Michelle Winters shares the liberation that comes with writing female rage
The N.B.-born writer spoke to The Next Chapter’s Antonio Michael Downing about her novel, Hair for Men.
WARNING: This story may affect those who have experienced sexual and gender-based violence or know someone affected by it.
As a young woman growing up in the Maritimes, writer Michelle Winters remembers attending hardcore punk concerts and the masculine aggression she observed there. Years on, in the aftermath of the #MeToo movement, reckoning with how misogyny seeps into the every day, Winters turned to exploring the power of female rage through music.
In Winters' novel, Hair for Men, Louise is struggling with trauma from her teenage years and lives a life of punk aggression until she gets a job at a men's hair salon. There, she builds relationships with her clients and begins to feel more settled.
But when that sense of calm is destroyed, she runs away to the East Coast to escape her past, which she does successfully until a man from the Bay of Fundy arrives and gives her the opportunity to right her wrongs.
Winters is a writer, painter and translator from Saint John currently living in Toronto. Her novel debut novel, I Am a Truck, was shortlisted for the 2017 Scotiabank Giller Prize. She also translated Kiss the Undertow and Daniil and Vanya by Marie-Hélène Larochelle.
She joined Antonio Michael Downing on The Next Chapter to discuss Hair for Men and the connection between rage, music and womanhood.
Louise has a very love-hate relationship with men. Where did this character come from?
Louise came from #MeToo, the movement. I was thinking about all of the men that were sort of being wiped off the slate based on their behaviour and how they were sort of being snuffed out like little lights. I thought of how we were going to reconcile that as men and women together.
I started seeing a lot of signs around me of forgiveness and I thought, if we're going to manage to come out of this thing, we may need to employ muscles of forgiveness and muscles of atonement that we have never tried before.
I started playing around with some really idealistic notions in my mind and I came up with the idea of just writing a female character who's just wild for men, who just has a natural intrinsic love of men. And I was starting to think of who that would be and trying to develop a little bit about the character and I thought, "What if she's also incredibly aggressive and violent?"
Then the character Louise appeared and I thought, "Hardcore. Of course she's hardcore. She's furious … you can go so many places and build her love and build her rage and then tie in the music." After that, Louise sort of just started presenting herself to me and the propulsion of her rage and her feelings.
We meet Louise in high school and for all of us, it's an awkward time — a time of curiosity but also of insecurity and naivete and an older boy, Mitch, takes advantage of that. Can you tell us about that event and how it affects her?
Louise, at 16 … she's been raised by a father who is beloved of women and when she sees the relationship that her father has with women, it's empowering to the women who love him. She sees the joy and the treats of the handsomeness and the touching and the attention that women get from her father and is sort of developing her own love of men.
And then Mitch is this good looking guy who is rude and obnoxious around her but then suddenly starts to give her attention and it's so flattering.
The experience is turned around so that she feels bad about herself, bad about men, and sort of clamps down in a way that she will emotionally do throughout the book to her great detriment.
So in the great history of pissed off literary fictional characters, there's the famous rage of Achilles in The Iliad, there's Furiosa in Mad Max and now there is Louise in Hair for Men. What's it like writing a character that's just so explosive and consumed by her fury?
It's great, it's so liberating. I was thinking about loving men, forgiving men, getting along and peace and gentleness and I would think about Steubenville, the dreadful football team rape case and that there's a picture of those boys carrying that girl by her hands and feet. And I would just have to think of that picture and I could go off to a very special place where I thought every woman knows this feeling of being this mad.
Anyway, Louise gave me a lot of room to explore that really and it was easy and it was incredibly liberating and constructive. It's great to be able to do something with your anger that's loving and gentle. Like it's so perverse, too, which was a lot of the propulsion for writing this too. It was to take rage and to turn it into nice things, to turn it into gentleness and patience.
Every woman knows this feeling of being this mad.- Michelle Winters
Louise gets into this hardcore punk rock scene. It's violent in reaction to what happened with Mitch. Having been in a few mosh pits, I was reading it and I was like, this sounds like first-hand experience. So were you ever attracted to that hardcore scene when you were a teenager?
I grew up in Saint John, and I think I would call myself like artsy/alternative. Saint John had a really vibrant, hardcore scene and when those shows would come to town and they would put them on in the all ages club, you'd go.
Even if you didn't like hardcore, it was a show and you would go and I learned to lead with my elbows and mess with the drunk people 'cause I was a sober kid. So I have drawn on some experience for Louise.
The Tragically Hip are a recurring motif in this book. The Hip are favourites of the boy who tormented Louise and they have this really male dumbed down kind of rah-rah audience and so it seems like a weird thing for Louise to gravitate towards. Can you talk a little bit about that?
It is a book about complexity of thought. You know, it's a book about growing up and developing the capacity to give up your really limited opinions. Like you're really limited teenage opinions when you're like, "I'm defined by the thing that I hate," to being able to actually open your mind.
The experience of being traumatized by music, I thought, was a crucial one to include.- Michelle Winters
Also, around #MeToo time, a bunch of bands came out and like, the Beastie Boys apologized for all their garbage lyrics. Any number of women I know are traumatized by the Red Hot Chili Peppers just based on the fans. Gord Downie apologized for the behaviour of the male fans. They performed at Woodstock in, I think it was 1999.
It was just such a sea of seething masculinity. Anyway, the experience of being traumatized by music, I thought, was a crucial one to include, too.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
