Live The Questions – Q&A for Big Girls Don’t Cry: A Memoir of Taking Up Space
The Carol Shields Prize for Fiction (CSPF): We are so happy to be doing the cover reveal for your memoir Big Girls Don’t Cry: A Memoir of Taking Up Space. Was it hard to get the right cover? What inspired the image of lemons?
Susan Swan: Covers are like posters for your book. If you don’t get it right, fewer people will buy it, so that’s why editors and writers sweat over what works and what doesn’t. One writer I know went through 25 different covers before they were satisfied. That’s unusual but you get the idea. My memoir is about a big woman writer (me) coming to terms with difference and taking up space so the cover had to suggest something original instead of predictable images of tall female bodies that don’t quite fit the book cover. I wrote a novel about the real life giantess Anna Swan and a lot of covers for this novel show images like that. So we wanted to come up with something new. I’ll leave it to you to figure out what the pink lemon means.
CSPF: How different is writing a memoir from writing a novel?
Susan: Not as different as you might think. Both forms dramatize and distill, so you need to write actual scenes instead of reciting a litany of events. I followed the same writing process that I use for a novel. Make notes; dictate a scene into my cell phone based on my notes; create a word document and revise endlessly. The big difference is the detailed way lawyers will check over your manuscript to ensure you aren’t compromising someone’s privacy. Although it’s rare, some novelists have been sued for defamation. Memoirs can be court cases waiting to happen.
CSPF: You said Big Girls Don’t Cry is about coming to terms with differences. Can you talk a little bit about that?
Susan: I was six foot two at twelve in the 1950s when women were supposed to be small and not heard. Things are somewhat better but very tall women still remain outside the norm. The novelist Jane Smiley recently pointed out to me that she and I are in the 99th percentile of North American women. We are one in 3000, in other words, and that means that others see us differently, and we see ourselves differently.
In the 1960s, I interviewed Femmie Smith, who used to sleep in a crib to try in vain to stop herself from growing, and who had four inches surgically removed from her thigh bones hoping it would make her more feminine. The Toronto doctor who performed the operation said he did it because she had been severely traumatized by her height of six foot two. Nowadays, a number of short men will request leg lengthening surgeries because they’re called derogatory names like “garden gnomes”, and short women say they are treated like children by their office mates. All these stories are in the memoir.
CSPF: Did you have help from other women writers with this book?
Susan: My friend Margaret Atwood suggested I write about my height and she read some very early rough drafts. At first, I dismissed it as a dumb idea but the more I thought about it, the more I realized my size had affected me powerfully without me being aware of it.
Early on, it made me feel I wasn’t feminine enough, and when store clerks would mistake me for a man (which still happens if they can’t see my face), I would just want to crumple up and die. As I got older, I learned height can be a dramatic tool that you can use to your advantage, which is why most giants become entertainers. If people are going to stare at you anyway, why not ask them to pay for doing it?
CSPF: Earlier you mentioned your 1983 novel, The Biggest Modern Woman of the World. Readers must often wonder whether there are any familial connections between you and the real-life Anna Swan, the Nova Scotian “giantess” you wrote a novel about. Is there a link?
Susan: I’ve researched our backgrounds and, aside from our mostly Scottish ethnicity, nothing has come up. But I knew about her when I was twelve and I felt terrified that I might grow up to be a giantess like her and have to join the circus, as a teenage boyfriend once joked. So my height always had a shadow side that I didn’t fully understand until I wrote Big Girls Don’t Cry.
CSPF: What do you think people will find surprising about your memoir?
Susan: The idea that body size is a factor in shaping our identities like race, gender, class, and cultural background. Many of us, especially women, have insecurities about our bodies, but we may not realize just how much that makes us who we are.
“Speaking as a fellow oddball, I think that this is the best book about coming to terms with your differences from the norm—especially for women—that I’ve read. It’s insightful, honest, and adept. Definitely, one of a kind.”
—Jane Smiley, Pulitzer Prize Winner
Memoir Cover Reveal
An exclusive first look at the cover of my new memoir, Big Girls Don’t Cry: A Memoir of Taking Up Space with a Foreword by Margaret Atwood, releasing May 2025 with HarperCollins Canada and Beacon Press!
A memoir about what it means to defy expectations as a woman, a mother, and an artist, examining the expectations of women across generations using the lens of my unusual height as a metaphor for how women are expected not to take up space in the world. This book is for readers of Joan Didion and Gloria Steinem and listeners of the podcast Wiser than Me.
To learn more about my upcoming book, visit this link for an exclusive Q&A with the Carol Shields Prize for Fiction about the differences between fiction and memoir and coming to terms with the differences that shape who we are.
Living the Questions: Should You Have Children if You Want to Write?
Years ago, a science-fiction writer named Judith Merrill told me she couldn’t write after her children left home.
Without the structure children imposed on her day, she was lost.
My daughter Sam transformed my day too. In order to raise her and write fiction I had to learn to say no to other people’s expectations.
Her birth was the start of my creative life.
Living the Questions: What Advice Gives Writers Confidence?
Ignore the advice to write about what you know.
Write about what obsesses you and what you know will transform every word you say. Why? Because what you know will come into play naturally and that’s the best way to write.
Living the Questions: Where Do Writers Live?
Anywhere that’s cheap.
Writing is a lifestyle and luckily, it has perks. People often rent to writers at a discount because writers are quiet. (Well, most writers.) That’s how it was for me at the Hotel Chelsea when Jerry Weinstein ran the desk. There’s a Jerry Weinstein for every writer if you keep an eye out. Look around and see.
Living the Questions: How Do Writers Make a Living?
This new series on the blog is inspired by the poet Ranier Maria Rilke, who wrote in a letter to a toiling poet:
“Be patient towards all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will find them gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”
A writer’s life is filled with frustrations. There’s writing and there’s making money. How do you do both?
One year I earned $160,000 from a book to film deal and not a cent the next. I made the writing life work by having one reliable source of income and freelancing the rest.
Below are a series of photos taken by Irene Grainger. The theme of the photographs is the frustrations of the writing life.
Here’s what others say:
https://www.cbc.ca/news/entertainment/canada-authors-poorer-than-ever-says-study-1.4908086
Why Start a New Literary Prize for Women Writers?
When my friend Janice Zawerbny asked me to help her start a literary prize for women, I had no idea what I was signing up for. Zawerbny is a Toronto editor and she was upset by the grim statistics about women’s writing that I brought to a Vancouver Writers Fest panel in 2012.
Like people who knew about the international success of literary stars such as the late Toni Morrison and Margaret Atwood, I thought women’s writing was killing it.
Research proved me wrong. In both the US and Canada, women authors won a third of the literary prizes and received a third of the coverage for their books in magazines and newspapers. And although they publish roughly the same number of books as men, women earned 45 percent less.
There’s been improvement since 2012 but the overall stats are still discouraging. Today only 17 women out of 119 winners have won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Since 1918, female authors have won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction 31 out of 94 times and the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction 13 out of 41 times.
Canadian statistics are more encouraging. The Scotiabank Giller Prize and the Atwood- Gibson Writers Trust Fiction Prize have an equitable gender balance but there are still weak spots. Female authors have won the Governor General Award in English language 31 out of 84 times while women authors have won the Stephen Leacock Award for Humour a shocking 9 times out of 75.
That Vancouver night after I shared my statistics, there were gasps and despairing groans from the large audience (you guessed it) of mostly women. In her book, The Authority Gap, M.A. Sieghart says men consciously or unconsciously don’t accord as much authority to books by women or they make a lazy assumption that women’s books aren’t for them. According to Sieghart, men read only 19 percent of the top 10 best selling female authors while 45 of percent women and 55 of percent men read the top 10 best selling male authors.
A few days after agreeing to help Janice, Don Oravec, former CEO of the Writers Trust of Canada, joined us. In the spring of 2014, American novelist Roxane Robinson, president of the Authors Guild, and Noreen Tomassi, founding director of Brooklyn’s Centre for Fiction, came on board. Since women authors in both countries had the same problem we felt we could be stronger if we worked together. Over the next decade, supporters and financial patrons from American and Canadian cities followed. Prominent philanthropists like Melinda French Gates and Jennifer N. Pritzker also gave us money.
And so it was that a small group of determined women and one man started the largest literary prize in the world for American and Canadian women fiction writers and non-binary authors. On May 4, the prize will have a historic moment when it awards its first winner at Parnassus, the fabled bookstore owned by our literary patron, Ann Patchett, in Nashville, Tennessee. BMO is generously donating the prize purse: $150,000 USD for the winner and $12,500 USD to each of the four nominees.
The Carol Shields Prize also gives grants and residencies to emerging female writers from marginalized communities. It does this through 11 mentoring partnerships in Canada and the US. Our first two mentees will attend the May 4 awards and meet writers like Margaret Atwood, who is speaking at the event.
Why did we start a new literary award? Winning a prize radically improves a writer’s economic circumstances. Women authors still earn less than men and often carry the burden of caregiving for dependents. Catriona Lily, a janitor at Trinity College Dublin, was able to pay for her daycare and a water tank after she unexpectedly won Ireland’s Rooney Prize. When Anna Burns won the Man Booker Prize for Literature, it enabled her to stop living off food banks.
After Jennifer Egan won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for A Visit from the Goon Squad, sales of her book tripled, selling an average of 10,000 copies a month until dropping to an average of 5,000 copies. And after Esi Edugyan won Canada’s Giller Prize for Half-Blood Blues, sales jumped 479 percent.
There was early pushback to the Carol Shields Prize for Fiction. Two prominent West Coast male writers claimed we had to give the prize to every ethnicity if we were giving an award to women writers. Women, who make up half the world’s population, were an ethnicity?
Oh well, I thought. Not everybody thinks that way. But a few did. The head of an important literary festival said he was starting a prize for male writers. As if literary prizes weren’t mostly awarded to men!
A national Canadian radio host surprised Janice Zawerbny on his show by featuring an audio clip of a female writer denouncing the prize for relegating women authors to “a pink ghetto.” How does a substantial financial prize hold women back, Janice wondered. Maybe we were missing something.
Interestingly, the pushback stopped when we named the prize after the late Carol Shields, a beloved, prize-winning author in both the US and Canada. Her life mission was writing away the invisibility of women’s lives. A dual citizen, she grew up in Chicago and lived over half her life in Canada.
Today many male authors like Richard Russo and Scott Turow have endorsed the prize. Our two boards are made up of high-profile Americans and Canadians, and managed by a CEO. The authors committee consists of established women writers from diverse backgrounds and different generations. Literary patrons include Margaret Atwood, Jane Urquhart, Louise Erdrich, Edwidge Danticat, Zadie Smith, Louise Penny, Alice Munro, Shauna Singh Baldwin, and Gloria Steinem.
Do I regret the hard work we did? Not a bit. Despite its early history, the Carol Shields Prize for Fiction isn’t a grievance award. It celebrates the brilliance of women’s writing and boosts their economic circumstances. It took us longer than expected to get there but here we are.
Originally published in The Globe and Mail, April 29, 2023.
Why don’t more Canadians know about Constance Beresford-Howe?
When you think of the giants in Canadian literature, chances are you think of writers such as Michael Ondaatje, Alice Munro or Margaret Atwood. Few readers these days remember Constance Beresford-Howe, who wrote ground-breaking novels about the struggle of women to be autonomous.
You may not know about her because she was shy. Or because, unlike some of these household names, she never won a Giller or the Man Booker Prize. But only a few decades ago, she wrote 10 feminist novels including The Book of Eve (1973), which critics have called a Canadian classic. And, recently, a dedicated band of her readers unveiled a beautiful bronze plaque in her honour in the Writers’ Chapel at St. Jax church in Montreal.
She is the 11th author to receive such a plaque, and I attended its unveiling because Constance Beresford-Howe was an encouraging mentor who taught me creative writing at McGill University. Back then, almost no Canadian colleges offered such a course.
Her colleague was Hugh MacLennan, whose workshops were known as Uncle Hughie’s bedtime stories since he was fond of long rambling conversations about American politicians and fellow authors such as Morley Callaghan. It was Beresford-Howe who could be counted on for tips on the craft of writing. She excelled at discussions of plot and character development. And she admired my writing, although she told me with a wry smile that my sex scenes were too graphic. Hugh MacLennan agreed.
As students of the sixties, we naturally felt we knew far more about sex and real life than our dignified mentors and we used to joke about being the first to write the toilet-bowl novel — a coup in literary naturalism that thankfully has never materialized. Later, I was startled out of my youthful arrogance when I read The Book of Eve and realized Beresford-Howe deeply understood the intimate relationships between men and women. Its saucy account of a 65-year-old woman walking out on an aging and crabby husband still stands up.
At the end of our undergraduate course, she wanted me to write a novel as my MA thesis. It was the chance of a lifetime to do graduate work with her. Yet, I turned down her generous offer because an ex-boyfriend had been stalking me on campus.
In 1967, I took a job as a reporter at a daily newspaper in Toronto. Two years later, Beresford-Howe moved to Toronto herself. Disturbed by the rising separatism in Quebec, she came with her husband, French teacher Christopher Pressnell, and their young son, Jeremy. When she applied for a teaching job at the University of Toronto, they turned her down. Jeremy thinks it was because she had taught at McGill, a rival university. For two long years, she had no teaching work and that’s when she wrote The Book of Eve.
Eventually, she took a teaching position at Ryerson Polytechnical Institute (now Ryerson University). And she went on to write novels such as The Marriage Bed and A Population of One. Her last novel, A Serious Widow, was published in 1991. Beresford-Howe couldn’t find a publisher for her next book. So she and her husband retired to the Suffolk village of Lavenham, where they lived for 25 years. She died in 2016 and her husband died two weeks later from cancer and a broken heart, her son says.
A writer’s legacy is an elusive thing. A few writers are so famous their work turns into memes, such as George Orwell‘s 1984 or Atwood’s handmaids, while some are known for influencing other writers. And then there is Beresford-Howe, whose readers are honouring her work and that of other deceased Canadian writers. The volunteers who install the plaques are led by retired English professor, Michael Gnarowski. His former student Karl Feige makes the plaques at a foundry outside Ottawa.
Coming back from the unveiling, I wondered what Beresford-Howe would say about a writer’s legacy. I bet she would give me one of her wry smiles.