Page 14 - Real Style August 2018

BOOKS
different points of view. You meet Billie Jean Fontaine, an outsider who enters the com- munity 17 years beforehand after falling from a stolen car, and whom the main plot re- volves around. Her husband is known in the community as The Heavy, a passionate man haunted by his past, and together they raise a daughter named Pony who wants noth-
ing more than to escape the life she’s been born into. Then just as suddenly as she ar- rives, Billie Jean vanishes one cold October night. As the community searches for her to try and find out why she ran, the pieces of the mystery start coming together, with one teen- age boy named Supernatural seemingly at the heart of it all.
CLAUDIA DEY
THE STUNT AUTHOR TALKS ABOUT HER NEW NOVEL, HEARTBREAKER. BY RODERICK THEDORFF
CLAUDIA DEY’S FIRST NOVEL, Stunt, came out in 2008 and was a critical success. Not only was it a finalist for Amazon’s First Novel Award, but it was also listed on the Globe & Mail and Quill & Quire’s book of the year lists. It was a great start to a promis- ing literary career. Then just as suddenly as she ap- peared, Dey seemingly vanished in the world of fic- tion. While she has kept busy with her fashion house Horses Atelier, as well as acting in low-budget hor- ror films, Dey didn’t release any new novels. Until now. Heartbreaker is set to be released on August 21, and it’s already getting a lot of advanced praise from critics.
Heartbreaker tells the story of a family and the remote northern town they live in, from three
Real Style: Where did you come up with the idea of Heartbreaker?
Claudia Dey: That’s always the most myste- rious question isn’t it? The book really started
with the image of Billie Jean tumbling from the open door of the slowly moving Mercedes sedan and then looking up from her and seeing that she was in the middle of nowhere and then writing the middle of nowhere, which became the territory. Most of the things that I write seem to start with a single inciting image and that was it for this one.
RS: Did you always know which characters knew what in terms of why Billie Jean ran?
CD: It came to me as I was writing and I knew that I needed it to function in a way like a crime scene and that they were all witnesses to the central event and that they would all have like different degrees of knowledge, which would increase as the book pro- gressed. So, you know, Pony only knows so much, and Gina knows more, and Supernatural knows the most. So it kind of takes us from the internal world
14 Real Style August 2018
PHOTOS, LEFT: NORMAN WONG