What do you do when your 6-foot-4 sixteen-year-old son comes home and tells you he never wants to go to school again for the rest of his life?
If you’re David Gilmour, you make this deal: the kid gets to drop out of school and stay at home without working or paying rent-if he watches three movies with you every week. (You, of course, get to pick them.) You spend three years on the couch with your son, watching movies.
Then you write a book about the whole thing, call it The Film Club and read the galleys-unseen by anyone except your editors and your son-at Harbourfront’s Enwave Theatre on Thursday, June 7.
“He was scoring single digits-and I’m not exaggerating-single digits on his report card,” recalled Gilmour. “I mean you-how do you get six [per cent] in gym?”
For his first non-fiction work, Gilmour initially wanted to write about how to get over women. “I’ve had a bunch of wives,” he said, “So I’ve had a lot of practice.”
"Well, what do you think about that?" he had asked his son. "I can sort of pick the top four, and I'll write about that. Or it could-it could be six or it could be eight. The numbers are there."
To which Jesse Gilmour had replied, “I don’t know dad, it seems to me that’s what all your novels are about. Suggesting that his father retire the subject completely, Jesse came up with the perfect topic: himself.
“I know there’s supposed to be a Q&A now, and I know these things can always be mortifying as authors stand there,” said Gilmour as he finished reading the first chapter of The Film Club. “So I have a question for myself. The question is: ‘David, what did your son think of the book when he actually read it?’
“Well that’s a good question.
“He was horrified, actually, and horrified as only a vain young man can be. Which is that it wasn’t so much the privacy of the information I revealed in the book, but there were strange things that distressed him.
“It’s like I took 2000 pictures of him over those three years and picked 200 of those photographs and put them in a book, and he, like any of us, found certain photographs and said, ‘Oh god, I look so terrible in that picture. You can’t let anyone see that. I’ll never get a girlfriend.’
“And I wanted to get this over too, so I showed it to his mother, and that was really like the Trojan Wars starting all over again. As a matter of fact, she confided to me, she said that she had entertained fantasies about mortgaging the house and suing me. After two or three hours of allowing her to say every worst-case scenario in her mind, we kind of arrived at a little bit of peace. That’s where we are right now, so I’m going to quit while I’m ahead.”
David Gilmour won the 2005 Governor General’s Literary Award for his novel A Perfect Night to go to China. Film Club will be released in Toronto in October.
