Q&A with Lori Lansens

As with Canadian writer Lori Lansens’ previous books, Rush Home Road and The Girls, The Wife’s Tale (Knopf Canada, $30) is set in the fictional southwestern Ontario town of Leaford, which bears some resemblance to Lansens’ own childhood home of Chatham. In this new novel, Mary Gooch wakes up on the morning of her 25th wedding anniversary and realizes that her husband, Jimmy, has disappeared. A passive, depressed woman who has gradually become morbidly obese, Mary has never been anywhere beyond Leaford, yet she sets out to find Jimmy and ends up in the San Fernando Valley wearing her heavy winter boots and carrying only a purse. It’s a journey that, at least geographically, parallels Lansens’ own: Three years ago, she and her husband and their two children left downtown Toronto, where the couple had lived for 25 years, and ultimately moved to the Santa Monica Mountains north of Los Angeles.

Mary Gooch’s journey was inspired by your own uprooting....

I wouldn’t have written this book this way if I hadn’t made this big transition at this time in my life. I moved down here when I was 43, and I knew nothing but city life, so it was a very lonely time. I felt this hunger to belong. This world seemed so foreign, but baffling because it wasn’t really foreign; people spoke the same language, watched the same TV shows, read the same books, yet I felt very much on the outside.

What research did you do for this book?

It was much more intimate and anecdotal. Whether it’s the issue of her weight, her hunger, her loneliness, Mary Gooch faces things that all women feel — and not just women of a certain age. This book comes out of observations and conversations.

I felt it was very easy to slip inside her form. I felt a deep connection. And I’ve found that everyone knows and loves someone like Mary Gooch, not necessarily someone who is morbidly obese, but someone who struggles with weight or who feels outside of the general population.

Canadians have preconceptions about California, but Mary Gooch repeatedly experiences acts of kindness. Does that resonate with your own experience there?

This happened time and time again, where people were taking us by the hand and showing us the way in selfless and surprising ways. We live in a very small town, and it has that feel — a family-centred place, not unlike small-town Leaford.