Author Billie Livingston entwines tragic elements of mercy in new novel

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There are many ways in which Billie Livingston mined real life – hers and others' – in crafting her new novel. From truth-can-be-stranger-than-fiction stories – ripped from the headlines and her own history – she wove together the stories of three people to create her new work of actual fiction, The Crooked Heart of Mercy.

In the novel, a married couple – Ben and Maggie – are bereft after the death of their two-year-old child. Ben, a limo driver, is racked with guilt and winds up in the psych ward with a terrible wound to the head. Maggie, a companion to elderly women, finds it impossible to continue working in her grief. She turns to her brother, Francis, for comfort. He's a priest – but he has problems of his own.

For Livingston, a respected author, the first seed for this story was planted with an assignment from Hazlitt for that website's Tabloid Fiction series – in which writers were asked to submit short stories inspired by trashy/lurid/bizarre stories in the actual news.

Livingston wrote one story inspired by an OxyContin epidemic in a West Virginia town. For another story, she was inspired by an article from Florida with this headline: "Teen shoots himself in forehead with rifle 'to escape from a nightmare after taking mushrooms.'" The 17-year-old, unable to wake himself from his hallucinatory state, shot himself in the forehead with a .22 calibre rifle – and survived.

A third element came from a tragedy in Livingston's own life – or at least, her background. About 10 years before she was born, her father and his then-wife had a little boy. When he was 2, he got up on the windowsill, fell out and died.

"That's always been in my head, that I would have this brother who would be 10 years older than me if he'd lived, and what do you do with that? How do you get over that? How do you get over the guilt and the horror and the self-loathing and everything that would go along with that?" says Livingston during a recent interview.

We're having coffee across the street from Kitsilano Beach in Vancouver, close to where she lives – and a place she often heads for walks when she's stalled on something in her writing. She was doing just that, wandering as she tried to unlock the character of Ben and how the different characters might fit together, when she had a brain wave. She took out her phone to voice-dictate her thoughts:

"Ben is sucked back through his own eye sockets, the eyes of the planet, the eyes of God. Falling through the air in a rush of embryonic sludge, he lands with a squelch," she said into her iPhone.

And Siri responded with only one word: "Family."

"I just burst out laughing and I went, thanks, sister," Livingston recalls, laughing again.

It was a key moment in bringing this novel, her fourth, together.

It's a difficult subject, the death of a child, which Livingston says was made probably a little less difficult because she herself is not a parent.

"You know, you feel this incredible compassion and sympathy for the idea, but I don't have kids so it's not as close to the bone or personally visceral as it would be, I think, if I had a child," says Livingston, 50. "My mother used to talk about how she couldn't stand it when I was under six months and there's still that soft spot on the head, she couldn't stand to even see anything sharp in the same room – a knife or anything. She couldn't get the picture out of her head of it magically flying off and going to this soft spot."

Another piece of real life that Livingston mined for the book (which is out Jan. 5) was her husband's experiences as a seminarian. Tim Kelleher was studying at a Washington, D.C., seminary to become a priest in the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church but took a leave and married Livingston instead. He's also an actor (credits include Inception and NCIS) – and they met on the set of a movie-of-the-week in Vancouver – Livingston was a stand-in for Michele Lee (best known for Knots Landing); Kelleher was playing a serial rapist.

Kelleher (who is also a writer and still has ambitions for the priesthood) had been at the seminary with someone who had significant problems with alcohol and went into rehab. Livingston and Kelleher visited him there – an experience that helped shape the Francis character.

Livingston has been inspired in her writing by her father's life before; her 2012 novel One Good Hustle, about the teenaged daughter of a petty-criminal hustler father who is largely absent from her life, borrowed heavily from Livingston's own relationship with her dad.

When I ask Livingston over our coffees whether she spoke with her father about her long-dead half-brother in researching this new novel, Livingston says no, they are not in touch.

I ask if her father was overly protective with her because of this tragedy with his son. She laughs at the question. "No, he's of the mind that when your number comes up, your number comes up. That's what he says."

She learned more about her half-brother from her father's ex-wife – but not very much; Livingston describes her as a tough nut to crack.

"I couldn't really get much out of her," says Livingston, explaining that she is no longer alive. "But in my mind, I would think of him sometimes. Nobody told me his name. My mother had told me this story and it's a very haunting idea that this little being just climbed up there and …" Her voice trails off. She still doesn't know his name.

In her novel, Livingston wanted to explore the idea of mercy. These were two essentially good people, devoted parents, who messed up one night. There was no malice. The negligence, one could argue, came from a sort of desperation to recapture what can get lost when young children join a marriage.

This is where the Oxy comes into the story.

"People smoke weed or they have some wine," Livingston says. "They do something just to kind of escape the slog of it, especially if you're really working paycheque to paycheque, the daily grind of trying to keep a kid clothed and fed and each other clothed and fed, the wolf from the door, really."

The worst kind of wolf shows up at Ben and Maggie's door and Livingston wanted to explore the possibility of mercy in that circumstance.

She explains that the word "mercy" comes from an idea of nursing wounds and comfort and healing. Livingston says when people say "Lord have mercy" in their prayers, many of them "have interpreted that to mean don't kill me, don't harm me," she says. "But what it's actually meaning is give me comfort, heal me, love me."