How would you describe your relationship with Paris?
The book's a love letter of sorts, but that said Paris has often rebuffed my attempts to get to know it better. It is a mighty city, forbidding and proud. I imagined living there and putting distance, finally, between me and my mother. It was the reason I went so many times, to get away from the constraints of my home life. Paris was the mother I always wanted, nurturing me in the ways of art, beauty, sophistication and idea.
But funnily Paris, by making me feel like I wasn't worthy, that I wasn't good enough to be granted entrance into its fabled gardens of beauty, was ultimately the mother I did have -- exacting, reproving, cold to the touch.
How did you come up with the idea of writing a memoir -- and why Paris?
I never in all my trips to Paris ever thought I would write about them, but a few years ago, about five months after the birth of my second child, I contracted a rare illness that turned me almost overnight into a cripple. There I was, laid up on chaise longue unable to walk let alone board a plane. Maybe to amuse myself, or maybe to sum up my life thus far (there was no certainty that I would survive the disease), I started to travel back in time, inside my imagination, revisiting all the places I had once been, and might possibly never see again.
I thought of Paris, and realized that by remembering my times in Paris, I could recollect the person I was, and measure my growth through the years, see where my life's journey, in effect, had taken me. I also realized in that second that Paris had never been the same city twice in all my visits there, appearing different each time, because I had changed while away from it.
And so lying there with pen and a piece of paper I jotted down a sentence, something about Paris mirroring my growth into womanhood, and serving sometimes as a friend in my search for meaning, sometimes as a foe, often making me feel unworthy of its beauty and claim to greatness. This made me want to explore the allure, thinking it might ultimately shed light on who I am, vis-a-vis my relationship with this faraway dream of a brilliant city. A story to leave for my kids, in the event that they'd want to know who I was, as well.
You're a well-seasoned writer. How was writing the book different from your usual writing for newspapers and magazines?
I am an experienced writer, but of daily journalism, and not memoir. After more than 24 years at the Globe and Mail, I had become used to a certain way of writing that was good at hiding the real me in service of a story. I realized that I had become jokey and glib, in effort to hide the real me from a reading public. So I had to learn a few new tricks in writing this book. I had to unmask myself, and be honest and and self critical and unafraid of how I looked or sounded. And that was hard.
What was most surprising to you in writing the book?
I worried that the book would come across as narrowly chick lit, whatver that really means. It's a woman's journey, only in the sense that I am female and it's my experience. But I wanted the book to be humanistic journey as well, and that men are loving it tells me that I might have achieved my goal.
What's next -- will you write another book?
I am dying to write more books, and have a couple of proposals before my publisher right now, both non-fiction. But there's fiction in me as well... so stay tuned!
Read more about Deirdre Kelly's memoir, Paris Times Eight or buy the book at Indigo.ca
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