Maggie Helwig sits down with Dani Couture

Recently, Dani Couture sat down with Maggie Helwig to discuss her new novel, Girls Fall Down. In an interview that is featured on the Pages Books and Magazines website, Helwig reveals how she found a voice for her schizophrenic character, Derek: <!--newline--><!--newline-->DANI COUTURE: In your novel, you wrote intense dialogue for Derek, Susie’s schizophrenic brother who had disappeared off the grid. What was your process for fleshing out Derek as a character and finding his voice?<!--newline--><!--newline--> <!--newline-->MAGGIE HELWIG: Derek's a character I have a lot of emotional investment in; he's the heart of the story in many ways. But there are a lot of risks in writing about a character whose mind works in some ways radically differently; the risk of being exploitative, of caricature, of how you represent someone else's reality when you can't really experience it yourself—we don't really talk about appropriation of voice as an issue with writing about mental illness, but I think it's a real one. There's also the risk, and this has happened with some readers, that Derek will be dismissed as just this crazy guy, that they won't see his dialogue or his writing as something to be read as seriously as anyone else's but as some kind of crazy stuff that you can skim over. And if you read it that way, you're losing a huge part of the meaning of the story.<!--newline--> <!--newline-->As far as process goes, most of my direct experience with people who have schizophrenia is through my work at my church's meal program for the homeless and marginally housed. So that's a particular group, which doesn't represent everyone with major mental health issues by any means; it's a group of people who have minimal supports, and poorly-controlled conditions, which is also the situation that Derek is in. I do worry that I'm reinforcing the idea that all homeless people are schizophrenic and all schizophrenic people are homeless, and neither of those things is true, but there is a significant group of people who are both, and those tend to be the people I know, and I do spend a fair bit of time talking to them, so I have some familiarity with the way the voice operates, the way language operates, because schizophrenia is a condition that has a strong effect on how a person relates to language.<!--newline--> <!--newline-->To read the whole interview visit: http://www.pagesbooks.ca/features.php?type=feature&id=205