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About Lilian
The Latest!
My new novel Web of Angels
is available for pre-order! It's scheduled for release February 2012.
How It All Began
My oldest friend remembers me telling stories when I was five years old, but I didn’t decide to be a writer until I was ten. That was when I discovered not all authors were dead. My life took detours, as life will. In my twenties, I despaired of ever being a real writer, because I was too tired at the end of a boring work day to write at all. Instead, I became a chartered accountant—the last thing I would have dreamed of doing in university. As my own boss, I had a small consulting practise and wrote part-time in a garret, albeit a dry and relatively warm one, for ten years. During that time, I signed up twice in a private (but written) contract with myself to see what I could accomplish in the next few years in return for a lot of penny pinching to buy myself time.
New Mom
About mid-term in the second contract, The River Midnight sold in Canada, the U.S., the UK and a number of European countries. I was able to quit accounting and did not grieve one moment for it, though it had served me well in supporting the work I was passionate about and giving me a life-long understanding of certain practical life matters. I got married the year that The River Midnight was acquired and planned a trip to China for my first child between book tours. I was in New York for an interview with A&E when the news about my older daughter was sent by courier from Children’s Bridge in Ottawa. Every hour I called home to ask my husband who our daughter was: her name, her weight, what her picture looked like. Finally, in the airport waiting for my flight home, he said, “It came.” Someone was talking on a cell phone, new technology and uncommon at the time, but way too loud. It wasn’t a private place to cry but I didn’t care. I knew my baby’s name.
Back To China
I wrote The Singing Fire as a new mom, which changed the course of the novel from draft to draft until The Singing Fire bore little resemblance to the place I started, an experience I’ve had with every novel I’ve written. I finished it just in time to travel to China for my second child, this time in the company not only of my husband, but our first daughter, whose most vivid memory of China is of the gummies she ate the day we received our younger daughter. I knew what day that would be months in advance; I knew it before our file was processed in China, even when the timeline seemed otherwise. It had to be this day: I’d predicted it when I’d written The River Midnight. It was the day that the midwife in that novel gave birth; it was the day that she had her vision of her imagined great-granddaughter—me—with her children. And in fact, on Yom Kippur, the day that the heavens open and God forgives all beings, my second daughter came into my arms. It was just as emotional as the first time. I remember nothing about either occasion except hearing their names and opening my arms. I would let no one else, not even my patient and loving husband, hold them for the first time.
Web of Angels
That same determination, the love, the endurance and overriding impatience have enabled me to write, and re-write, and re-write again. I needed that for Web of Angels, which has been my most challenging book yet, the deepest, the most heart-felt, the most demanding. It is the only book my children remember me writing. They asked me again and again: “Mom, will it get published? Mom, when will it get published?”
Now my dear ones. Now.
Contact Lilian
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