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Feb. 15 - Feb. 22, 2004 |
Smells like angry teen spirit
Mary-Lou Zeitoun's new novel 13 explores post-pubescent suburban angst
By Angela Baldassarre
Originally Published: 2002-04-07
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13 By Mary-Lou Zeitoun The Porcupine Quill, $14.95
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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."
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