Just call her Hurricane Katrina. Most people would have their hands full with two young kids and a busy career as a pop culture pundit whose reach spans three different mediums (print, TV, online), but in the midst of it all, Katrina Onstad also managed to write a novel. And a sharp, funny, heartbreakingly lovely one at that.

The former National Post film critic’s debut novel, How Happy To Be, is the story of Maxime, a damaged entertainment writer for a neo-con daily in Toronto. Sound familiar? While many have assumed the book is a clear-cut case of art imitating life, Onstad, who went on to write for CBC Arts Online and appeared on Rogers Cable’s movie show Reel to Reel, notes that while the broad strokes are there, there’s plenty of difference in the finer details.

Originally from Vancouver, Onstad, 35, studied at McGill and honed her journalism skills at the student paper there before moving to Toronto a decade ago.

How Happy to Be was released in January, around the same time as a certain other local female newspaper scribe’s first novel came out (that would be Globe and Mail-er Leah McLaren’s much-derided The Continuity Girl), much to the delight of incestuous local media circles, but Onstad managed to stay largely out of the fray (though she did appear alongside McLaren at a reading that month at the Gladstone Hotel, which, for the record, was perfectly civil, disappointing curious attendees perhaps anticipating a catfight).

We caught up with the first-time author back in January over lattes at Bar Italia, where she waxed thoughtful about the craft of writing, her time at the Post, celebrity journalism, and the bane of the ‘girl columnist.’

Tabassum Siddiqui: How long did it take to write the novel?

Katrina Onstad: I say five years, but I wrote it around a full-time job, and in the last five years I also had two kids, so it’s been exhausting-like a marathon. I was [on a break travelling] in Asia at the end of 2000, and started conceptualizing it when I got back in 2001, and it’s taken me that long to finish it-about four years and then a year of editing. This book has sort of seen me through all these different phases in my life.

TS: And did you find it difficult, switching from journalism to fiction?

KO: This was the kind of writing I did my whole life-creative writing, fiction. And then journalism became a way to make a living-and it’s a great way to make a living. There was always this sort of split between the two sides, which are ultimately the same thing-they’re just about expression. You can’t make a living, or it takes a long time to make a living, writing fiction. It’s a really long trajectory.

And I kept getting distracted by other opportunities. I kept trying to leave my job at the Post-I’d be like, “I’m going to write a screenplay, I’m going to do this…” but then I would go do something and get pulled back in. When those opportunities are in front of you, those are good jobs, so I kept taking them. I think I just have to decide what kind of writer I am, ultimately.

TS: In the book, Maxime finds all sorts of creative-and borderline illegal-ways of trying to get fired from her job at The Daily. Did you actually attempt to get fired from the Post?

KO: No, I never tried to get fired! I think I was a very good employee, I never did any of those things. I would just kind of leave… I would quit, and then go back. It was a really good gig, I just wanted to do other things. But no, I never set a filing cabinet on fire or drank beer at work-except when beer was offered. (laughs)

TS: Do you think the Post is going to stick around?

KO: Oh, god, I don’t know… Man, I hope so. The more, the merrier, right? The more outlets for writers, the more voices, great. Everyone always asked me, “How can you work there?” like it was an arm of Al-Qaeda or something. But it’s a newspaper-we’re supposed to have lots of opinions floating out there, aren’t we? I never felt encumbered, and I got to cover a lot of what I thought was interesting, slightly edgier stuff.

TS: Clearly your experiences there inspired some of the material in the novel.

KO: I was working in the world of celebrity journalism-I didn’t have the job that this character has, thank god, because I think that’s a really rough job to have, the junket circuit-the serious, like, celebrity fellatio kind of thing. So I was rubbing up against this world-I would come out of these interviews at these roundtables, and it’s so funny-all these people like a bunch of kittens in a basket, angling for the question, and the questions that they do get out are so banal, and the celebs are so exhausted and overwhelmed… And then if you do get five minutes in a hotel room with Naomi Watts, you just feel so sorry for her that you almost don’t even want to ask her anything…

Most of [the book is] not really true, but the one thing that’s closest to my experience is interviewing Ethan Hawke-and it’s not like that interview was particularly memorable, except that the whole time he just seemed determined to be “down with the peeps,” and I admired it. I thought it was kind of sweet-he really felt he could be a normal person when it’s so obvious there’s such a machine functioning around him.

And while maybe in a parallel universe we might have been friends or something, it really wasn’t going to happen in those 20 minutes at the Four Seasons. And I came out of that interview thinking, “You know, we’re all people here.” And when you work so long in that world, you start seeing yourself as sort of a second-class citizen-everyone’s catering to these celebrities whether or not they’re asking for it, and we’re all so servile in their presence; it’s pretty repulsive after a while.

TS: There’s obviously the temptation to see your novel as a thinly veiled roman-à-clef-so really, how much of it is true to life?

KO: I don’t know… The professional dimension of course comes from my work life, but it’s an extrapolation, a version. But the other stuff, her background, is entirely fictitious. And the other thing I wanted to explore was this breakup, which is the other loss. And that’s partially from me, because I came out of one of those long-term relationships that spurred the idea of wanting to write it out.

I was interested in this idea of how most people by the time they hit their 30s in our very specific cultural milieu have had one of those long-term relationships that seems like a marriage, acts like a marriage, but it’s not really acknowledged as a marriage, so when it ends, there’s not really this space to grieve publicly the way you do when you say you’ve been divorced. But they’re heartbreaking-when those relationships end, it’s really devastating.

TS: I found your writing style, particularly the way you move between the very urban plot and the hippie West Coast backstory, very akin to author Douglas Coupland’s work, and sure enough, there’s a glowing blurb from him on the cover of your book.

KO: I couldn’t believe our fortune getting that quote-he doesn’t do that very much. It was such a blessing. I would love to have his readership-and it’s hard, because there’s a real temptation to position all new female authors writing about women’s lives as ‘Chick Lit.’ So when he wrote that lovely quote, I felt like I had been given a Get Out of Jail Free card, that it would be hard for them to put me on a table with all the pink illustrated covers with the martini glasses and the high heels, because that’s not his readership. On the other hand, if the martini-glass people want to read this, well, great. (laughs)

TS: Speaking of chick lit, one of your targets in the book is a certain type of female newspaper columnist-is the Allissa Allan character maybe an amalgam of, say, two certain Toronto ‘girl columnists’?

KO: Okay, I swear to god that character is not based on any particular person. That job-that kind of young, female columnist is something that almost every paper has, and I think she’s kind of a sympathetic character in the book, actually. I don’t think it’s great for women to ghettoize writing about trivial issues over and over. Everyone does it once in a while, which is fine; it’s fun. But I think it’s a waste of our writers. We’re missing an opportunity to hear what young women really think about the world. Because I know that a lot of these women are thoughtful-they must be thoughtful-and they’re not untalented writers, but the material is just vapid, and it’s been going on for far too long.

It’s a pale facsimile of Sex and the City circa 1998 or something. I don’t believe it could possibly be selling papers. I mean, all I ever hear is people complaining about that kind of stuff. I think it’s maybe comforting to a certain kind of older editor/publisher type who is content to see young women as sort of silly and unthreatening. And it’s a bit ‘porny,’ that stuff-they think it’s sexy even though it’s not really sexy or timely.

I think it’s toxic. I think it’s a danger. I don’t know why women higher-up at these papers don’t say something. There is an implicit pressure on young women to do this kind of journalism, that it’s lucrative and an easy way to make a name for yourself, to expose your inner self in a kind of voyeuristic manner. And I think that discourages progress in our industry.