Susan Juby seeks dark, funny truths about families

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      A couple of years ago, Susan Juby was writing a novel that inadvertently drew on the life of someone she knew.

      “I got to the 200-page mark and I thought, ‘This isn’t right,’ ” she says now. “The longer I’m a writer, the more sensitive I am about using stuff that isn’t necessarily mine. Or that I haven’t cleared.”

      The manuscript, “about a young woman who’s just come out of prison and about a boy who’s lost someone in his family”, was abandoned. A new concept nevertheless emerged.

      “I thought it would be terrible if you had a sibling or a family member who took all your humiliating, weak, vulnerable moments and wrote about them,” Juby says to the Straight at a Kitsilano café. “And I thought you could make that even worse if the person also drew you in your hardest moments, in a misshapen way. I thought, ‘Well, that would be awful.’ And what if the person was incredibly successful and you didn’t feel like you could say ‘Stop! Unacceptable’? And so, that’s where The Truth Commission was born—it’s from this idea of a girl who’s being ground up by her sister’s storytelling.”

      Presented as a school assignment by Normandy Pale, a student at the fictional Green Pastures Academy of Art and Applied Design in Nanaimo, B.C., Juby’s seventh novel for young adults tracks Normandy’s escapades with her friends, Dusk and Neil, who form the Truth Commission, a club committed to “asking people, very directly, the truth about open secrets”.

      Early on, the 16-year-old Normandy observes, “There are the truths found in books or films when some writer puts exactly the right words together and it’s like their pen turned sword and pierced you right through the heart. Truths like those are rare and getting rarer. But there are other truths lying around, half exposed in the street, like drunken cheerleaders trying to speak. For some reason, hardly anyone leans down to listen to them.”

      Their pursuit of certainty is braided with the novel’s other plot line, which involves Normandy’s sister, Keira, the graphic novelist behind a best-selling series that riffs on the Pales’ flaws. Having left college in California and mysteriously moved home, Keira gradually discloses to Normandy why she’s returned; burdened by a vow of secrecy, Normandy seeks to explore the disturbing revelations, and eventually unites with her cohorts to run surveillance on the increasingly elusive artist.

      When “you start getting honest about what the problems are in families, sometimes the families, they suffer,” Juby says. “There are consequences for some big truths, the ones that are hard to tell, and I wanted to reflect the complication.”

      Informed by the narrative techniques of David Foster Wallace and Junot Díaz, the text is studded with footnotes that highlight the quirky sensibility that has garnered Juby nominations for prizes as diverse as an Edgar Award and the Sunburst Award for Excellence in Canadian Literature of the Fantastic. The idea for illustrations came as the protagonist developed, and they were provided by Trevor Cooper, a former student who’d taken a few of Juby’s writing classes at Vancouver Island University. (“That’s one of the things I love about the book, is that I can point to Trevor’s stuff and say, ‘Look at that.’ ”)

      The Truth Commission arrives after the February release of her second novel for adults, Republic of Dirt, a follow-up to her 2011 book The Woefield Poultry Collective, which was shortlisted for the Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour. Juby was thrilled to reinstate Woefield’s cast, a motley crew on a ramshackle Vancouver Island farm, and wrote Dirt while editing the current novel. “It was very exciting to write about a person who is 10 or 11, a man who’s in his 70s, people in their 20s,” she says. “I just enjoyed writing about their concerns, because they are different than coming-of-age concerns. That was very entertaining.

      “And those [Woefield] books were all written with four first-person narrators, and my favourite thing is voice,” she continues. “That is the thing I am most engaged with as a writer, is how do I create this voice and sustain it? And how do I investigate who these people are?”

      Since her 2000 debut, Alice, I Think, part of a series that was adapted for television in 2006, Juby has employed comedy to address outsiders and identity, familial dysfunction and community. This approach extends to her 2010 memoir, Nice Recovery, which describes her teenage struggle with drugs and alcohol. “My books have always had the humorous element,” she says, “but there’s a darkness underlying a lot of that stuff.”

      Droll recollections here tether considerations of charged sibling relations and ruthless creative production. The members of the Truth Commission are “convinced that the world is too full of lies and phoniness and falsehood”, but does truth, on and off the page, really lead to freedom?

      Juby herself was once “very excited to learn all the nitty-gritty truths about everyone and everything. And as I got older, there were things I didn’t want to know anymore.…I go through life now wishing I didn’t know things, thinking, ‘That’s too much, I wish I didn’t know that.’

      “I want to know the truth about who I am and how I tick—and truth is important as a form of self-expression and a form of self-understanding—but that hunger for other people’s truths is no longer with me.”

      She adds, laughing, “Although I am a greedy, curious writer—so maybe it is a little bit.”

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