My way into the narrative seemed easy enough. I began by imagining being thirteen. Immediately memory kicked in and transported me to a few days I once spent at a summer place in a park north of Edmonton. My recollection of the actual place was hazy and centred on a canoe gliding through sunlit lily pads in a setting like Monet’s garden. But the feelings aroused by remembering being in that canoe were intense. The warmth of the air, the slowness of the canoe, my fingers trailing in the cool water, and above all the sense of a quiet becoming—all of this came back to me. It was as if I held the young person I once was within my seventy-something self.
It was a joy to sink through time and find that young self, a rare indulgence, and I have to admit I was also beguiled by the romance of the place I was half-remembering and half-imagining. It was a place of narrow paths through stands of tall, dark trees, a memory of walking in and out of slanted light. And more than anything it was a place defined by water: a big northern lake, a charming stream, even an in-ground pool, in Alberta, in 1962. As my seventy-something narrator says, “Everywhere I looked in my reconstruction of those days, I saw water, and water is always moving. Light on water is always moving.” With that light on water reflecting its shifting patterns over everything and everyone, the whole setting shimmered with the sense of something about to happen. It was the perfect place for a girl to slip into womanhood.
The setting was enhanced for me, as it had been the year I was thirteen, by the mystery of the women who were there, who gathered by the pool each day. I’d been awed by their sophistication. These were women who were comfortable with a glass or two of wine at five o’clock, and easy with one another. I was a watcher and an eavesdropper by inclination, like one of the narrators of the novel. As I tried to imagine and capture Carol’s memories, I found myself lingering over them and delaying the shocking act I knew had to happen. I found myself wanting to let Carol stay in love with the setting and the women—because I was in love with it all myself, all over again. Writers are wary of letting too much authorial enjoyment into a novel, but luckily delay is a good element in a mystery; maybe it is even crucial.
I wrote A Study in Red while I was struggling with a lengthy episode of long Covid. The enforced immobility and isolation of that time played into the writing and I put my character, in the present of the novel, into the same predicament. Long hours spent on my couch became long hours she spent on hers. There was a feeling of immersion in experience that was much like lying on the bottom of a canoe when it is stilled. You are going nowhere, but just as the canoe picks up the movement in the water under it, your thoughts go on in constant, unwilled motion.
Writing the first parts of Carol’s experience in the northern forest provided an escape for me, an escape from the fuzzy frustration of my condition and from the fears I was beginning to have of creeping old age. I let those parts of the novel be an escape for her, too. Together, we remembered how it felt to wear a new swimsuit that flattered because it was the first meant to hold breasts, how we hoped our breasts would grow enough to fill the cups, how that hope embarrassed us. It was a real joy to imagine Carol negotiating her new sexuality and the new image of herself that was resulting. When she tells of an incident in which she came across a gorgeous young couple she calls “the honey couple” making out, she responds with wishing she could be both of them at once. And her seventy-something self experiences a surprisingly strong arousal too. Another joy for me, as strong as imagining that physical response, was creating a scene in which Carol spouts poetry to the woman who owns the summer place, a romance writer herself. I’d been enthralled, as a teenager, by the poems Carol discusses. I loved remembering the heady sense of discovery that comes from first inhaling poetry as if it were breath.
I remembered much of my adolescence as a waiting time. I was impatient to find out who I was. I must have thought becoming an adult would answer that question, as if I would burst out of my cocoon and become the butterfly I was meant to be. I put Carol near the end of that phase. I saw it as a spell similar to the Covid induced time we all spent apart from ordinary living, waiting for real life to start again. But the thirteen-year-old’s anticipation is a different kind of waiting and it’s more exciting because it’s made of hope. It’s so open to possibility it was fun to imagine her impatience, the impediments, and the discoveries.
A Study in Red has two narrators who tell their stories in alternating chapters. Amy and Carol are both young and they are both old. This is the beauty of fiction. In one novel you can create characters who occupy several time zones. You can explore layers of memory. We know that memories can get warped. They may be plain wrong and this novel explores how wrong they can be. But writing it showed me that the errors we make in remembering are meaningful.
In the present day of the novel, Amy is eighty, Carol in her early seventies. I tried to give both of them, in their different experiences of isolation and aging, constructive ways to be alone with themselves, to make some discoveries — because as old as they are, they still haven’t become who they are. Who does, until their last breath? And it’s a good thing to remember that even at the end of life we have more to learn. But I need to acknowledge the other truth that every day we live there is less time in front of us. There is less hope, more fear and the biggest fear is that time, in pulling us forwards, will make it seem as if we are going backwards (see Shakespeare’s seven ages) and all we have gained will be lost.
I got involved in two kinds of mysteries while writing this book. One mystery was the plot of the novel, the other was the mystery of living a life. When you really think about how a life is lived, when you have many years of your own to look back on, you have to wonder if you had a clue the whole time about what you were doing. You might doubt you’re the same person you were yesterday. But imagining Carol’s experiences, different though most of them were from my own, gave me access to the girl I once was. It made me feel as if I had a continuous self; it made me think it’s possible that nothing is lost. Or maybe as Elizabeth Bishop did I’m learning the art of losing. So far I know this: even as I change I’m still stubbornly me. This knowledge hasn’t made me confident of the future but it has made me braver.
Connie Gault is the recipient of the 2025 Cheryl and Henry Kloppenburg Award for Literary Excellence. Her most recent novel, The Rasmussen Papers, was short-listed for the 2024 Toronto Book Award. Previous fiction has won several Saskatchewan awards and has been short-listed for the Commonwealth Prize for Best Novel of Canada and the Caribbean and long-listed for the Giller Prize. After living most of her life in Saskatchewan, Connie now resides in London, Ontario.
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