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Victoria-based Susan Sanford Blades's debut novel, Fake It So Real (Nightwood $21.95) takes on the fallout from a punk-rock lifestyle -- the future of "no future" -- and its effects on the subsequent generations of one family. It follows Gwen, a gnarly Nancy Spungen lookalike, who meets Damian, the leader of a punk band in 1983. Seven years and two unplanned pregnancies later, Damian abandons Gwen, leaving her to raise their two daughters, Sara and Meg, on her own. The novel then covers the next five decades of the lives of Gwen and her daughters. Sanford Blades' novel won the 2021 ReLit Award in the novel category and was a finalist for the 2021 BC & Yukon Book Prizes’ Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize.
Sanford Blades received an MFA in creative writing from the University of Victoria.
BOOKS
Fake It So Real (Nightwood 2020) $21.95 9780889713888
[BCBW 2021]
**
REVIEW
Review by Alexander Varty
Although most of its action takes place in a downbeat world of dingy clubs, cramped apartments, and squalid camper vans, Susan Sanford Blades's Fake It So Real, ends on a strangely upbeat note.
At a wake.
A wake, more specifically, for former punk-rock singer Damian Costello, whose disembodied foot has washed up on a beach somewhere in the Salish Sea.
And at this wake the mother of Costello's children, Gwen, has uncharacteristically taken control. Snapping out of her book-long trance of agoraphobia, alcoholism and need, she's climbed to the stage where her late partner's band has been shambling through its pre-show rituals and corrals the microphone.
"I am punk rock," she declares -- and so she is, in this glorious but long-delayed moment of sonic self-affirmation.
And although Gwen's creator downplays her own instrumental talents -- "I tried to play bass, or I did play bass for a bit in high school, but I don't think I'm a very musical person," says Sanford Blades in a telephone interview from her Victoria home -- music certainly played a major role in her own creative awakening.
"For me," Sanford Blades explains, "it's been about listening to music, and about feeling, and about the broader social messages with music. I came of age in the '90s, so for me it was riot grrrl. That was my big thing, and it meant a lot to me, especially as a teenage girl -- just how these women who were just screaming about everything, all these things that you encounter and you don't know how to react to. Like older men staring at you in the street… All these things that are just starting to happen now that you're becoming a woman. So, to have all of these women older than me who'd dealt with it and were screaming about it, that was really empowering for me.
"For me, music is definitely a way of connecting with the world, and of feeling your own power," she adds. "Like reading books, too: it's a way of feeling a connection with somebody else who's going through the same thing as you, or connecting with a character that you can see yourself in."
Although the power of music to both liberate and seduce animates Fake It So Real, which takes its title from grunge icon Courtney Love's song Doll Parts, it would be a mistake to consider it a "punk rock novel." It's more a novel of family dysfunction centred around the always contentious mother-daughter relationship, and it also touches on the psychologically crippling effects of economic precarity and addiction.
Gwen, who's trying to raise her daughters Sara and Meg on a coffee-shop waitress's income, self-medicates with vodka while the kids find their own means of escape: Sara by splitting town without looking back, and Meg through education, as she pursues a degree in gender studies. Both repeat their mother's romantic mistakes by hooking up with feckless men -- but for them, at least, there is some future. Gwen, however, takes the "no future" ethos of punk rock literally -- not as a call to shape one's own life outside society's lines, but as an excuse for surrender.
Sanford Blades's unflinching treatment of her older protagonist might suggest that she's working out some of her own mother-daughter issues in her fiction, but the author says that's not entirely the case.
"People always ask if it's 100 percent my real life, and no," says the mother of three. "But yes, for sure, I started writing this book after I separated from my husband, which was almost ten years ago, so a lot of that went into these stories for sure. What I like to say is that the actual events that take place in the book are not real, but all the feelings in the book come from real feelings that I was experiencing or working through."
She allows, too, that she's had to clarify that point with her own parents. "A lot of these chapters were published first as short stories, and I remember [my mother] thinking that Gwen was inspired by her, and I was like 'How can you think that?'" Sanford Blades says, laughing. "Like, my mother is completely the opposite; she's very conservative, the opposite of Gwen. And I think my dad was kind of offended by the fact that the whole book is about an absent father. So, um… There's nothing of my mother in this book."
There may be more of Sanford Blades and her family in her next book, which takes place in her hometown of Edmonton, Alberta, during the very years that she was coming of age, listening to the riot grrrl sounds of Bikini Kill, and following the shocking revelations about sex killers Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka.
"I want it to be about female friendship, so it's about these two girls who are 18," she says, noting that she's already finished a first draft but will likely discard most of it. "As I was writing it," she continues, "I wanted the main character's mother to be absent in some way, and I thought 'Oh, she'll be adopted.' And now, as I write the second draft, it's becoming a novel about a girl trying to find her birth mother."
Zine culture, toxic masculinity, sexual awakening and the cult TV show My So-Called Life also figure in the as-yet-untitled book, Sanford Blades reveals, suggesting that even if there really is no future, the past can still be mined for fresh revelations. 978-0889713888
Alexander Varty is a musician and writer living on unceded Snuneymuxw territory.
Sanford Blades received an MFA in creative writing from the University of Victoria.
BOOKS
Fake It So Real (Nightwood 2020) $21.95 9780889713888
[BCBW 2021]
**
REVIEW
Review by Alexander Varty
Although most of its action takes place in a downbeat world of dingy clubs, cramped apartments, and squalid camper vans, Susan Sanford Blades's Fake It So Real, ends on a strangely upbeat note.
At a wake.
A wake, more specifically, for former punk-rock singer Damian Costello, whose disembodied foot has washed up on a beach somewhere in the Salish Sea.
And at this wake the mother of Costello's children, Gwen, has uncharacteristically taken control. Snapping out of her book-long trance of agoraphobia, alcoholism and need, she's climbed to the stage where her late partner's band has been shambling through its pre-show rituals and corrals the microphone.
"I am punk rock," she declares -- and so she is, in this glorious but long-delayed moment of sonic self-affirmation.
And although Gwen's creator downplays her own instrumental talents -- "I tried to play bass, or I did play bass for a bit in high school, but I don't think I'm a very musical person," says Sanford Blades in a telephone interview from her Victoria home -- music certainly played a major role in her own creative awakening.
"For me," Sanford Blades explains, "it's been about listening to music, and about feeling, and about the broader social messages with music. I came of age in the '90s, so for me it was riot grrrl. That was my big thing, and it meant a lot to me, especially as a teenage girl -- just how these women who were just screaming about everything, all these things that you encounter and you don't know how to react to. Like older men staring at you in the street… All these things that are just starting to happen now that you're becoming a woman. So, to have all of these women older than me who'd dealt with it and were screaming about it, that was really empowering for me.
"For me, music is definitely a way of connecting with the world, and of feeling your own power," she adds. "Like reading books, too: it's a way of feeling a connection with somebody else who's going through the same thing as you, or connecting with a character that you can see yourself in."
Although the power of music to both liberate and seduce animates Fake It So Real, which takes its title from grunge icon Courtney Love's song Doll Parts, it would be a mistake to consider it a "punk rock novel." It's more a novel of family dysfunction centred around the always contentious mother-daughter relationship, and it also touches on the psychologically crippling effects of economic precarity and addiction.
Gwen, who's trying to raise her daughters Sara and Meg on a coffee-shop waitress's income, self-medicates with vodka while the kids find their own means of escape: Sara by splitting town without looking back, and Meg through education, as she pursues a degree in gender studies. Both repeat their mother's romantic mistakes by hooking up with feckless men -- but for them, at least, there is some future. Gwen, however, takes the "no future" ethos of punk rock literally -- not as a call to shape one's own life outside society's lines, but as an excuse for surrender.
Sanford Blades's unflinching treatment of her older protagonist might suggest that she's working out some of her own mother-daughter issues in her fiction, but the author says that's not entirely the case.
"People always ask if it's 100 percent my real life, and no," says the mother of three. "But yes, for sure, I started writing this book after I separated from my husband, which was almost ten years ago, so a lot of that went into these stories for sure. What I like to say is that the actual events that take place in the book are not real, but all the feelings in the book come from real feelings that I was experiencing or working through."
She allows, too, that she's had to clarify that point with her own parents. "A lot of these chapters were published first as short stories, and I remember [my mother] thinking that Gwen was inspired by her, and I was like 'How can you think that?'" Sanford Blades says, laughing. "Like, my mother is completely the opposite; she's very conservative, the opposite of Gwen. And I think my dad was kind of offended by the fact that the whole book is about an absent father. So, um… There's nothing of my mother in this book."
There may be more of Sanford Blades and her family in her next book, which takes place in her hometown of Edmonton, Alberta, during the very years that she was coming of age, listening to the riot grrrl sounds of Bikini Kill, and following the shocking revelations about sex killers Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka.
"I want it to be about female friendship, so it's about these two girls who are 18," she says, noting that she's already finished a first draft but will likely discard most of it. "As I was writing it," she continues, "I wanted the main character's mother to be absent in some way, and I thought 'Oh, she'll be adopted.' And now, as I write the second draft, it's becoming a novel about a girl trying to find her birth mother."
Zine culture, toxic masculinity, sexual awakening and the cult TV show My So-Called Life also figure in the as-yet-untitled book, Sanford Blades reveals, suggesting that even if there really is no future, the past can still be mined for fresh revelations. 978-0889713888
Alexander Varty is a musician and writer living on unceded Snuneymuxw territory.
