In the lobby of Anne Giardini’s house in Vancouver hangs a familiar black and white publicity photograph of her mother, the late novelist Carol Shields. The image of a blonde, vibrant and happy Shields, taken before her catastrophic breast cancer diagnosis in 1998, floats above another photograph, propped against the same wall. This one, of a young woman with her head turned away from the camera, is the cover illustration for Giardini’s first novel,
The Sad Truth About Happiness, just published. She puts this juxtaposition of images down to the sort of haphazard piling up that occurs in most households but admits: “I’d love her to see my book.”
Actually, though, Giardini is glad that her mother, one of the world’s best loved and most successful novelists, won’t be exposed to the inevitable comparisons that will accompany the book’s launch this month. “If I get a bad review, she would be very defensive and protective of me, as I became of her in the last bit of her life.” In the bleak times of her mother’s dying, Giardini refused to discuss Yann Martel’s Life of Pi in her book club because it had beaten Unless for the Man Booker Prize in 2002.
Shields wasn’t just the Pulitzer prize-winning author of The Stone Diaries and a stack of other novels, plays and essays, she was beloved as a wise and humane writer who celebrated the ordinary and made the quotidian universal. Her last novel, Unless, made the top ten list of Britain’s best loved books written by women, a list that included Shields’s own favourite, Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. It’s hardly surprising that Giardini feels quite “daring” about throwing her own first novel out there in the marketplace so soon after her mother’s death in 2003.
And yet, many elements of The Sad Truth About Happiness will remind readers of Shields’s conversational writing style and preoccupation with domestic issues. The title refers to the transient nature of joy and how happiness is always tinged with sadness. “We have rare fleeting moments of bliss, but then it evaporates like the mist,” says Giardini. “We are biologically triggered to always be on a quest for happiness. Otherwise you would be completely satiated and you would never get off your butt and have sex again and have more babies.”
The novel is about Maggie, the middle daughter of an eccentric pair of bicycle-riding, pacifist librarians in Vancouver. Maggie is thirtyish, single, and known in her family for “contentedness”, a polite term for passivity. She slumbers through life, worrying more about the happiness of her demanding and narcissistic sisters than her own career or love life. Between boyfriends, and working as a mammogram technologist, Maggie’s life is jolted when her roommate Rebecca, a freelance writer of lifestyle quizzes, tests her on a questionnaire about longevity.
By answering “not completely” to the question “Are you happy right now?” Maggie’s lifespan projection plummets to three months — a prospect that concentrates her mind and propels her into taking charge of her life, or what she fears is left of it, with mostly disastrous and often funny consequences.
Although Sad Truth is meant to be a comic novel, it has serious underpinnings in Giardini’s own life and in conversations with her mother about the exclusion of women from power and literature. Giardini, the second of Shields’s five children, remembers precisely when she realised that her stay-at-home mother was a writer. It was the mid-1960s, they were living in Ottawa, and Shields had just won a poetry competition. “I was about four or five and I was lying on my back on the kitchen floor. She was standing up and we were both listening to her voice reading her words over the radio. It just seemed like absolute magic.”
Giardini went on to become a lawyer, married an accountant, Tony Giardini, had three children (Joseph, 16, Nicholas, 13, and Sofia, 10) and established herself in the executive suite of Weyerhaeuser, a multinational timber company with worldwide net earnings last year of $1.3 billion. As head legal counsel she is responsible for negotiations with native groups over timber rights in richly forested British Columbia.
She and her mother both made a success of career, marriage and family, so their conversations about misogyny were based not on a personal sense of discrimination but their observations of the world around them. When Giardini began her articles in a law firm, she was “absolutely horrified” by the “down and dirty” Machiavellian machinations of her male colleagues. “It was so not the helping profession that I thought it was going to be.” Today she often goes to meetings where there will be one woman (herself) at the table and 16 or 20 men. “The media is not reflecting the absence of women,” she says, because so many journalists, directors and producers are women.
Ten years ago, when Giardini was 35, she feels she and her mother reconnected as adults who had transcended the hierarchical divide between mothers and daughters. “That seems late, but I was busy, and she was still raising my younger sisters,” says Giardini. By then her own three children had been born and she had begun writing a weekly column for The National Post. “My mother felt that 35 was when she became an adult too,” recalled Giardini.
Writing, reading, children and work brought them together in a new kind of relationship. Their shared love of Jane Austen’s novels initiated an e-mail correspondence for a joint research paper entitled “Martians in Jane Austen”. They took John Gray’s archetypes about men being from Mars and women from Venus and applied them to the characters in her novels. “It was such fun and I thought it would be the first of many such projects,” Giardini says sadly. Then she wrote an essay for Dropped Threads, the anthology that Shields and her friend Marjorie Anderson edited back in 2001. Entitled “Still Life with Power”, it examined women’s exclusion from “the discourse in the arts and in the machinations of the world”.
All of these topics developed a poignant urgency after Shields’s cancer was diagnosed. “I was always on the phone to her or my father or my sisters. We were talkers, of course, and we talked as though we could talk ourselves into a cure.” Whenever she has a twinge in her neck, that time comes “flinging back to me”, says Giardini, describing how she used to crook the phone between her left ear and her shoulder.
Some of those conversations, the ones about the nature of happiness and fulfilment, became the catalyst for both Unless and Sad Truth, although the novels are very different and a generation separates the narrative voices. Shields writes from the perspective of a mother of daughters, for example, and Giardini from that of a young woman who is drifting and who has not yet taken possession of her own life.
“We were talking about happiness because of Mom’s illness and whether she had had a happy life. Of course, she had and we talked often about what we thought was our shared gift for happiness,” says Giardini. “I have a number of friends who are unmarried for no particular reason and who have friendships and a rich life of the mind,” she continues. “They are overlooked in literature as well as in life and I wanted to write about that and the physical loneliness that goes along with not being in a couple in a couple world.” Her remedy was to write a novel in which women aren’t secondary to the plot, but are driving the drama.
How does she find the time to write anything, let alone a novel? She gets to work at 6.30am and is home 11 hours later. She loves her job. “If you had told me in law school that I was going to work for a pulp and paper company, I would have fallen down laughing,” she says. “But I found out I like to be practical, I like to know the foresters and engineers and I like the issues; aboriginal, environmental, social, which are at the crosshairs of life in British Columbia.”
Giardini admits that without very good childcare she wouldn’t be able to manage her life.
Focused and deadline-driven, she writes in “scrips and scraps of time” on her laptop at the ice-hockey rink or on the kitchen counter. She loves the computer feature that lets you count how many words you’ve written. “You have this real sense of incremental accomplishment,” she says with a laugh. “I’ll get half an hour on a Saturday morning easily and maybe an hour on a Sunday afternoon and in the evening I can sit on the couch by the fire with a cup of tea and the kids can swirl around me.”
In other words, she wrote the novel in the margins of her domestic life and I’m afraid it shows: like many first novels, it has an excess of plot and badly needs another draft to smooth out its inconsistencies. I’m surprised that Christopher Potter, Shields’s editor, gave her what Giardini describes as “a very light edit”. She never showed the book to her mother. “I was protective of it until it had reached a certain form and by the time I felt I could impose it on her . . .” she lets her voice trail off. Her trepidation about how Sad Truth will be received creases her equanimity, but she says, with a shrug: “I’m just going to have to tough it out.”
The Sad Truth About Happiness by Anne Giardini is published by Fourth Estate, £14.99, offer £11.99
