of different sorts of people in the sense of having neutrality about nearly everything -- he sees himself as an observer, an outsider, and he's quite non-judgmental in that role, but he doesn't really connect very much with anyone. He's interested in the outside world to the extent that he can make interesting pictures of it, but he's really sometimes astonishingly self-absorbed.

That's part of why Susie-Paul is such a disturbing presence in his life, because she's someone who can immerse herself in issues and in other people's lives, she's got a history as an activist and also a history of multiple complex emotional engagements. If Alex has exceptionally high and sturdy boundaries, Susie's problem tends to be in drawing appropriate boundaries at all. She's chosen to work as an academic studying an area in which she already has a direct and intense emotional involvement, she doesn't really segment parts of her life off at all, and that's another sort of problem, but it is part of what makes her both fascinating and frightening to Alex.

LM: A number of Canadian writers—Margaret Atwood, Dionne Brand, Russell Smith and many others—have set novels in Toronto. How do you see this novel in relation to other writers’ representations of Toronto?

MH: There's been a fair bit of Toronto literature recently, hasn't there? When I started working on this, I felt like Toronto was really underimagined; that's less the case now. But I don't think it's much use thinking about where I stand in relation to these other writers while I'm writing. Inevitably I'm going to have my particular Toronto as they'll have theirs.

It's not an easy city to write about, you know, and I think the subterranean nature of it has something to do with that. There's a kind of muffling and suppression to Toronto -- which, by the way, I think is not wholly negative, it actually has both good and bad aspects. But writing about mass hysteria in Toronto almost feels like an absurd thing to do, because we're ... not like that. Other places have mass hysteria. We have politeness. And I ended up with this really oddly restrained and subdued kind of mass hysteria which I think is frankly mysterious to people from other countries. 

So any novelist who's writing about Toronto is going to have to reckon with that burying and muffling, and how you make your way down to some of the underlying conflicts without falsifying the nature of the place. And I think you can see that in the other writers you've named, as well, though the underlying conflicts we're working towards are probably quite different in each case.