Author Post: Frances Greenslade reveals her inspiration for SHELTER

Posted by Victoria Pepe in Book News, Guest Posts

On 2 February, Virago published a wonderful debut novel, Shelter, about two young sisters from Northern Canada who are left to fend for themselves when first their father dies, and then their mother leaves them.

Here, Frances Greenslade gives us an exclusive insight into her inspiration for this spellbinding novel.

The iconic Canadian writer Margaret Laurence’s novel The Diviners has the quality that I value more than anything else when I’m reading: each detail pulls me deeper into the world of the story.  At some point, I forget I’m reading a book and instead I’m there with Vanessa in the imposing old brick house in a lonely prairie town. One of the backbones of Margaret Laurence’s writing was her view that our lives are governed by the myths of our culture and our ancestors. Sometimes we’re conscious of the myths and at other times we live by them without even knowing they exist. In Shelter, I wanted to explore the myths that can guide us, but also those that can trap us. And some of the oldest and most profoundly affecting myths are about our mothers.

I first wrote Shelter after my own mother died. I was twenty-four and shocked by her absence and the gap that it left in my life. I was really adrift in the years following her illness and death. I remember a friend commenting that I looked different. It was true that I’d been so shaken by the loss of her, I had trouble dressing myself. What did I used to want to look like? What did I used to care about? I think now that it wasn’t only the fact of her death that shook me. It was also that I was on the cusp of adulthood and I felt a deep sense of guilt that, through her illness, I’d been unable to focus on anything other than what I was losing. I hadn’t been able to see her as someone other than my mother, a woman with desires and dreams that had nothing to do with me.

When I wrote the first draft of Shelter, Maggie’s perspective as a bereft daughter dominated the story. Something was missing; maybe I didn’t have the distance from my own loss to be able to write about Maggie’s. Years later, I was drawn to the story again. I’d become a mother myself and understood something about the myths that mothers have to labour under, the burden of our culture’s idea of what makes a “good mother.” I started writing again from scratch. Maggie and Jenny, the sisters who’d caught my imagination years earlier, were still there. Their loneliness, probably the most primal kind of loneliness, still interested me. But Maggie also begins to feel something else: compassion for her mother, Irene, and a growing understanding of her, separate from her dutiful role as mother.

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