All About Y: An Interview with Marjorie Celona

by Beth Carswell

  Y: A Novel
by Marjorie Celona

Called compulsively readable, exquisitely rendered, evocative, ambitious, psychologically deft, even audacious - Y: A Novel is Marjorie Celona's first book. It was nominated for the 2012 Giller Prize, enjoyed several weeks on the Maclean's bestseller list, and has garnered widespread acclaim and applause from the critics. Not too shabby.
Y tells the story of Shannon, a newborn baby left outside the YMCA in Victoria, British Columbia. One might be tempted to say abandoned, but the word seems wrong, somehow, upon reading the character of Yula, the troubled young mother who makes the agonizing decision to leave Shannon behind. And the critics aren't just blowing smoke. The book is ambitious, exploring complex situations and emotions fearlessly, without relying on clichés, pat explanations or too-perfect coincidences. Nothing is explained away – it just is. Both villains and heroes are few and far between in the story, with Celona opting instead to create a rich cast of flawed, imperfect, multi-dimensional and understandable humans not soon forgotten. 
Least forgettable of all is Shannon herself. From the outset, her voice is strong and clear, and her humble acceptance of her lot in life, of finding herself thrust repeatedly into situations too adult for her age, is both painful and inspiring. The interwining stories of the two women see Shannon grow from her inauspicious start, through girlhood and into the beginning of womanhood, while letting Yula's life and backstory unfold alongside.

Throughout the story, Celona writes with little judgment and no flinching, and as a result of the refrain from over-emotional writing, readers are given the space to draw their own conclusions and understand the characters on their own terms, getting to known them an inch at a time as more of each is revealed.

Celona is a 31-year-old author living in Cincinnati, Ohio, but she was born and raised herself in Victoria, on Vancouver Island. In fact, she studied at the University of Victoria and did an internship with the literary magazine The Malahat Review, before moving to the U.S. and earning her MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop.
When I met Celona, it was at the Victoria launch of Y, which was coupled with the launch of another Victoria book, from UVic's own Bill Gaston, who read from his seventh novel The World. It was an impressive turnout in a large downtown pub, with eager lineups of attendees waiting to have their books signed. Celona was soft-spoken, but held the entire crowd rapt as she read from Y, laughing that she debated at length which passage to read, trying to avoid any references to sex or drugs as her family members were in the audience. She also paused mid-reading to address an audience member who sneezed: "Bless you."

Read on for an interview with Marjorie Celona, author of Y: A Novel .
AbeBooks: Details of the book are so vivid. How much of the book is autobiographical?
Marjorie Celona: Hardly anything, save for the cats and Winkie the dog—those were my childhood pets.  (Though the truth is we had five cats, not three.  But I thought five cats was sort of unbelievable—that’s the trouble with using autobiographical details, I think: they rarely ring true.)
AbeBooks: Much of the story centers on (protagonist) Shannon’s search for identity and belonging. Is that a theme to which you can relate?
Marjorie Celona: Sure. I’ve always felt like an odd duck, odd-man-out kind of thing. But the search for identity, not so much—I know my roots, where I come from, where my grandparents came from, etc.
AbeBooks: You now live far away from Victoria . Are your breathtaking descriptions of Vancouver Island in part because you miss it?
Marjorie Celona: I miss the ocean, particularly the stretch alongside Dallas Road, more than anything. Now I have to look harder to find beauty: the red cardinal in my backyard; the abandoned buildings of downtown Cincinnati overtaken by vines; the view across the Ohio River to the lush hills of Kentucky. It’s there, sure, but I have to go searching for it.
AbeBooks: What are some of your favorite books, ones you recommend to friends?
Marjorie Celona: Mona Simpson’s Anywhere but Here.  The Remains of the Day.  In the Skin of a Lion.  Bastard out of Carolina.  Unlikely Stories Mostly by Alasdair Gray. Anything and everything by Alice Munro.