In the beginning...

My Unorthodox Journey to the Published Land: 1

(Note: I may publish a few of these early posts in quick succession to build up an archive for new subscribers to peruse before starting to release new posts every week or so.)

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My father was at least partially responsible. Would I be a writer without his influence? Perhaps, but not likely. My father passed away a few years ago. He was a pediatric surgeon and the first Director of the Emergency Department at Toronto’s famed Hospital for Sick Children. He also loved language and wrote a number of medical books including a sort of memoir and guide for summer camp doctors. And he was a grammarian of the first order whose reverence for proper English usage bordered on the fanatical. Some among my family, friends, and work colleagues over the years would likely lament that I inherited my father’s reputation as a stickler for proper grammar. At Sunday night dinners, my Dad and I would debate the geopolitical implications of the split infinitive. It did cut down on dinner guests. My father was also very, very funny.

Dr. Jim Fallis (late 1980s, I think)

So I grew up in a family where unconditional love, joy in language, and near-constant humour were part of daily life. It helped to have an identical twin brother with whom I competed on all fronts, including trying to make our father laugh. All these years later, we remain very close. I must talk to him a few times a day and we still play on the same line in our weekly ball hockey league. Yes, we still play hockey, though my aging body has been protesting for years. I just ignore it and keep suiting up.

Tim and Terry Fallis (1974)

We’re fourteen in this photo (I think). Such an awkward in between age and stage. Tim is the one on the left wearing the very fashion-forward, avant-garde choker (all the rage in the 70s) while I’m the obviously more mature identical twin on the right. (Oh, to have that much hair again.)

I don’t know if an affinity for language is in the DNA I inherited from my father, or if I just gravitated to it as part of emulating him. Whatever the case, despite a love for science and politics that led me to a degree in mechanical engineering, a stint in the national student movement, and an early career in the smoke-filled backrooms of Parliament Hill, words, sentences, and a love of language and writing were always lurking just offstage.

I confess that until my very late-twenties (okay, okay, I was 30), I was not much of a fiction reader, perhaps a surprising admission from a novelist. But it’s true. Until about 1990, my reading tended towards politics, biography, history, and economics. But I woke up one day, not long after my wife and I were married, and realized I had this gaping hole in my cultural understanding. So I belatedly turned to novels and have never looked back, though my reintroduction to fiction suffered a somewhat rocky start. I thought a good way to begin my fiction journey would be to read all of the books shortlisted for 1990 Booker Prize.

If you haven’t read novels for a long time, starting with John McGahern’s Amongst Women probably wasn’t a great idea. The word “bleak” kept ricocheting around my brainpan. And I just didn’t connect with Penelope Fitzgerald back then either. I’ve come to love Brian Moore since but wasn’t blown away by Lies of Silence. I don’t actually remember much about Bainbridge’s An Awfully Big Adventure, which I know falls somewhat short of a ringing endorsement. So after reading the first four, I was a little discouraged. Then I tackled A.S. Byatt’s Possession and loved it. And I finished with fellow-Canadian Mordecai Richler’s Solomon Gursky Was Here, and it remains a favourite novel. I was happy that A.S. Byatt won the Booker that year. In my inexperienced literary mind, it deserved to. Don’t misunderstand me. All the books were brilliantly written and worthy Booker finalists. I just preferred the stories Byatt and Richler told and I fell headlong into them.

I then worked my way through the rest of Richler’s canon and enjoyed almost all of them, particularly St. Urbain’s Horseman and Joshua Then and Now. The humour in Richler’s writing was almost a revelation. (Richler’s final novel, Barney’s Version was wonderful and won the Leacock Medal for Humour in 1998.) To be honest, until then, I’m not sure I realized that novels could make you laugh. (All right, yes, I had a sheltered literary upbringing.) I stayed with CanLit and read through all of Robertson Davies’ novels and loved them, too, particularly the Deptford Trilogy. He struck me as a writer born about a century late. His prose was wonderful but felt of a different time. And then it happened. Someone suggested I try John Irving. Wow.

You may not know this, but John Irving is my mentor. Don’t worry, John Irving doesn’t know either. But I learned so much from his novels, I think of him as my mentor. My favourite of his novels, though choosing is not easy, would be A Prayer for Owen Meany.

I was thunderstruck by how Irving’s writing made me feel. I’d be laughing uproariously in one paragraph and then have a lump in my throat the size of a small grapefruit in the next. I found Irving’s juxtaposition of humour and pathos—and sometimes rubbing them right up against one another on the page—extraordinarily powerful. You can find this idea in most of my novels, courtesy of John Irving, you know, my mentor. I’ve since met John Irving, though I was not able to construct complete sentences in his presence. (Remind me to tell you another John Irving story involving my editor and me.)

After finishing Irving’s books, I looked for novels that specifically promised in their cover blurbs that I’d laugh. That led me to Christopher Buckley, Stephen Fry, the late, great Canadian writers Paul Quarrington and Donald Jack, Nora Ephron, Roddy Doyle, Michael Frayn, Richard Russo, Howard Jacobson, even P. G. Wodehouse and Evelyn Waugh, and many others, too. In short, I had found my chosen literary genre (if funny novels can be identified as a genre). Of course, not every novel cover-claim that I’d split my side laughing was valid. Often I’d crack not a smile throughout a novel, let alone release a belly laugh or be rendered senseless with mirth. It dawned on me that while Irving, Richler and other writers made it seem effortless, triggering a reader’s laughter simply through words on a page, is no easy feat.

At this stage, in the mid to late 90s, the notion that I might try to write a funny novel myself one day was still a long way off. But this is how it all started for me—a bleak Booker nominee that eventually led me to love reading novels that made me laugh and made me think, preferably at the same time. I do like to laugh.

Yours truly in the library where I write on the third floor of our Toronto home. (Photo credit: Mark Raynes Roberts)

Next up, what finally caused me to put finger to keyboard and write my first novel.