When did you first come up with the idea for your book?

In the summer of 2019, my husband and I had a one-year-old child and a five-year-old business and neither one was sleeping enough. We had escaped to Algonquin Park for the weekend, and our daughter was (finally) down for a nap. I was looking out at the forest and still, peaceful lake when a nineteen-year-old Englishman started talking in my head. He had a kind of melancholy drawl, and he was addressing someone called Pen (short for Penelope; a nonbeliever in marriage, she had excised the “elope,” as it turned out). I scribbled what they were saying to each other in my notebook, but I was very cagey about it. Over the next several months, I would write down other bits and pieces when they came, but I was not yet ready to believe something might be taking shape. It took a year and another baby before I made the conscious (and terrifying) decision that the voices were characters in a novel, and that I wanted to write it through to the end.

What advice do you have for someone struggling to make time to write?

I don’t know about advice, but here’s what worked for me. I promised myself I would get to the end. I told myself it didn’t matter how long it took, or whether I then put it into a drawer forever. I just had to get to the end. Once I knew I had to write the whole thing, or else, I started to find scraps of time. I more or less gave up on having a social life for that period of time. I wrote at night after the kids were asleep. At first, it was an hour here and there, and then it got to the point where I needed longer stretches of time, and I found them where I could (I don’t want to understate how hard and frustrating this was—it was incredibly hard and frustrating, but that was how I knew how important it was to me). I usually write longhand so I can’t edit as I go, in part to trick myself into going forward instead of spending precious writing time revising. I tried hard not to revise until the thing was out of me. I often broke this rule, but I did eventually get to the end.

What’s the last great book you read by a Canadian writer?

Moon Road by Sarah Leipciger is extraordinary. The landscapes, interior and exterior, are beautifully rendered. I also read an early copy of a book that is coming out next summer, I believe, called The Wild Beneath by Kelly Anderson, which was incandescent.

Did anything surprise you while writing your longlisted book? 

The octopus surprised me. When I began mapping out the story in my mind, she was not a part of the plan. But of course, my life while the story took shape was saturated with the demands and rewards of motherhood, and as I went deeper into the minds and hearts of my characters, I found myself returning to this question of maternal self-sacrifice and self-erasure, and how we’ve viewed it over the past few generations.

How many drafts did you go through?

Somewhere between 50 and 100. When I finished writing it through to the end, I rewrote it for two more years before showing it to anyone.

Follow us on X, Bluesky, Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn for the latest Giller Prize news, including when the shortlist is announced on October 6, 2025.