Alan Reed on Open Book Toronto

Alan Reed recently spoke with Open Book Toronto about love, heartbreak and his new novel Isobel and Emile.

'Open Book Toronto: What inspired you to write this novel?

Alan Reed: I spent my 20's breaking my heart over and over again. Among other things, it's made me curious about all sorts of questions to do with mourning and loss and memory. Before writing this book I'd been working on a video installation that was partly built around a reading of Freud's essay "Mourning and Melancholia," and when it was done I felt like I hadn't entirely finished with everything that had come up while I was working on it. Sort of like I'd arrived at this gesture, for lack of a better word, this particular way of remembering, and I needed to let it loose in the world to find out what it could do.

So I sat down with it, I thought about it a while longer and realized I was sitting on the premise for a novel. Isobel and Emile represent two different aspects of that gesture, and there's an autobiographical element as well, just enough to bring the two to life, and I started to construct a world for them and as they settled into it there I was, in the thick of writing the book.'

Read the whole interview here.