Smells like angry teen spirit

Mary-Lou Zeitoun's new novel 13 explores post-pubescent suburban angst

Life isn't easy for 13-year-old Marnie Harmon. Trapped in the hideous suburbs of Ottawa in 1980, this precocious but dangerously bright teenager dreams of killing her teacher, destroying Catholicism, losing her virginity and, most importantly, meeting John Lennon. Problem is, her friends don't understand her and her parents think she's crazy. If only she can put together enough money for a bus fare to the Big Apple, she'd be saved by her hero The Beatle.
"No, it's not biographical," laughs Mary-Lou Zeitoun, whose first novel 13, is being published this week by The Porcupine Quill. "But it's informed by fully formed moments of my life that turned into stories that really didn't happen to me. So I'll take a room, a person, a smell, and I'll turn it into something that may have emotionally felt like it happened to me or I may have wished it had happened to me. But most of the stuff didn't happen to me."
"John Lennon was the first sexy genius I fell in love with, but I never wanted to be dishwasher-blond Cynthia, I wanted to be Yoko. I'm certainly weird enough to be Yoko. I was even weirder when I was thirteen, the year I tried to kill my media studies teacher. The year John Lennon died."
Zeitoun, 35, who actually did grow up in an Ottawa suburb during the early days of punk and the latter era of disco, denies the similarities to Marnie but admits that she wished she was more like her. "Marnie is way meaner, way more focused and way more resentful than I was... Although my mother would disagree," laughs the Toronto-based author. "I wish I had been more able to take care of myself. I had a better family than Marnie Harmon.
I had a very strong happy family with four kids who were all very supportive of each other. She only has one inarticulate brother and two distant parents. And her mother is completely insane from Catholicism so she has no support. And that's what happens. And I guess the point of the book is you take a kid, you don't give them support, especially a girl, and you raise her in a religion that thinks girls are not as good as men. And what is she going to do? She's going to go nuts. You have to have communication, you have to have support. It's like a parable of what happens from the inside out as a girl goes from thinking she's a human being to realizing she's just a girl. She thinks she's just as good as anybody else, but as soon as she gets boobs and hips, she starts getting sexualized. And in our society hyper-sexualized."
"When I was thirteen, I lived in my room and I hated everything. I hated the suburb of Green Vista. I hated Ottawa. I hated my street. I hated my mother. I hated my ugly white, brick school, but most of all I hated my media studies teacher, stupid Mr. Carter who lived behind us in an ugly bungalow. I could see his room through a crack in my curtains from where I'd lie on my bed. He never closed his curtains so I always had to have mine closed. I wasn't missing anything. My window looked out on a dumb view anyhow. Nothing to see but other people's swimming pools and petunia borders. 'Marnie, don't be so Negative,' my mother always said. Mom would get mad at Anne Frank for being scared of the Nazis. She would think Anne Frank was being 'Negative.' "
So... did mom read the book?
"Yeah, she read the first chapter," says Zeitoun, a half-Irish half-Palestinian brunette beauty with milky-white skin and green eyes. "She's a little irked at the digs at Catholicism because it is her faith and it's been a very strong faith for her and it's really helped her in her life. But she knows damn well that she raised a strong woman and she feels proud of that."
A playwright by passion and an arts journalist by necessity who's contributed to this publication often, Zeitoun found completing her first novel a cathartic and invigorating exercise.
"Playwrighting is my favourite voice to write in, but it takes a lot of cooperation with a lot of people," she admits. "So I needed to do something that I could still write but that could be short and easy. So I thought I'd do a short story course and then I'd just do short stories. I thought that that would be really easy and simple, and I'd be able to write. Then I wrote the first chapter of 13 at the short story course at Ryerson about four years ago. And she just wouldn't shut up, this character. So I did the Humber Literary School and she kept talking for about 14 chapters!"
"We played spin the bottle, except the guys just pointed at who they wanted and ignored the bottle. I was sure I was going to do something stupid and embarrass myself and nobody would pick me. The other kids kept looking at me out of the sides of their eyes. Nobody was even laughing or joking. They were so cool, you'd think they played spin the bottle since they were two years old. Patrick pointed to me and I went to this furnace room with him. I could see Louise. She was squirming all over Tommy Schneider. No way I would ever do that. I put my face up to Patrick's and let him drool all over me basically. It was gross."
After four years of this 13-year-old girl inhabiting your every thought, one wonders how an adult woman can exorcise herself from her.
"I worry about my level of maturity," laughs Zeitoun. "I really do, because I've had a 13-year-old girl living in my head for four years and it was hard not to act like an adult. She propped up all the time. I started saying 'you suck' to people. But at the same I had a kind of playfulness and sentimentality that teenagers have. Y'know, she is too vivid in my head. It's like an actor getting too deep in her role. I'm kind of sick of her now and I want to shake her off, which is ironic because as soon as your book comes out you're sick of it and you're working on your next piece. My next character is 27 so I'm getting there."
Titled $400 and a Bottle of Tequila, the new novel centres on an ugly bookkeeper who's surrounded by beautiful people and who decides to charge for sex. And we thought Marnie Harmon had problems.
The book launch for Mary-Lou Zeitoun's 13 takes place Sunday, April 7 at the Horseshoe Tavern featuring music by Rocket Tits. 370 Queen St. West.

Publication Date: 2002-04-07
Story Location: http://tandemnews.com/viewstory.php?storyid=1158