Utopia: A Novel

Tell us about your new novel, Utopia.

The story is about how a young artist’s attempt to claim her creative life takes an unsettling turn when details emerge about the death of her husband’s magnetic former wife, which forces her to confront the truth.

It started with no notion of “character” or “plot” but with an image. A woman falling off a rooftop. I kept thinking about her and wondered: did she jump or was she pushed? This woman became Romy. At the same time, I was rereading a lot of second-wave feminists which led me to the performance artists during that time who were doing a lot of body works, and that’s when the story ignited for me.

It’s set very firmly within the 1970s art world, but I think many of its observations about gender roles and the recognition of female artists still ring true, to some extent, today. Do you think that’s fair?

Yes! As I was writing about the 1970s, there was a chilling feeling as the events from my time started to echo those in the book, namely the fight for reproductive rights, and for the basic notion of gender equality. Because the art world is so tied to capitalism, a hierarchy built on the oppression of women (or anyone who suffers under the material conditions historically assigned to women), the disparity still holds. Go to any gallery, you won’t see much work made by women. In a way, the writing of this book was to circumnavigate the legacies of men. I wanted to illuminate and re-imagine all the work made by women artists that no one may have heard of.

The mysterious death that sets this novel ticking seems to be inspired by the real-life case of Ana Mendieta, the Cuban-American artist. Could you talk a little more about that?

In 1985, Ana Mendieta, a rising young artist “fell” thirty-four stories out of a window after a violent fight with her much older, art-star husband, Carl Andre. Andre began his 911 call by saying, “My wife is an artist, and I am an artist, and we had a quarrel about how I was more exposed to the public than she was,” which, with his wife dead on the pavement below, is, at best, odd. When Andre (who was twice charged with her murder) walked away free, her death became a parable of the relative power of women and men in the art world. Her performances, which had sometimes involved blood and burial, were used against her. As a young Cuban American woman, she struggled for prominence in the overwhelmingly white male art establishment. Now revered as a feminist art pioneer with a cult following, in the post-Weinstein/Depp #MeToo era, it’s hard to believe that Andre is still having exhibitions and that no one is talking about who killed Ana Mendieta. Her story had a huge impact on me as I wrote Utopia.

How long did it take you to write this novel? Did you take any wrong turns?

It took about two years, though I was thinking a lot about falling (the embodiment of the philosophical problem of free will and determinism) as I was finishing my first novel. At its heart, the story is a love triangle with a ghost, and I struggled about how the ghost could work. I had a draft where the “ghost” narrator keeps coming in, weaving her voice with the other narrator’s and it was, to say the least, incredibly confusing. Then I had the novel divided in three parts, each narrated by one of the characters in the love triangle. That felt really forced. I realized Paz, the young artist who has begun a relationship with Billy, the much-older recognized artist, was the voice I most wanted to follow, maybe because I found it hard to understand her choices so I needed to figure her out.

What does your writing process look like?

Like a lot of women writers I know, I tend to take intense measures, make more elaborate psychic arrangements to access my imagination. Because of my design job and because I have three children, I have to write in short, intense stretches. When I wrote Utopia, I had the keys to a relative’s empty apartment that overlooked a giant graveyard, and that’s where I would go alone to write. I have to completely drop out of life, turn off my phone, not get the wifi password, and just disappear. Writing is a discipline, and it requires such long-form thinking, the kind of thinking our world doesn’t really honour or allow with all the constant digital intrusions. (That’s something I loved about writing about the 1970s. It was an era of both unpredictable contact and profound solitude.) The only way I know how to write is to sit in a hard chair at a desk for hours and hours and contend with what I am thinking and not allow myself to get up until I have something to work with.

One of the lead female characters in Utopia, Romy, flies light aircraft over the Californian desert; you’re a pilot too. When did you train, and what have you used your pilot’s license for?

I worked for a summer as a bush cook for forest-firefighting camps on the Alaska/Yukon border and was flown in on helicopters. I had this crazy plan to become a licensed bush pilot for forest fires in summers, which would mean that I would be able to write for the rest of the year without having to worry about money. I got my pilot’s license in Texas of all places, so I spent some time flying over hot, dry land. After that I was accepted into an intense commercial bush pilot program in northern Canada but when the funding was suddenly cut, I never did go on to get a commercial license to fly for hire. I still have dreams of flying. It’s actually how it all clicked for me. I found learning to fly a helicopter extremely difficult, and then one night I had a dream I could do it, and I went into the hangar the next day. My instructor was floored. He didn’t understand how I suddenly knew how to fly. I still believe in the instructions from dreams.

Do you see parallels between your two novels? What are their common interests?

Utopia and The Dictionary of Animal Languages are both about women artists working. I think that is, and will always be, a fascination for me. In both cases, the protagonists come to realize that the various forces in society have worked to turn their energies away from their work and their politics, toward a man. And in both cases, I am interested in how that plays out. I also am interested in the thinking and work that comes from the outliers, from the disempowered. For me, that’s where the compelling art gets made.

I can see why some have likened Utopia to Emma Cline’s The Girls; it has that same dusty glamour, an intoxicatingly charismatic male love interest. But who do you feel to be your literary influences?

O! I love the notion of “dusty glamour.” I feel like that is the perfect description. Like the Romy character in a beautiful velvet suit but there is sand in her shoes. Definitely while writing Utopia, I reread all of my favourite books from the 1970s. Joan Didion’s Play It As It Lays, Eve Babitz’s, Sex and Rage, both of whom were still alive at the time. I also went back to the second-wave feminists like Andrea Dworkin, Adrienne Rich, Audre Lorde, et al. The works of fiction that I have marvelled at the craft of and still do, are Clarice Lispector’s The Hour of the Star, and Virginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouse. I thought a lot about Woolf’s notion of Shakespeare’s sister (from A Room of One’s Own) with the Romy character, and wanted to explore the power dynamics of a woman making art alongside men, and how it might work out for her. The trajectory is devastating, but the truth remains that her work—and the work of all these women— mattered.

Heidi Sopinka