Novelist Emma Richler is seated in her publisher’s office. She is feeling at ease with her status as a fresh face in the world of fiction. “I have one primary urge, and it is to write.”
Her first literary effort, Sister Crazy, was a collection of interlocking short stories that can be read separately or together as one longer narrative. The book centered around the fictional Weiss family, and Richler decided to pick up the thread and use the middle child, Jem, as a narrator again in her first novel, the recently released Feed My Dear Dogs. Richler found that drawing on her own family for the tale was “like a springboard.”
“I used exactly the same structure as my family. Which was actually a very handy framework because it was like borrowing your clothes… and I can fill in the person that I’ve invented.”
The involvement of the Richler clan does not end there. Yes, she is the daughter of Canadian literary icon Mordecai Richler, and some of her siblings are involved in writing (brother Jacob currently does time as a food critic for the National Post, and brother Daniel works for cable channel Book Television and has written a novel), but it took some time before Emma was bitten by the writing bug. While many would assume it was her father who guided her into writing, it was in fact her mother who gave her the initial encouragement she needed.
“I finished the first chapter and I gave it to her to read,” says Richler. And she said, ‘I think you should take this to your father.'” One of the things that impressed Mordecai was his daughter’s keen understanding of the mind of a child.
“My father said that I have an uncanny ear for children’s voices,” she recalls. “I don’t know where it comes from; it’s probably best I don’t know.”
Maintaining a connection to her childhood through fond memories has served Richler well. She offers, “Memory by nature is very immediate, which is one of its ironic qualities. It teaches us how subjective time is.”
One of her favourite memories includes watching westerns in her father’s native Montreal.
“I actually used to watch westerns with my dad… It became a sort of mutual language and I think that in my imagination, that is the writer’s process-that the enjoyment I had with my dad affected the character of Jem.”
Of all the westerns she saw, the 1953 film Shane has remained her all-time favourite. One can draw comparisons between the film and Richler’s novel-they both feature a protagonist forced to choose between two worlds. For the central character of Feed My Dear Dogs, it is a choice between her mother’s Catholicism and her father’s Judaism.
Says Richler of Jem, “She does an awful lot of exploring and she worries about being compromised, and she will never consider herself one thing unless she has explored it.”
Richler has done her own share of exploring, and her decision to stick with writing brings her to the end of this journey.
“Ideally I want each book to be a better achievement than the one before,” she says. “You want to be brave, want to go deeper. That’s the only driving thing I have.”
With such a strong literary lineage behind her and her own unique creative voice emerging, Richler may have her work cut out for her, but has clearly found her niche.
“I don’t want to do anything else.”
