On the cover of the book, you write that Day of Epiphany is “set against the backdrop of Québec’s Grande Noirceur (Great Darkness) of the 1940s and ’50s, and tells a haunting, riveting story inspired by the true events of the Duplessis orphans scandal, a much overlooked national tragedy.” Can you explain a little bit more about that and why it was something you felt compelled to write about?
I’d been developing an interest in Canadian history of the 1940s and ‘50s, an era when my own parents were in their teens and twenties. Their shared memories of this period had long been incubating in my mind, and while it was never going to be a biographical work, I thought the new novel could be a place where many of their stories might find a voice and live on, while contributing generously to the detail of the picture I wanted to paint.
As I threw myself into researching the social history of the period, one name dominated from the start: Union nationale party leader Maurice Duplessis. I didn’t know much about Le Chef initially, except that he was premier of Québec for the better part of 20 years, and that he was immensely influential. What they didn’t teach us in high school was his dubious legacy. First, the Duplessis era itself came to be known as La grande noirceur—the Great Darkness—a period of extreme conservatism, sluggish economic growth and stifled cultural development. Second was the scandal of the Duplessis orphans, thousands of children whom he allowed to be deliberately misclassified as mental patients in order to qualify for federal subsidies earmarked for psychiatric hospitals. It was an incredibly compelling and tragic episode which I quickly discovered was largely unknown in English-speaking Canada; aside from @Joanna Goodman’s excellent 2018 novel The Home for Unwanted Girls (a must-read, by the way!) the subject of the Duplessis orphans has barely been touched in English-language fiction. I decided that this was the story I wanted to write about.
Tell me about writing a book set in Quebec. You’ve created something that has a distinct tone that is unique both in the way the characters speak and the things they talk about. Was there specific things from your own personal background that contributed to the telling of this tale?
Well as I mentioned, the setting of this novel is much more familiar to my parents and their generation than it is to me. The ‘40s and ‘50s in French-speaking Canada was a period where the Roman Catholic Church loomed over pretty much every aspect of daily life. That was the world that my mom and dad knew. I grew up in a much more liberated time, the 1970s, and in a very secular household. I had discovered by the time I was 12, for example, that I was an atheist; I simply stopped going to church, and my parents tacitly supported that decision. It wasn’t an issue. It was different for my parents. My dad attended a French-language Catholic boys college in Saskatchewan for something like six or seven years, and some of his memories from this period are included in the novel. That institution was run by a religious order: all the teachers were priests, he was forced to attend Mass every single day, and the episodes of abuse were well known. He too was a very secular minded kid and mischievous by nature, but because he was so good in school, the priests let him get a way with a lot. Meanwhile, my mom was the second oldest of seven children in a typically pious French Canadian family. My grandmother would have liked nothing more than for her to become a nun, but that wasn’t in the cards for my mom. She became a nurse instead.
This book really got me thinking about the implications of government decisions and the interaction between government and religion. But it’s not all serious, there is also humour and even hope. What would you like readers to take away from the book after reading it?
There is so much in this story that could be discussed and argued about. I think it will make an excellent choice for a book club that has an interest in history. There’s the fact that, like the stories coming out of the residential schools, these event—as unspeakable as they were—are NOT ancient history. They happened within the lifetimes of people alive today. Another aspect that I think deserves a good deal of discussion is that the terrible, inhumane treatment being described in this novel was being perpetrated by otherwise perfectly normal, well-adjusted individuals, people who were led to believe that they were carrying out God’s will, and that it was all somehow for a greater good. My central character comes up against this very conflict, and it is only her love for the children closest to her that keeps her from following along with the other sisters. It makes me think of the later work done by Stanley Milgram and Philip Zimbardo on the psychology of evil, persuasion, and deindividuation. It’s an important issue that hasn’t gone away and that we need to remain vigilant about.
And yes, there is humour. People being people, even in the darkest circumstances our humanity will always find a way of breaking through, if only for a short time. Much of it is simply kids being kids. Some of my father’s stories from his college days were too good to leave out and add some levity to the book. Of course, the laughter and liveliness of children were ill-tolerated by those who would seek to exert control; such spells of merriment are usually halted pretty quickly, but the human spirit is a hard thing to extinguish entirely.