Jann Arden's debut novel The Bittlemores was 15 years in the making
The Canadian singer-songwriter joins Q's Tom Power to talk about her first book of fiction
Jann Arden is a lot of things: an eight-time Juno-winning singer-songwriter, an actor, a television producer and the author of four memoirs. Now, she can add novelist to that list. Arden's debut novel, The Bittlemores, was released at the beginning of November. In an interview with Q's Tom Power, she calls it a "fairy tale of sorts."
The book's titular characters are an aging farm couple, who she describes as "miserable people." They have a life filled with secrets, and a group of farm animals who are plotting to kill them due to their inordinate cruelty (in the world of The Bittlemores, the animals don't talk to people, but can talk with one another).
"I really did want to give these animals human qualities: empathy, kindness, caring, humour," Arden tells Power. "One of the cows stutters. She is just so twisted about what's happened with her, she stutters.… I wanted the cows to endear themselves to the reader."
Arden says she really wanted to make people root for the animals, as well as to explore what made the Bittlemores into the people they are. For her, exploring a character's descent into darkness "makes characters more interesting."
"I needed people to really dislike the Bittlemores," she says. "There's a lot of discomfort. There's animal cruelty, and I'm the biggest animal advocate going, so it was hard for me to write [about] animals getting hurt."
The Bittlemores was a book about 15 years in the making. Arden started work on the novel back in 2007, while recording at a studio in Nashville.
"I had my laptop and I kind of had this idea, so I started tapping out this little idea, which was basically the beginning of this book," she says. "The beginning of this book is quite unchanged. And 10,000 words later, I had this little story in my head."
Then, as she puts it, "life picked up." Arden recorded albums, took care of her ailing mother, toured, and released two additional memoirs. The novel was shelved for months at a time. She'd write 1,500 words here and there, forget what she'd written, and have to go back and read the whole thing in order to remember where she'd left off. Over time, friends started to poke fun at her perpetually unfinished masterwork.
"I did it in little spurts," she says. "And then finally in the last three or four years I thought, 'I have to get this thing done.'"
She adds that, after a while, the "characters start talking for themselves."
"You're just sitting there with your pencil in your hand, jotting down what they want you to," she says. "You have this complex that you're not really writing it at all, you're just the purveyor of these words."
The full interview with Jann Arden is available on our podcast, Q with Tom Power. Listen and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.
Interview with Jann Arden produced by Ben Edwards.
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