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sarah hampson: the interview

In her house in London, Ont., Bonnie Burnard landscapes her garden from the inside out.

"I don't care what it looks like from the curb. I landscape for the view outside my window," the author says, laughing.

And why not? She works from the inside out, too - from that first thought, her imagination begins, and then a book finds its way out.

Not only that, everything in her life emanates from the domestic world, from the chair where she likes to sit to look at the trees in her garden - her writing, her happiness and the themes of her two novels, A Good House , which won the Giller Prize 10 years ago, and her new release, Suddenly .

"It's the way I live," she says, when asked why her literary imagination draws on the intimate circles of home. "Aside from my regular life with friends and family, my working life is solitary. What I watch and see is these intimate relationships. … And part of living is noticing each other's gestures, wanting each other's gestures, watching each other's gestures, being threatened by each other's gestures."

Suddenly is about midlife - the imminent death of the central character, Sandra, from breast cancer, and her husband, her female friends, their mates and their children. Ms. Burnard had a bout with breast cancer in 1997, while she was writing A Good House , and understands well the need for a support system. "In my private constellation, we all sit in our pattern, and part of what holds the constellation together is knowledge, an awareness of what's happening," she says. She drew up a list of the friends she wanted to contact about her medical situation, but not because she expected or needed their help. "Just knowing keeps the tension of what holds the stars in place."

At 64, with snowy-white hair and small glasses, and dressed in the bright floaty clothes of midlife, Ms. Burnard looks like a kindly grandmother, drinking tea in the corner of a Toronto café. In her large purse, she has an assortment of remedies - an asthma puffer, Advil. But listen to her talk, and quickly it becomes clear that if she is interested in knitting anything, it is sentences. "There are a million verbs to use, and a million nouns," she says. "It's making something."

The craft is private and never weighted with expectation, she says. "Most Canadian writers, myself among them, simply assume that we will write our books, and if lucky, get them published. … It's an adjustment to have numbers and numbers of readers, and also the money that came."

She had not fully assessed the financial risk she was taking when she turned to writing full-time as a divorced mother of three children who were then headed to university. Still, she knew enough not to talk about it to her late father. "Are you able to make a living?" he would have asked, she recalls. "And I would have had to say, 'No.' Having educated me and raised me, it would have been a disappointment [to him]" When she was nominated for the Giller in 1999, she didn't tell him. The morning after she won, someone phoned him to say his daughter's picture was on the front page of the National Post. "What's she done?" he asked.

She immediately signed a new contract for another book. But Suddenly took longer than anticipated to complete. She started with the idea of unexpected death in midlife. "Death, when it strikes the young, is shocking and rare, almost obscene. A boat accident or hideous child abuse. And at the other end [are]grandparents or great aunts. They have lived a full life; had their careers and their families. That's what they have left. But there's this other kind that will begin about now at my age." That thought led to her wondering how people cope. "I am not interested in a work where everyone fails. That wouldn't hold my attention. I'm interested in the ways people do adapt to circumstances and to each other and to themselves."

The challenge came in how to structure a book that tackled all kinds of emotional attachment. "I wanted friendship. I wanted marriage. I wanted the lives of these women a little bit before they knew each other. I wanted motherhood. I wanted her death. I wanted the aftermath of her death." Ms. Burnard usually spends 10 per cent of her time on structure and 90 per cent on writing, but this time, it was the inverse.

She had begun her writing career with short stories, when her children were young, and she lived with her husband in Regina. "I began right after my son was born. He is 30," she says. Her two other children were 1 and 3 at the time. "With a short story, I could go into that other world, without leaving my life for great lengths of time."

Still, she never felt creative frustration over the limitations imposed by motherhood. "I would give up writing a thousand times for my kids," she says. "My kids are absolutely the thing in my life."

Even now?

She looks at me, startled by the suggestion that they might not be.

"Absolutely. Just the fact that they exist and they've grown up to be interesting and funny and strong, each in their own way."

Now, when she writes from her office in her empty-nest home, she never feels lonely. She writes all day and sometimes into the wee hours when it's going well. It's a place that feeds and shelters her imagination, and in turn, she takes care of it. With money from the success of A Good House , she redid her kitchen. When something needs fixing, she immediately calls a handyman.

"I need that kind of order, because writing is very much disorder," she says, peering through her glasses. "I need perfect order before I can go into that sort of chaos of possibility."

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