Holding Still for as Long as Possible (30 page)

HOLDING STILL
FOR AS LONG AS POSSIBLE

• • •

ZOE WHITTALL

BOOK CLUB QUESTIONS

HOLDING STILL FOR AS LONG AS POSSIBLE
BY ZOE WHITTALL

• • •

1. Billy is the character in the novel who most wants to hold still for as long as possible, and this approach certainly meets her need for calm rather than panic. Is this a possible or desirable approach to modern life? Why or why not?
   
2. How do you think the author balances plot and character?
   
3. Whittall provides many great descriptive passages, such as: “the sky was the colour of newly dead skin;” “beige carpeting, the kind that looks like overcooked oatmeal and feels scratchy like patches of old dog hair;” and “I could feel Desperation's presence in the room, hanging around me like a stifling, wet wool sweater.” What is your favourite description or moment from the novel?
   
4. Billy says, “Fame makes the whole world seem ridiculous. And stupid people love it.” How does this statement apply to her experiences?
   
5. How does Josh deal with the everyday emergencies of his job?
   
6. Why is a healthy relationship so elusive for the novel's characters? What are the keys to a healthy relationship?
   
7. What did you think of the four “Life” vignettes at the beginning of each part of the book? How did they add to the story?
   
8. Amy relates Josh describing “the majority of human beings [as] freeloading dirtbags.” Do you think this is how Josh really feels about people? Why or why not? What examples from the novel can you think of that support your opinion?
   
9. Was the accident unexpected to you as a reader? Why or why not?
   
10. Billy describes creativity as, “A messy tug-of-war with imagination to erase that feeling that nothing really matters anyway.” How well does this describe your own experience of creativity?
    

ZOE WHITTALL ON THE INSPIRATION FOR WRITING
HOLDING STILL FOR AS LONG AS POSSIBLE

• • •

In 2006, I had a vision of two young women on bicycles weaving around Kensington Market. They were bonding about being in love with the same person, after months of discomfort and jealousy. At that time, I was interested in the erotic possibilities of jealousy because it is such a passionate and uncomfortable feeling that hardly anyone deals with responsibly; all of that messy emotion and lack of accountability is bound to result in some boundary crossing.
Holding Still for as Long as Possible
began as a writing exercise after I'd handed in the draft of my debut novel,
Bottle Rocket Hearts
, and was trying to figure out what to do next.

I love neurotic characters. Billy, from
Holding Still
, was born in a series of first-person monologues about mental illness and how debilitating it can feel when we realize how little control we have over what happens in life. Billy was initially called Maddy, a name I almost always give to a character in a first draft. I first saw her sprawled out on a black-and-white tiled kitchen floor, having completely given up on the day. I decided she was one of the girls I had seen riding around Kensington Market in my vision earlier in the year, and that she would have to face her biggest fear at some point during the story. I wrote many scenes where she became more and more afraid of the world outside her apartment, and then a scene where she was hit by a bus. An entire first draft of the novel took place inside Maddy's head as she lay in a coma. Needless to say, that was a bad idea.

I wrote a roughly 150-page draft about the women on the bikes. Then two things happened that completely changed the manuscript: I fell in love with a woman who was working as a paramedic, and I began my MFA in Creative Writing at the University of Guelph. The manuscript shifted significantly during those years of study. The book became my thesis, and was ultimately published a few weeks after graduation.

But back to the paramedic: I was fascinated by her job. As an extremely risk-averse person, I could not understand how she functioned, witnessed, and was able to respond to chaotic situations and stay calm. We would plan dates, but she would end up writing me texts that said, “I'll be late for dinner. A guy stabbed himself in the stomach.” For a writer this was a goldmine. I knew then that Josh, a very slight character who existed only as a vague love interest for both Amy and Billy,
had
to be a paramedic. As soon as I decided that, the whole book changed. I spent a few years researching the job, speaking to dozens of paramedics and doing ride-alongs, building a world for Josh, Billy, and Amy that focused entirely on how these three different people approached the idea of courage, and dealt with their anxieties, or lack of anxiety, around mortality.

My characters were also somewhat influenced by the twenty-somethings I observed living and working in the Parkdale area of Toronto in the mid-2000s: a group of queer and trans people who were less uptight about identity than my generation had been. I spent very little time thinking about technology, hipsters, the Millennial Generation, gender identities, and sexuality, so it still fascinates me how much these topics came into the critical conversations about
Holding Still
. I didn't write this book hoping to capture a moment in time, or to say something about technology. If anything, I wanted to talk about the more timeless issues of anxiety and mortality and how three disparate characters deal — or refuse to deal — with life or death emergencies. But it is difficult for writers to write about young people without readers trying to figure out what kind of generational statement they are trying to make.

That said, there are plenty of books about young adults, men and women in their twenties, finding themselves, and they are reviewed as books about people, not as books about a certain marginalized community. Feedback I've received on
Holding Still
served to highlight how few literary works exist that feature characters who belong to the queer and trans communities. This is changing, of course, but it is still far more acceptable and marketable for a straight writer to write about gay or trans people — including a gay or lesbian side character, for example — and for those characters to teach “us” something about the “world” or “humanity” than it is for a queer writer to write about queer lives, and for that book to reach a broad, mainstream market. When this book came out, I was clear that I didn't want it to be marketed as a book “about a transsexual.” Trans characters are rarely allowed to just be regular people with stories of their own: their gender, their bodies, their childhood are always plot points, a source of fascination. I know that this book may have reached a bigger audience had I allowed it to be exploited as a book about a “‘social issue,” designed to “make us think,” but I'm glad that I didn't. There are enough of those books.

I had a trans friend read an early draft of
Holding Still
; he told me that he'd never seen his life, or anyone like him, represented in a book before. Never. This isn't a perfect book by any stretch, but I'm happy that it contributes to a small but growing body of literature that allows queer and trans people to be real characters, flaws and all. Perhaps I'm harping on trans marginalization in culture because I am writing this on Transgender Day of Remembrance. I've lost three friends in the last decade and I am thinking about them today. I'm hoping this afterword will seem ridiculously archaic in a decade, something that people will read and roll their eyes at. Fingers crossed.

Zoe Whittall
November 20, 2013
Toronto, Ontario