Getting 2 Know Caroline Adderson

What is your favourite thing about writing?

My favourite thing about writing, and perhaps the ultimate reason I write, is creating characters who are often quite different from me.  Readers will often comment on, say, Malcolm from A History of Forgetting, who is a 56 year-old gay hairdresser, or Iliana in Sitting Practice, who is paraplegic, or Pete, from The Sky Is Falling, who is an anarchist, and say, “How did you do that?”

For me, the point of writing is to get inside another person’s skin and find out how they think and feel.  There isn’t any other art form that allows you access to someone else’s heart and head the way literature does, both for the writer and the reader.  While I often disagree with my characters and sometimes I don’t even like them, I always have enormous compassion for them.  Imagining is, after all, a form of compassion.

What’s the best decision you’ve ever made, and why?

The best decision I ever made was to have a child.  In a way this connects to the previous question.  For me, having a child allowed me to experience unconditional love.  While we may certainly love many people very intensely throughout our lives, there usually are, whether we want to think about it or not, conditions put on that love.

For example, we rightly expect mutual respect and caring, over the long term anyway.  When you have a child, there are no conditions.  Not only that, as a parent you actually derive pleasure from another person’s pleasure.  I can stand in a cold arena watching my child skate, not actually having much fun myself, but not noticing, because he is enjoying himself.  This ability to step out of myself in these moments is quite similar to what happens when I create a fictional character.  So being a parent has made me a better person and a better writer.