Golda Fried has the Write Stuff

Golda Fried, author of the Governor General's Award-nominated novel Nellcott Is My Darling, was interviewed for the McGill News Alumni Quarterly for their feature, The Write Stuff. Read on, or visit www.mcgill.ca/news/2007/winter/writestuff for the story.

The Write Stuff
By Neale McDevitt and Daniel McCabe, BA'89

Canadian literature has never been healthier and some of the country’s finest authors have emerged from McGill

For the longest time, it seemed that whenever the subject of Canadian literature came up, the same names were bandied about. Atwood. Munro. Richler. Davies. Ondaatje.

Things have changed.

Canadian writers of substance are now almost legion. The best novels produced in Canada match up against anything authored anywhere in the world. Each year, when the finalists for the Giller Prize and the Governor General's Literary Awards are announced, a fierce debate typically ensues over the many good books that didn’t quite make the cut.

Some of the most exciting fiction being produced these days is the work of McGill graduates. Three of the last six winners of the Books in Canada First Novel Award, for instance, are McGill alums – Eva Stachniak, BA'88, Mary Lawson, BA'68, and Colin McAdam, BA'93.

They aren’t the only McGill graduates making waves in literary circles. CBC online journalist Katrina Onstad, BA'94, earned raves for her first novel, the acerbic How Happy to Be, while the award-winning Trout Stanley, by playwright Claudia Dey, BA'95, was described by the New York Times as a "deliciously lyrical piece of Canadian Gothic" when it made its Big Apple debut in mid-2006. Andrew Pyper, BA'91, MA'92, draws plenty of attention for his slick, brainy thrillers, as does Edeet Ravel, MA'86, PhD'92, for her poignant tales of love amidst the political strife of the Middle East.

Here are some McGill authors whose work we suspect you'll be reading – and reading about – for years to come.

Golda Fried

When Golda Fried, BA'94, left the composition class she teaches at a community college in Greensboro, North Carolina, one October day in 2005, she realized that her cell phone was clogged with messages. Her initial panic – "I thought someone had died" – gave way to joy when she found out that her book, Nellcott Is My Darling, had been nominated for a Governor General's Literary Award.

"I really didn’t think they gave them to books from small presses," she laughs. "I was in total shock. Even my publisher was surprised."

Given all the critical kudos garnered by Nellcott, the nomination shouldn’t have come as such a jolt. The Montreal Mirror described the book as "one of those rare novels that captures innocence without resorting to nostalgia," while the Globe and Mail hailed it as a "sensitive, sensual, funny and accurate map of the rocky and mystifying territory between childhood and maturity."

t's hard to imagine Nellcott being written by anyone but a McGill graduate, steeped as the book is in the day-to-day experiences of a McGill student in the '90s. Fried's novel tells the tale of Alice Charles, a naive and quirky young woman who leaves the warm and insular confines of her family home in Toronto to attend McGill. Living in residence, the neurotic newcomer is surrounded by a menagerie of fellow undergrads, all in various stages of self-absorption. Alice's Wonderland is turned upside down when she falls for Nellcott Ragland, the proverbial boy-from-the-wrong-side-of-the-tracks, who wears black eyeliner and works in a record store.

The 34-year-old Fried admits that reading a pair of coming-of-age novels (Leonard Cohen's The Favourite Game and Daniel Richler's Kicking Tomorrow) inspired her to try her own hand at the genre. Adhering to the adage "write what you know," Fried shares a lot in common with her protagonist – although the author admits that she condensed several years of her own experience into Alice's inaugural one. For starters, both are Torontonians whose fathers are proud, chest-thumping McGill alumni. And, like Alice, Fried arrived at McGill as a wide-eyed freshman, just 17 years old.

Fried is particularly adept at capturing the sights and sounds of residence life and the massive internal upheaval that many students experience when they move away from home for the first time. "Initially, I was really intimidated," she says. "I didn't have a lot of friends coming in."

Like her creator, Alice tries to meet people by becoming the secretary of the ill-fated Film Society, where members spend as much time arguing about which film to show ("You guys had to pick the most obscure Rolling Stones movie, didn’t you?") to the merits of serving Pop Tarts instead of popcorn.

And while shout outs to the Leacock Building and the Bifteck bar will be welcomed by alumni like old friends, the appeal of this girl-grows-up story is broader than that. "I think that anyone who's left home for their first year of school can relate to the book."

Currently, Fried is collaborating with illustrator Vesna Mostovac on a graphic novella. She admits that carving out opportunities to write can be challenging. "Unfortunately, I'm not very disciplined," she laments. "I don't think I do a good job of balancing work and writing. It would be easier if I was an insomniac, but I sleep a lot."