Understanding A Novel

In an interview with Alan Twigg of BC Bookworld, Jane Barker Wright says that she's always wanted to write about an abiding, long-term relationship. It's a state that's commonplace in life, especially middle-life, but virtually absent in modern literature. She's more interested in the compromises, surrenders and shared experiences that keep people together than she is in the indifference and acrimony that pull them apart. At the same time, she became obsessed with a woman who could not stop having babies. The recognition of the end of the child-bearing phase is a poignant moment in many women's lives; even childless women reach a point when they realize that the baby option is no longer viable. Aging is about the gradual narrowing of possibility. With that poignancy in mind, Wright began to imagine Isobel Whitechapel. Wright then became fascinated by the logistics of raising a large family in Vancouver in the Nineties. How much milk, bread, peanut butter and toilet paper does the family need? Whose soccer game do you attend? Whose baseball game do you miss? How do you ever manage to pay for their shoes? By the time she'd finished the last draft, Wright was saddled with a family dealing with a huge, almost overwhelming, crisis. But meals still have to be cooked, concerts have to be attended, illnesses still have to be treated. Children expect a certain predictable regimen. 'I've always thought that parenthood is one of the big subjects,' says Wright, 'as big as war or love. If someone writes a novel about war, it's automatically endowed with a kind of gravitas because of the resonance of the theme. If a woman writes a book about motherhood, it's gently condemned as ''domestic'', as if the producing and nurturing of life is less monumental than the destruction of it. But the issues are the same: risk, power and lack of it, despair and hope.' Wright ends by saying, ''an ordinary life can be as gripping as an extraordinary one''.Wright, Jane Barker is the author of 'Understanding A Novel', published 2002 under ISBN 9780889842427 and ISBN 0889842426.