Selected Reviews of The Featherbed by John Miller

Reviews
The Globe and Mail 2003
Books in Canada 2002
The Hamilton Spectator 2003
The Canadian Jewish News 2003
Quill and Quire 2002
701.com 2002
Saskatoon StarPhoenix 2003
Xtra! 2003

Features/ Interviews:
St. Lawrence & Downtown Community Bulletin 2001
fab Magazine 2003

Reviews

The Globe and Mail
Saturday January 11, 2003
Reviewed by Jim Bartley.

She Remembers Mama

In Toronto writer John Miller’s debut novel, we first join Anna Cooperman at the bedside of her dying mother. At 70, Anna is still obliged to receive maternal counsel, though Rebecca’s stroke has abruptly made her pronouncements easier to dismiss. Today, Rebecca expands on “a banal and seemingly pointless” remark: “Objects hold meaning…For instance, Anna dear, an object might reveal a person’s hopes and dreams [or] all of her follies and heartache.”

After the announcement of Rebecca’s death, Anna gets a telephone message from Toronto. Her sister, Sadie, will be coming to New York for the funeral. The news revives long-buried resentments. Sadie has not been heard from in more than 50 years.

At spare moments during the three-day shiva following the funeral, the two sisters go through the contents of Rebecca’s tiny tenement apartment in lower Manhattan. Anna finds her mother’s diary in the depths of a closet, and we’re whisked back to pre-First World War New York, and the lives of teenaged Rebecca and her immigrant parents, Jews from Czarist Russia eking out a meagre living in the garment trade.

Fulfilling mama’s dying portent, the diary is filled with hopes and follies and heartaches. In 1909, Rebecca is an adolescent factory worker, sewing shirts for seven dollars a week and bringing home her wages to a stentorian father and house-worn mother. She is never allowed to forget that however mean her own life, it pales next to her parents’ hard-ships in the homeland.

At 16, she faces an arranged marriage. Rebecca boldly challenges her father and negotiates a postponement, which papa vetoes a week later, after Rebecca is injured in a clash between union workers and the police. Married and housebound, she’ll be safely cloistered from zealous socialists and bigoted Irish cops.

Husband Isaac proves even bossier than papa, but without the wisdom to back it up. Unbending traditions bind Rebecca to Isaac’s whims. If he doesn’t arrive home each night to a hot meal and a wife who jumps to serve, he’s sure to pick a fight.

To make ends meet, the young couple take on a boarder, Sylvia, a needy friend of a friend who, unknown to Isaac, also happens to be a prostitute. We learn of the family scandal that forded Sadie from the nest at 18, never to be seen again until the day of her mother’s funeral in 1983.

This is an old-fashioned tale, blending traditional (almost Dickensian) storytelling with a deftly updated erotic candour. Deception, illicit love, a gruesome birth and untimely deaths finally raise the action to an exhilarating penny-dreadful pitch, only slightly undercut by Miller’s button-down tableau of sisterly reconciliation.

Jim Bartley is The Globe and Mail’s first-fiction reviewer.

Books in Canada
December 2002
Reviewed by W.P. Kinsella

When 90-year-old Rebecca passes away after a lifetime in a New York City tenement, her dutiful daughter Anna is surprised when her older sister Sadie, who she hasn't seen or heard from in over 50 years, comes to the funeral. Slowly, by reading their mother's diaries, the two seventy-ish sisters discover that there was much more to their mother's life than they ever imagined.

The writing is solid as the layers of past are stripped away and some shocking truths revealed. Their mother was a bright girl who longed to write, but was forced into an arranged marriage to an unhealthy and abusive husband. As a young wife she became the reluctant friend of a pregnant prostitute. Life in a New York tenement in the early years of the century were cruel and uncompromising. Parts of this story are not for the faint of heart as there is some horrific blood and gore.

This is a strong, well-written, and researched debut.

The Hamilton Spectator
Saturday January 18th 2003
Reviewed by Stewart Brown, Special to the Hamilton Spectator

Family secrets are revealed in adventurous first novel

In The Featherbed, Toronto writer John Miller takes an adventurous detour from the notion that first novels ten – or need – to be autobiographical.

Instead, he delves diligently into American social history for this story of attempted reconciliation between Anna and Sadie, two sisters in their 70s, estranged for more than 50 years, who are reunited at their mother Rebecca’s funeral in New York in 1983.

More riskily, Miller writes from a woman’s viewpoint. His sympathies through 350 pages lie far more with women than with men. As the prostitute Sylvia says: “Lying to men jus sort of goes with the territory in my business … the sad reality is that being honest with men doesn’t lead to happiness.”

Rebecca doesn’t need to follow her friend Sylvia’s footsteps to realize that life for a woman is not easy. It is Rebecca’s life, told through revealing diaries discovered by Anna and Sadie and through Miller’s fictional narrative, that forms the compelling crux of this novel.

Basically, it’s the classic New York immigrant story: Rebecca’s Jewish parents arrive from Poland/Russia to live in a crowded tenement building where their daughter – sewing in a shirtwaist factory at 14 – must light matches after work to guide her way up the dark stairwell to the family’s fifth-floor apartment.

Two years later, in 1909, she begins a journal. “I would never show my children what I write in a diary,” she notes, believing that emotions and history should remain separate.

That same year, at 16, she becomes a wife in a marriage arranged by her parents, to Isaac, a cap-maker eight years her senior.

It is not a happy relationship, for Rebecca or her girls, Anna and Sadie, or, indeed, for most of their female friends. As Dora, an opportunistic “aunt” of adjustable morals, puts it: “Things are always easier if you think of them as temporary.”

Throughout, a will to survive keeps these women going. In that respect, this is a feminist novel. Anna and Sadie, though separated for half a century, land on their feet, though writer Miller sums up their career paths rather matter-of-factly.

What’s best about The Featherbed is the sociological flavour it provides of Manhattan’s Lower East Side – tenement life, the raucous streets with their pushcarts and horse-drawn wagons and storefronts and nickelodeons and dance halls – and of the social and religious traditions of immigrant family life and the price of transgressing these mores.

In setting the scene, Miller includes some of the dangers of the urban poor in the early 20th century. There are fires and gas leaks in the tenement buildings, the exploitation of women and children in the factories and unsanitary health conditions.

The book’s most dramatic chapter describes a violence-filled childbirth in a tenement bedroom.

In that respect, Miller reflects the crusading spirit of the turn-of-the-century journalistic breed known as the Muckrakers, from whom Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, a stomach-wrenching novel about the Chicago meat-packing industry, remains a persuasive argument for vegetarianism.

As for The Featherbed, the title comes from a goose-down tick, brought over from the Old Country by Rebecca’s parents, that stands as a symbol of family ties and secrets through four generations.

“Lumpy and uneven, there is comfort in an old blanket,” Rebecca notes in her diary. “It can warm a numb and aching heart.”

Stewart Brown is a Hamilton writer.

The Canadian Jewish News
January 23, 2003
Reviewed by Bill Gladstone, Special to The CJN

An unconventional look at New York’s Lower East Side.

Toronto writer John Miller’s The Featherbed is a credible depiction of tenement life in New York’s Lower East Side of a century ago, but has a number of jarring twists.

Anna and Sadie, sisters who haven’t seen each other in more than 50 years, are reunited at the funeral of their mother, Rebecca, who had still lived in the family’s tiny tenement apartment in lower Manhattan.

During the shivah, the sisters become reacquainted with each other as they struggle to understand the many dark family secrets and deceptions contained in their mother’s diaries.

Their mother had been forced into an arranged and unhappy marriage. Her diaries, which are conveyed to us in both first-person and third-person narratives, reveal exactly how and with whom she finally found love, as well as a secret involving the parentage of one of the daughters. The diaries are at the centre of the novel.

Miller, who pays homage to writers such as Henry Roth and Abraham Cahan, never seems to lose sight of the fact that he is revisiting a hallowed literary terrain. In true Rothian fashion, for instance, Rebecca is frightened by the dark stairwell in her building, which she associates with the menacing sexuality of the human male. The book consistently portrays men unsympathetically as animalistic and abusive.

The author even throws in a reference to Cahan’s short novel Yekl, which became the basis for the film Hester Street and sets the next scene in Hester Street.

Sweatshop scenes, street vendors, a union rally that turns violent, a tenement tragedy involving gas and other period markers give the book a graphic authenticity. The dialogue also manages to capture the flavour of tenement “Yinglish” on occasion, and the characters are steeped in the familiar poverty, class struggle and sexual oppression of the era.

But grafted to this realistic period portrayal is a narrative discourse about radical gender politics that is out of keeping with the times.

Locked into loveless relationships with overbearing and violent men, Miller’s female protagonists break out of their bondage in unconventional ways. They are Jewish in name only, with no discernable connection to Jewish spiritual traditions or family values.

Although disturbing, The Featherbed is a bold first novel and Miller has evoked a credible feminist voice. Having previously written for Fuse magazine and Xtra! , he is a gifted literary craftsman who deserves watching.

The Featherbed is published by Simon & Pierre Fiction and costs $21.99.

Quill and Quire
November 2002
Reviewed by Steven Manners

“Objects hold meaning,” Rebecca tells her daughter Anna from her deathbed, “an object might reveal a person’s hopes and dreams.” That object, Anna soon discovers, is her mother’s diary dating back to 1909. The revelations in those volumes form the backbone of John Miller’s first novel, The Featherbed.

Anna and her sister Sadie, reunited after being estranged fro 50 years, are drawn together as they read the diary. Their mother’s most private thoughts begin innocently enough. Rebecca is only 16 and resists the marriage her father has arranged. She is hungry to explore the wider world of New York City. Miller deftly captures the flavour of the period, the struggling masses of immigrants, the sweatshops, the union unrests. There are moments reminiscent of Malamud’s The Fixer or John Dos Passos’ U.S.A. Trilogy.

But those moments are not sustained. The diary device is tired, and the overworked featherbed – where babies are born and people die – soon wears thin like an old duvet. The main problem here is an excess of plot. Mama marries Isaac, who becomes physically abusive for no apparent reason. She takes in a lodger, Sylvia, a prostitute who needs a place to stay during her pregnancy. But all that is born is melodrama as the diaries heap one startling revelation upon another.

The most well-rounded character here is Rebecca, but she provides little insight into the characters surrounding her. Anna has lived her life in her mother’s shadow, a fact borne out by the diaries crowding out any character development she might have received in the novel. Her marriage and the passing mention of her son’s death in Korea are glossed over, and her sister Sadie is little more than a sketch. In the end, the musty diaries in The Featherbed become a Procrustean bed, squeezing characters into a space too narrow for them to breathe.

Steven Manners, whose most recent book is the collection Wound Ballistics.

701.com
November 2002
Reviewed by April O’Flaherty

In his powerful debut novel, Toronto-based writer John Miller has proven that he is a Canadian force to be reckoned with.

The Featherbed is an intergenerational family drama that will grab you by the throat and refuse to unhand you until the last word has been absorbed. I began reading with a yawn at 8 p.m. and reluctantly closed when it was finished at 11. So gripped was I by the drama and intricacies of the story of Rebecca Ignatow and her daughters Sadie and Anna that I became most annoyed when nature called and I had to tear myself away from their story for even a few moments.

Somehow Miller has captured the female perspective so well that I momentarily forgot that the author was a man. Writing in the voice of the opposite sex is not an easy endeavour, but Miller handles it like a pro and deserves credit for remaining true to the female point of view; giving it depth and dignity and not turning it into caricature.

Miller has a BA in Human Geography and an MA in International Development Studies and this reviewer believes that this and his keen knowledge of culture and politics served him well as he tells the story of Rebecca and her arranged marriage in New York in the 1900s. He weaves a remarkable tale of her diary, read after her death by her daughters, who find out they didn’t know their mother half so well as they’d thought they did.

What is woven here is a masterfully told tale of a cruel and abusive marriage, adversity, and the emerging love and sexuality that will not, cannot, be denied. Vivid writing stirs up images of early 20th century New York with all its diversity. One can almost smell the fish sold my Mr. Zussel and the sweet buns baked and sold by Mrs. Cristobaldi.

More importantly, the reader can feel the tension in the home of Isaac and Rebecca Kalish and it is almost too much to take, but we are so intent of learning what becomes of the young Rebecca that we cannot help but turn to the next page, and the next, and the next.

The estranged sisters are shocked and amazed by what their mother’s diary reveals, and they learn to see her in a new light, as a woman with a history that they are richer for knowing. In the process they learn more about one another and a gap of fifty years is bridged.

If Oprah still had a book club, this book would be more than worthy of rising to the top of the list: I know it’s at the top of mine.

Saskatoon StarPhoenix
Saturday January 11, 2003
Reviewed by Kathy McNinch for the StarPhoenix

Daughters on journey to understand mother.

As a child, you develop an image of your parents and can’t imagine them having other priorities, feelings or goals. Everything they do is filtered through their role as a parent and not as a person. John Miller has created a story that shows how two sisters discover the person their mother was by reading her diaries after her death.

Rebecca was a young garment worker in New York in the early 1900s. She attended night school and planned to continue her education. Her participation in a union rally that ended in violence convinced her father of the need for a husband to stabilize her life. He arranged a marriage to one of the employees in his business.

Her new husband did not approve of her education or her friends. She was not allowed to continue with her education, but financial difficulties forced him to allow her friend to become a boarder in their home. When Sylvia moved into their home, Rebecca found a new sense of purpose. Although she never saw herself as a political activist, she slowly came to understand how women and immigrants were victimized.

Rebecca pulled off a deception that would affect the lives of everyone in her family. Her daughters could not have imagined the truth and are stunned to read about it in the diary. They come to understand the choices their mother made and how hse always had their best interests at heart.

Miller has created an unpredictable pot and believable characters. The chapters alternate between past and present to give the reader the same experience of discovery as Rebecca’s daughters, Anna and Sadie.

Anna is the daughter who stayed in New York and looked after her parents until their deaths. Sadie left home at an early age and never kept in touch with the family. The sisters finally have a chance to talk about why Sadie left and the aftermath of that event. They both realize that neither of them had an easy life but it was as good as it could be because of their mother’s choices.

Miller has captured the emotional undercurrents that are present in all families. He shows how this family survived political and social upheaval in the early 1900s. The daughters’ understanding of their mother as a person is a touching and realistic journey. This is an entertaining book that provides an intimate look at family relationships.

McNinch is a freelance writer.

Xtra!
February 6, 2003
Reviewed by Maureen Phillips

Life is in the details - A diary triggers flashbacks in The Featherbed.

Historical fiction was one of the staples of my adolescent reading diet. Big, fat epic-length books by old lady writers — the writers were old ladies and the books were written for old ladies and me. I loved those books because of their pseudo-educational aura and of course, their irresistibly melodramatic nature. I didn’t waste a second thinking about historical accuracy; it was all about story and triumphant endings.

Those days are long gone and it’s impossible to read historical fiction without wondering about the reality factor. Some writers, like Sarah Waters, get around the issue by making their books sound like books written in the period they are writing about and that produces a convincing effect. Others do lots of research and fill the narrative with details that are historically grounding. Toronto writer John Miller’s first novel The Featherbed falls into the second category. Miller offers a thoroughly researched story set in New York City in the early decades of the 20th century.

The novel begins in 1983 with the death of Rebecca at 90, mother of Anna and Sadie — which brings the sisters together after a long separation. Fifty years ago, Sadie had left home abruptly and was disowned by her parents. The reasons for this estrangement are shrouded in mystery and Sadie’s disappearance is a source of great resentment for Anna. As the sisters clean their mother’s apartment, Miller invokes the device of the found diary to tell the story of Rebecca’s early life.

But he doesn’t just present the diary, he uses it as a point of entry to the world of the past and shifts to a first-person narrative voice to fill in the details. It’s like a flashback in a movie that begins with a voiceover and then presents an episode from the past. The past is that of eastern European Jewish immigrants to North America, struggling in New York as garment workers, as fishmongers, as prostitutes, living in cramped tenements, walking garbage-filled streets in 1911. The details are certainly vivid, and no doubt well researched.

The problem with the book is in the structure. As the sisters read the diary it becomes clear that we’re headed for big revelations about deep family secrets — that’s what diaries are for, after all. But there’s nothing special in the revelations themselves. There’s drama of course, particularly when it becomes clear that Sadie is not Rebecca’s child after all and the circumstances surrounding her birth are disclosed. It’s a classic example of too much going on without enough meaning associated with all the action.

Because of the shifts back and forth in time, with the emphasis being placed on the past, it’s much harder to connect with the characters of the sisters. They are not fully realized, and given the details of their early life together it’s hard to understand why they find the past so mysterious. They both had good reason to hate their father and Anna in particular knew a lot about the abuse he inflicted on their mother. Yet she acts surprised to read about such things in her mother’s diary. The narrative is not emotionally coherent and this undermines the powerful effect that Miller is trying very hard to create.

There is an everything-but-the-kitchen-sink feel to this novel; it’s packed with all sorts of things — early trade union history, immigrant politics, Jewish culture, illegal abortions, child abuse, rum running, poverty before and after the Depression, domestic abuse and a little touch of homosexuality and sad lesbian love story as well. These elements are obviously drawn from life and history, but fiction demands an artful arrangement to restore them to life — that life is missing in this novel.

Everyone is an armchair editor at times, and in the case of The Featherbed, it’s hard to resist that tendency. There’s some great stuff in the novel and Miller clearly wants to work a large canvas. At times it works because the minor characters are really well drawn. But this is a classic example of book that needs some fine tuning. It’s not enough to lay out the details, they need to be filled with meaning as well.

Features/ Interviews:

St. Lawrence & Downtown Community Bulletin
September 2001

John Miller is better known for his actions than his words, but the first-time novelist is looking to change that with his debut book, “The Featherbed”.

During his 10 years in Old Cabbagetown, Miller has built his reputation in health care policy, AIDS activism, and social services, and is a fixture on his silver mountain bike with saddlebags brought over from his last visit to Europe. But soon his neighbours will be able to add author to his impressive list of accomplishments.

The former executive director of Trinity Home Hospice, Miller earned a master’s degree in international development.

In recent years, he held various roles in the Ontario government. He was originally recruited to do policy work for people with disabilities. Most recently, he managed a high profile, and sometimes controversial, public program for early childhood development. He left public service in April and has since been consulting on policy and organizational development.

While he was writing The Featherbed, Miller recalls he was working full time and “trying to juggle a lot of things that were important to me. I’m fortunate to be interested in a lot of things.” His primary interest is AIDS activism.

“I actually left my job at the hospice to take a job with less responsibility at the Ontario Government to have more time for my other work and for writing.” He sat on the steering committee AIDS Action Now, but “gave that up when I really started writing because I couldn’t fit it all in.”

He still made room for family, though, with his parents living a few doors down from him in Cabbagetown. “They followed me here,” Miller laughs. He also takes his niece and nephew to Riverdale Farm as often as possible. Despite his full life, Miller was unprepared to succeed as a writer. “When I set out to write this book, I really had no promise of success at all – it was the first piece of fiction I’ve ever written. So I decided if I was going do something this big, I at least wanted to ensure I was going to learn something in doing it, something more than, of course, about writing.”

Prior to starting this book, Miller had only written non-fiction and analysis pieces. “I never took any formal writing courses and hadn’t wanted to be a writer until six or seven years ago, and when I started to write non-academic, creative non-fiction I realized how much I loved writing.”

Miller tried marrying his newfound love of writing, and his love of story-telling, “which inevitably meant that I wanted to write fiction.” I took a crack at one short story and it was terrible. I don’t think it’s really my forte. It didn’t allow me to really paint a big enough picture with different characters interacting and growing.”

Miller enrolled in the writing program at the University of Toronto. “Well, really, I realized I didn’t know about structure and plot. I took an amazing course by a writer named David Mayerovitch. It wasn’t what I expected, it didn’t’ give a formula for structure, but what it did was help you to gather all the elements you needed to have a story that’s good enough to tell.”

He started the book about five years ago when his uncle gave him a present for his birthday: a history book about Jewish immigration to North America called “The World of Our Fathers.”

“I got the kernel of a story idea from that,” Miller recalls. The character of Hattie is loosely based on a writer of that time, Anzia Yezierska. Miller explains, “She was the Jewish Cinderella, grew up in the tenements, was courted by Hollywood. She went by the English name Hattie Meyer as well. I read several of her books to get a sense of the tone of the time.”

Miller finds women’s history, and women’s social history, “fascinating; in some ways more rich than men’s history simply because of the things that women experience, because of subjugation and oppression throughout history, that men didn’t. I also have the privilege of having many close women friends who have taken me into their fold, and I guess they’ve confided in me about the intricacies and the personal details of their lives, and I wanted to do justice to their experiences, and the experiences of all our mothers and grandmothers, particularly, their story.

“It was important for me to strike a true chord, with women’s experiences. So I checked that out with some people along the way,” said Miller, who is gay. “I had them read certain passages to tell me whether or not I had gotten it right, and I was pleased to find I apparently had. And I suppose people will tell me if I haven’t when they read the book.

“My friend read a certain passage and she said, ‘How do you know that about women’s bodies?’ and I said, ‘You told me! I listened to you.’ I don’t think she realized she had told me that much about it: the scene where Anna slides into the bed and is lying in a certain fashion and her breasts are squashed and she’s lying on her stomach, and she found that accurate.” Miller’s attention to detail was time-consuming. “It took me three years to write the first draft, another year for a second draft, and the last year I just spent waiting to hear from publishers – over 10 of them.

“I was very fortunate that Dundurn has people there that really saw what I was trying to do with this book and loved it. I feel very lucky that I’m getting this book published.

“I think there are so many good manuscripts that never get printed, because there are so few books that are being printed in Canada, so somehow they saw mine as being worthwhile and that was tremendous.”

fab Magazine
Issue #212, March 27-April 9, 2003

Inside John Miller’s Featherbed
By Andrea Németh

Curled in the corner of a soft, retro-‘70s sectional couch on the third floor of his Cabbagetown home, John Miller is amazingly pleasant for someone who’s just had his car towed. The 35-year old merely grimaces behind his goatee, the scowl distorting the smooth skin and strong features of his face. “I have to start reading signs – that’s the second time this month!” Fortunately, this debutante author is better at writing a novel than he is at parking a car. The Featherbed, published by Dundurn, is (besides a failed attempt at a short story, which the author calls, “awful, self-indulgent and terrible”), both the first piece of fiction that John Miller has written and an excellent first novel.

“I wasn’t one of these people who always dreamed of being a writer,” Miller admits and there’s certainly nothing in his past education or employment to suggest the writing life that he has embraced. Following high school, Miller participated in Canada World Youth, an exchange program between young people in Canada and in developing countries, and spent some time in Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of Congo). The visit was cut short when then-president Mobutu took offence at comments by one of the trip’s supervisors and banned the group from his country.

Back in Canada, Miller took his undergraduate degree in Human Geography (the study of people’s relationships with their environments) at McGill. The completion of his MA in International Development Studies at the Institute of Social Studies in The Hague brought Miller back to Toronto and to employment in the social service sector, as a community worker for a street outreach service. Later, he was the Program Co-ordinator for the Practical Assistance and Buddy Programs at ACT (organizing both practical and emotional support for people living with AIDS) before being hired as the executive director of Trinity Home Hospice, a facility that provides care to people with life-threatening and terminal illnesses. It was during these years that he began to recognize his interest in writing.

“Because I was interested in social issues, in political issues, I began to write about those things in a non-fiction capacity. I was writing about things that I actually wanted to write about,” he says, and recalls his articles in Xtra! about safer sex, and about the coming-out process, as well as his Fuse article on gay men and body image and some employment related pieces in the Journal of Hospice and Palliative Care. Previous to these, his only reason to write had been for academic purposes; with these constraints removed he found a passion for writing that had long gone unrecognized. His obvious pleasure in recalling the start of his writing career makes Miller relax the nervous posture that he’s been maintaining (knees drawn up to the chest, arms hugged around them) and lean towards me before continuing his narrative with even greater enthusiasm.

Clearly not a man of halfway measures, Miller set about acquiring the skills required for novel writing, “… because I had none,” he says, with a wry chuckle, by enrolling in a continuing education course at the University of Toronto, in which he work-shopped the outline for the plot of his first book.

Narrated in the voices of Rebecca, a young Jewish woman living in the tenements in the Lower East Side of New York City in the early 1900s, and her daughters, Sadie and Anna, both in their 70s when they read Rebecca’s diary after her death, The Featherbed recounts the lives of these women and the many things that they don’t know about each other, despite their close kinship. Rebecca’s inability to control the events of her life – first directed by her parents, then by her husband – and the ways she eventually rebels against this oppression, are central to the plot, which spans most of the 20th century, from Rebecca’s young adulthood in 1909 to her death in 1983.

With its focus on the lives of women and their relationships with one another, The Featherbed is not a novel that one would expect to be written by a young, urban, gay man. Especially one who may be better known to his community as the poster model for Leatherball 8.

It’s a sinister image with a black leather cap pulled low over his eyes and shadowing his darkly-bearded face, his well-muscled arms angled away from his body, showing the definition of biceps, chest and stomach to great advantage. He appears decidedly less sinister tonight, less sinister and slightly mortified about being grilled on his foray into modelling.

“That poster was such an embarrassment! I didn’t realize what it would be like to see myself staring back from every lamp post.”

The contrast between the poster image and the soft-spoken nearly blushing man, sipping water as if it were spirits to fortify him, is stark. Though the novel has been positively reviewed in several papers, from the Saskatoon Star Phoenix to the Globe and Mail, this is Miller’s first interview as a published author and he’s choosing his words very carefully.

Perhaps like Rebecca, The Featherbed’s protagonist, does in her diary, he wants to separate the events of life from the contents of the heart.

The Featherbed addresses several issues in its 352 pages, including prostitution, sweatshops, arranged marriage and homosexuality. On the latter, Miller comments, “The idea of same-sex relationships in that time period.. it’s like the straight world believes that we’re fabricating them as a sort of wishful thinking but gay and lesbian historians have done a great job of uncovering these hidden lives and now writers can fill the gaps by helping us to imagine what it was like for them.”

Despite its depictions of same-sex relationships at the turn of the 20th century, The Featherbed wasn’t written with a gay audience in mind and Miller was not hopeful of its appeal to at least one half of the gay community.

“I expected that gay men would hate it,” he says frankly. “And that my lesbian friends would like it.” But the reality has been a pleasant surprise. “I’ve had gay men who I thought would be uninterested in the story come up to me and say, ‘It was really great to read the book, it wasn’t the usual gay crap’,” he says, with a self-conscious laugh. “I took that to mean that it wasn’t the typical story of the young gay man troubled by the urban gay lifestyle and his sexual partners and relationships. Obviously, it wasn’t fair of me (to think that gay men wouldn’t like the book). A lot of gay men identify with women … the ways in which we experience discrimination are similar.”

Identifying with women is clearly important to Miller. His book is dedicated to his two grandmothers, about whom he says, “Their lives were not anything like the lives I’ve written about but parts of their personalities crept in, in spite of myself.” He also mentions his mother, who worked as a sexual health educator and took her small children (Miller and his two brothers) to pro-choice rallies with her, as a role-model. Many of his close friends are women and he took great pains to make sure that the female voices used in the novel rang true to them, giving lie to the adage that one must “write what one knows.” About that ‘truism,’ Miller says “When people say ‘write about what you know,’ that doesn’t mean that you need to write about your life. My life isn’t that interesting, why would anyone want to read about it? You have to bring your sensibility to your writing but choosing a subject matter … that isn’t necessarily ‘of your life’ can be very freeing to the imagination.”

Continuing to free his imagination in the writing of his second novel, Miller is currently conducting primary research by interviewing people who remember Toronto in the 1930s, the period in which the next novel is set. He remarks that researching history as a writer and imagining people’s lives in the time period created an interest in history that he’d never had before. “So much more interesting than it ever was in school! It’s a joy to learn about it and if there’s one thing I hope to achieve with (The Featherbed), it’s to show this time period in an enjoyable way.” It’s a fitting goal for a novel about learning one’s history and one that The Featherbed achieves with skill and grace.

Andrea Németh is an associate editor at fab.