Zoe Whittall is a bestselling novelist and TV writer. Her novel The Best Kind of People was a finalist for the Giller prize and named Indigo’s #1 book of the year. The New York Times called her fourth novel The Spectacular “a highly readable testament to the strength of the maternal bond” and The Toronto Star called it “a singularly impressive piece of fiction.” She won a Lamda literary award for her second novel Holding Still for as Long as Possible, and the Writers Trust Dayne Ogilvie prize for her debut, Bottle Rocket Hearts. She won a Canadian Screen Award as part of the writing team for The Baroness Von Sketch Show. Her latest books are No Credit River (poetry/memoir), Wild Failure (short fiction), and The Fake (a novel). She lives in Prince Edward County, Ontario.
Zoe Whittall reads in Ottawa on Friday, March 28 as part of VERSeFest 2025.
Amanda Earl: In Ars Poetica, you mention that you read everything labelled autofiction, and you are drawn to autofiction as an alienated truth. You say it permits stories without villains. Were you consciously reading autofiction to try to figure out the rules or conventions? Can you talk about why the idea of an “alienated truth” was attractive or generative to you?
Zoe Whittall: I love autofiction mostly because I love style, voice, language, and character more than I like plot. I like a tightly plot driven TV show, I love a meandering thought bubble of a book. Give me a slim volume about a girl sitting in bed thinking about her philosophies or feelings and I’m all over it. But part of what I love about it is its implicit unreliability, and the sort of gossip-y or fake closeness of feeling as though you’re sitting beside the author when they’re at their weirdest and they’re telling you secrets. But no one is ever really telling you secrets. They’re offering you a sculpture, highly cultivated, polished and chipped away at, that only looks raw or like it has an organic, improvised quality. Every word, phrase, moment, in any good book is deliberate. If it was just blurted out and messy it would be like when you look at a bad painting but you don’t know why it's bad but you know it somehow. And the secret is that the composition is off balance. But I love the lie of autofiction. It feels close to what I like about the new narrative movement which was this raw, circular, rule-breaking literature that was often about sex and oblivion and queerness with these unwieldy and wild sentences that felt like you were just reading someone’s scrawled vulnerabilities. So alienated truth was the most concise way I felt I could describe what I think the best kind of hybrid, personal texts can aim for.
AE: Creative nonfiction and memoir have overlapping qualities. This book is described also as a memoir in prose poetry. Can you talk about your experiences in trying to label this work?
ZW: Ok so here is where I confess that I assumed creative non-fiction and memoir were one and the same? Is the difference that CNF can be more creative – i.e., loose with the facts and more story-like? It started as a book of mostly prose poems, and the more I worked on it the more I started to see a book length narrative arc. And then I started to think about the confessional element and how I might be able to be more overt about it.
AE: In your Ex-Puritan interview with Kailey Havelock about your novel The Best Kind of People, you write “I used to feel more comfortable in first person, and sometimes I still do.” Now you are using first person and writing something that is so clearly about personal experience. How did you get more comfortable with writing in first?
ZW: I feel comfortable in first and third for different reasons. Both have an intimacy that you can’t get with the other. Sustaining first for an entire novel is difficult in terms of the constraint of what you can know, but it is also roomy and had a depth you can’t always get in the same way with third. I like them both.
AE: This book is so readable, relatable, funny, biting, and raw with self-deprecating humour. As a comedy writer, I imagine you hone your craft for timing and knowing what is humorous for an audience. In the book, did you have to try to be humorous or is this just how you are? Can you edit humour or is it something that just has to flow naturally?
ZW: It's something that comes naturally to me whenever I’m wrestling with an idea or how to think about something. Certainly it’s a defense mechanism and also how I understand the world. I’ve also been working as a comedy writer for TV and crafting jokes while also writing books for about ten years now, so the instinct is hard to turn off. I definitely edit humor the same way I would any sentence, for rhythm and pay off and I think about how long a line is and whether or not the joke is too quick or too long.
AE: One of the areas of the book which impressed me was the constant engagement with its form, the metatextuality of it. You refer to it as a “book of ideas” (4) and “A poem is four hundred years of lesbian gossip” (10). You say that “form is content” (15). Content can be both the substance of a work and a state of mind. The form here troubles or queers the journal/memoir/poetic form by playing with it, such as you do in the prose pantoum (20) or by using techniques such as imagery and repetition which hybridizes prose and poetry. You mention Dodie Bellamy and the New Narrative and mention that you were inspired by it? Can you give some examples of how it inspired you? Did it help you tackle ways in which to approach an unreliable memoir, for example?
ZW: I was thinking about something Dodie Bellamy said in an interview about how the new narrative movement was big on telling not showing. I think that unlocked something in me while writing this book, to stop being afraid of defining the genre and being fixed in any which way. I was, am, very influenced by that worlde of mostly queer avant garde writers who were unafraid to break with the conventions of the time, who wrote about shame with humor, sexuality, and dying – very much influenced by aids and the conservatism of the 80s, I imagine. The kind of confessional zine era I started writing in, those movements were in conversation with each other. New narrative writers were so daring on the page with what looked like confession but was highly artful and audacious, using real names and real events, but twisting and subverting it all. I returned to Kathy Acker and Gary Indiana and Gail Scott while writing the book, I was looking for permission to really go wild after a few years of writing fairly conventional novels, form-wise.
AE: There are vivid details in the book. Is writing a journal or diary part of your everyday practice or something you did to work on this book?
ZW: I journalled obsessively
in my younger years but I haven’t been consistent about it in a long time. So
some of the details I’m looking back on are from photographs or are just
particularly memorable, others start as a sensory detail from a journal and then
I expand on them or make them more stark or interesting.
AE: What is it like to read the book to an audience? Are there certain parts that you don’t read or wish to avoid reading? Are you surprised at what people laugh at?
ZW: I mostly read from the ars poetica and any of the poems with humor because they work better out loud. Especially since I started writing for comedy shows and doing some stand-up, I’m most comfortable if I can make at least a few people in the audience laugh. There are certainly poems I don’t think would work from the stage.
AE: In some ways, the book could be a handbook for the broken-hearted, especially in its reference to transmasculine and femme butch relationships, which as you mention is rare. I love the idea of writing the book you wish to see in the world. I feel like this is a book I wish to see in the world, including the wisdom you share and its hybridity. I am grateful to you for sharing your grief, your heartbreak and your experiences as a writer. Do you think you will play with this unreliable memoir, prose poem format again? How does it compare to writing fiction for you?
ZW: Thank you! I will definitely write more prose poetry. I love the form. I love a long line and small stories pushing up against imagery and comedy and fragments. I’m not sure if I’ll ever be explicit about writing memoir again. Depends on what happens in my life, I suppose?
AE: Can you achieve an objective distance from your writing at the editing stage when you so closely write about grief and heartbreak?
ZW: I think so, or you can close to it. And then you have the gift of an objective editor who can remind you what is artful or what the interesting idea might be that you’re wrestling with, and then what is the diary stuff that can be cut to make the work better and real.
AE: You mention that your ex will hate the book but will never read it (51). Did you feel you had to be careful in how you depicted him in the book?
ZW: Yes. The book is about me and my grief process, I offer very few specific details about him and I did that on purpose bc it felt like the ethical thing to do. As a reader I love the gore of gossip and confession but as a writer I can’t help but always think of the real people I love and have loved and their feelings.
AE: “There’s the way I live and the way I want to live.” I feel like this could be a refrain for queer people and their lives, that feeling of having to fit into some concept of heteronormativity that is shoved down our throats through film, tv, etc. Do you find models for the way you want to live in art, literature and film and do they act as solace or reassurance? Today, given the rise of homophobia and transphobia and removal of rights, especially in the USA, do you feel like your work might help queer and trans people feel less alone?
ZW: I’m not sure. I’ve certainly heard from a lot of readers so far who have felt seen in terms of the specific kind of heartbreak devastation that can happen when you end a relationship with someone who was very push-and-pull emotionally, where you feel caught in a kind of addictive cycle. It’s a strange, surreal kind of dynamic, not quite like regular heartbreak or grief because there is an added feeling of such utter confusion for which way is up or down. The line about the way I live and the way I want to live was for me about the things you say and believe about who you are in relationship and how you’re getting by, and then the truth of those most sorrowful moments.
The rise of transphobia right now is so terrifying. I feel like I can’t even make sense of how bad it is getting every day. I feel like we have to prepare for war and I’m not being an hysterical leftist overstating harm, I really do feel like it’s a new era and I’m very scared.
AE: I appreciated your inclusion of the details of the literary life: awards, artist retreats, toxic CanLit, struggles to write, responses to fan mail, etc.
ZW: I couldn’t write about the last ten years of my life without mentioning the strangeness of life as a full time writer within this particular world of Can Lit. So many things happened all at once, and it was a very exciting time but in some ways any artist’s career has extreme ups and downs. It mirrored the relationship in a way. So there was chaos everywhere. And I dislike reading memoir by artists where they leave out the day to day practical details of being an artist.
AE: “I can’t choose safety as an artist…” (71) Did writing and publishing this work help you work through your grief and heartbreak and did it make you feel unsafe? How do you cope with such feelings?
ZW: I’m not sure if it helped me cope, but it did help to write a story of it all.
AE: “My feelings were so big I was stumbling through our life together, a messy chaos monster.” (51) I think a lot of people will relate to this book and I appreciate your sharing your stumbles. Thank you for writing no credit river and for being willing to be open about your experiences.
ZW: Thank you, Amanda! Looking forward to seeing you in Ottawa.
Amanda Earl (she/her) is a writer, editor, mentor, reviewer, publisher, living on the unceded territory of the Algonquin Anishinaabeg Peoples. Hire her as an editor or literary event organizer. Her latest book is Beast Body Epic, a collection of near-death long poems. More info: AmandaEarl.com. Linktr.ee/AmandaEarl
