"Listening to a radio with my friends seemed oddly holy": How To Write About Your Childhood

"I had a ludicrous childhood, but I feel that I was able to profit from a lot of the idiotic and unfortunate things that happened to me by turning them into fiction. I feel in that way that I cheated fate by writing this book, by declaring that ordinary stones were gold."

That's novelist Heather O'Neill describing her recent novel. She turned her childhood poverty into a powerful meditation on innocence--a book loaded with dark humor, class warfare, and wild imagery.

Welcome to the first installment of our interview with O'Neill, part of my deceptively simple feature: Five Easy Questions.

In the spirit of Jack Nicholson’s mad piano player, I run a serialized set of weekly interviews with writing pioneers—delivering some practical, unexpected advice about web publishing...

Jason Boog:
How did you turn your personal stories into something that thousands of people can relate to? Any advice for writers who are writing about their own childhoods?

Heather O'Neill:
I tried to live in the past when I wrote this book. Continue reading...

I saw the world through my own eyes as a child and didn't allow myself to filter the vision through an adult's perception. For instance, at one point Baby says that she thought strippers were magical, fictional creatures like mermaids and she doubted their existence.

I think this was important especially for drawing the characters and people that she is attracted to. Children look for different qualities from those who surround them and are entertained by them in a wholly different and sometimes shocking way.

That's what I think readers of the book are reacting too, and why they find certain aspects of the book ringing true and reflecting their own childhoods. I think you have to be true to your perceptions as a child and also really value them.

I always look on my experiences as child in an almost religious light, they seem so incredible and deep and mystical. Even mundane memories like that of sitting on some steps listening to a radio with my friends seem oddly holy.

Devoted to publishing, publishers and to those who craft the written word

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