Today Open Book talks with Lynn Coady, author of The Antagonist (Anansi), as part of our IFOA Interview series. Also the author of Mean Boy and Saints of Big Harbour, Lynn Coady writes a weekly advice column in the Globe and Mail.
IFOA: Ontario is the International Festival of Authors' touring component, bringing authors from IFOA’s roster of the best contemporary writers from around the globe to a number of Ontario locations.
Open Book:
Tell us about the book from which you will be reading at IFOA Ontario.
Lynn Coady:
The Antagonist — it’s about an angry guy named Rank writing emails to a long-lost friend from his university days. The friend has published a novel that Rank happened to stumble across, only to discover a version of himself from 19 years ago — a self he’d hoped to have buried permanently in the past. He’s freaked out to see himself and his past laid out so imperfectly and, he thinks, unfairly in his friend’s novel, so he starts writing to his old friend, now perhaps an enemy, to set the record straight.
OB:
To what aspect of the IFOA: Ontario are you most looking forward?
LC:
I’m really looking forward to drinking beer with other writers I admire; particularly hoping to meet Gary Shteyngart, whose work I’ve enjoyed for a long time.
OB:
Tell us about a favourite spot or area in Ontario.
LC:
Downtown GTA! It has always been my favourite place to walk or cycle because it is so teeming with people and style and food and fashion and architecture and colour. I’m a particular fan of in and around College Street.
OB:
What is your favourite part of touring?
LC:
Introvert answer: Staying in hotel rooms.
Extrovert answer: Meeting new people, readers and writers alike.
OB:
Tell us about a favourite book set in Ontario.
LC:
Pretty much anything by Alice Munro; I also like the gothic Ontario depicted in Greg Hollingshead’s The Healer.
OB:
What is your writing environment like?
LC:
Untidy.
OB:
What are you reading right now?
LC:
Riddley Walker by Russell Hoban, The Bear Went Over the Mountain by Alice Munro (taking it a little at a time because I find it too sad), Push by Sapphire, The Guilt Project by Vanessa Place.
OB:
What can you tell us about your next project?
LC:
It’s entirely embryonic right now, but I think it’s going to revisit a couple of characters from Saints of Big Harbour, and it’s going to have a lot more female characters than my previous novels.
Lynn Coady is an award-winning author, editor and journalist. Her previous novels include Saints of Big Harbour, which was a national bestseller and a Globe and Mail Top 100 book, and Mean Boy, a Globe and Mail Top 100 book. Her popular advice column, Group Therapy, runs weekly in the Globe and Mail. Coady is originally from Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia, and is now living in Edmonton, Alberta.
For more information about The Antagonist please visit the Anansi website.
Buy this book at your local independent bookstore or online at Chapters/Indigo or Amazon.
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