Ann-Marie MacDonald Has Written Her Queerest Book Yet

Ann-Marie MacDonald’s work has always loomed large in my life, quite literally. Her 1996 debut novel, Fall on Your Knees, occupied a brick-sized space on my mother’s bookshelf. The “Oprah’s Book Club” sticker implied a level of commercial appeal, while its heft and biblical title added an intimidating sombreness. Only years later, when I read it myself, I would learn that it is a creaking manor of a novel, with dust that could pass for glitter in the moonlight, filled with winding corridors of family secrets, generational lore and a defiantly queer third act.

This summer, I received an advance copy of Fayne, MacDonald’s fourth novel. It came with a note: “Yes, I have written a book with a lot of pages. I am smiling as I type this, even though I know it is risky.” Fayne clocks in at 721 pages and fits right at home with two of her other works: Fall on Your Knees (566 pages) and 2003’s The Way the Crow Flies (820 pages). (2014’s Adult Onset, at 384 pages, was relatively slim by comparison.) In an era where our attentions are divided between push notifications and endlessly streaming content, she is unapologetic about building a world that audiences can linger in. “I love big books,” the note continues. “I think a lot of readers do too.”

“It is four pages shorter now,” she admits to me about the final edition of Fayne, out now. “I suctioned off descriptions here and there, and tweaked the order of things.” We’re sitting on the back patio of a café in Stratford, Ont. It’s a Sunday afternoon in August, and I’ve just caught a matinee performance of Hamlet-911, which was written by MacDonald and directed by her wife of 19 years, Alisa Palmer.

MacDonald got her start in the theatre, a fact that is immediately evident in conversation. She has a self-possessed way of speaking, often slipping into voices of different characters—Columbo, Bugs Bunny—to punctuate a point. (“‘Ah, just one more thing,’” she says, imitating Peter Falk’s TV detective, when describing her never-ending research process.) Born in 1958, in the former West Germany on a Royal Canadian Air Force station (a biographical fact she shares with Crow protagonist Madeleine), she trained at the National Theatre School of Canada. She’s acted on stage and screen, earning a Genie nomination for her work in the 1987 film I’ve Heard the Mermaids Singing. She is a prolific playwright, most notably writing 1988’s Governor General Award-winning Goodnight Desdemona (Good Morning Juliet), who then set her sights on prose, where her abilities to craft immersive worlds found a natural home.

“I’ve directed her as an actor, I’ve worked with her [on] theatre pieces, I’ve directed plays she’s written on her own and I’ve read drafts of her novels,” says Palmer, a frequent collaborator since the pair met at a theatre festival in 1987. “I feel like I’ve had the privilege of seeing her exploratory process from different points of view, but there are things that are similar no matter the form. There’s a kind of listening she does that I recognize actors doing: listening to voices that are in the world around us, the world of nature, and, like a divining rod, finding out the sources.”

“I admire Ann-Marie’s prose so much,” says Hannah Moscovitch, who co-created the upcoming stage adaptation of Fall on Your Knees with Palmer, and wrote the script. “The book is iconic. I read it when I was 19, and it meant a lot to me. We didn’t want to make the mistake of putting a book onstage; we tried to create a piece of theatre that would be, in its own right, masterful.” It’s a daunting task; the book was a smash hit, shortlisted for the Giller Prize and winning the Commonwealth Prize, in addition to Oprah’s seal of approval, among other accolades. The stage adaptation is a co-production between five theatre companies, a massive undertaking to support the sheer scale of cast and crew required to tell the story. As such, the play will, unusually, be presented in two parts—“a two-evening extravaganza,” says MacDonald—and will tour Halifax, Ottawa, Toronto, and London, Ont. in 2023. Adds Palmer, who will also direct the adaptation, “The book doesn’t need the theatre adaptation, but the theatre may need the theatre adaptation.”

Fayne is no less ambitious in scope, but it invites the audience into a more intimate space: the pure narrative voice of Ann-Marie MacDonald. It tells the story of Charlotte Bell (an homage to Charlotte Brontë and her male pseudonym, Currer Bell), a 12-year-old growing up on the cusp of the 20th century at Fayne, an estate on the border between England and Scotland. Sheltered and brilliant, Charlotte is kept from society due to an unnamed medical condition. Her world consists of a doting father, a handful of staff, a library of philosophical text and the sprawling wetlands that seem to have a life of their own. “This book harks back to when I was a kid and just wanted to live in stories,” says MacDonald, who first read Jane Eyre when she was “nine or 10” and was immediately hooked on the story’s gothic atmosphere.

Like all of MacDonald’s historical novels, Fayne is a richly imagined story anchored in a meticulously detailed setting. It unfurls into a multi-generational epic, taking us back in time to to meet Mae, Charlotte’s late mother, and explore the courtship of her parents. For research related to Charlotte’s condition, MacDonald visited medical museums in Edinburgh and Glasgow and spent months at the Osler Library of the History of Medicine at McGill University. She put on gloves and a mask, “long before the pandemic,” to browse archival materials and saw surgical instruments first-hand. She read journals and old books and letters—so many letters, mostly exchanged between aristocratic women. “They were works of art,” she says. “The way they would express themselves was extraordinary.”

It was important to bring the time period to life for the reader, to understand the food her characters were eating and how it sat in their stomachs, their experience of taking a bath and the texture of their towels, the feeling of their bedding, the stench of the city air. “It’s not enough to simply say, ‘Well, there’s the crunch of wagon wheels on gravel.’ It’s like, ‘Whose wagon? What wheel?’” Here, she goes back to her theatrical roots. “It’s like being responsible for set design, props, costumes, everything,” says MacDonald.

Charlotte’s “condition” is slowly revealed to the reader: She was born with an enlarged clitoris, what would now be recognized as an intersex trait, but mistaken then for a penis. Her father is waiting until Charlotte is older to have it surgically altered. “It’s not what I consider a spoiler,” says MacDonald. “It’s a normal human variation that has been pathologized to this day.” During the process of writing Fayne, she became acquainted with activists who are currently working to change the law in Canada, where clitoral reductions—also known as Intersex Genital Mutilation—are still legal.

Many people with intersex traits do not identify as LGBTQ+, though Charlotte does experiment with her gender identity. “I’m very sensitive and very aware to the degree to which that character could be fetishized and exoticized,” MacDonald tells me. She devoted herself to researching the character the way she would any other detail in her work. “I’m going to discover who she is and how she feels about her gender. And what does that mean, and how do you navigate through a whole long life like that? Especially when the deck is stacked against you.”

MacDonald has spent her entire professional life advocating for LGBTQ+ rights. She came out as a lesbian at 24 and was told in no uncertain terms by her parents that something was wrong with her. “Being judged to be inadequately female, it’s a short walk to somebody whose body seems to disturb people who want to police invented strict lines.” Her parents came around eventually, but that would take another decade.

Queer characters exist in MacDonald’s novels—showing up in the 1920s New York jazz scene of Fall on Your Knees and amid the Cold War paranoia of The Way the Crow Flies—because queer people existed throughout history. She credits the work of academics who document and preserve queer histories. Lillian Faderman’s Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers: A History of Lesbian Life in Twentieth Century America is a favourite. “Sometimes [lesbianism] was actually encouraged, because the belief was, ‘It’s going to keep my wife happy if she’s got her best friend,’’’ MacDonald says. Women didn’t hold any economic power, and their relationships with other women weren’t seen as a threat to the institution of marriage; as women made societal gains, the backlash to relationships between women grew.

LGBTQ+ characters are scattered throughout Fayne, which MacDonald calls her queerest novel yet. There is the “nancy boy” who Charlotte’s mother encounters, and the gender- nonconforming sex workers who frequent a pub in Edinburgh. MacDonald was inspired reading about a late 19th-century movement led by German writer Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, who advocated to repeal anti-sodomy laws. “I love seeing the beginnings of movements, where you go, ‘What? People were doing that then?’” she says. “Yes, yes, yes they were! And it was really exciting.” There are characters who struggle and face discrimination, but also, notably, who find community and love, who “were completely integrated and precious to those around them, and whom they cherished in return”

I tell MacDonald about my introduction to her work and of only learning of the radical subject matter of Fall on Your Knees years later. “I want a whole lot of different people, regardless of their lived experience, to enter in and take this journey, right?” she says. “So, it’s kind of a miracle when they do. When you list all the reasons why, ‘Gosh, it’s not a natural fit for my mom’s shelf, but there it is.’ That’s the magic of narrative. That’s the magic of literature. That’s the magic of stories.”