In the name of my father: My dad didn’t like my novel, but not for the reasons I’d projected.

The free room was in the back of a bar in Toronto’s Kensington Market. Stoners, hipsters, gluten-free bakeries. A taco place next to a taco place next to a bicycle co-op. The manager of the bar was kind. Set up a glass keg of tap water with lemon. Didn’t flinch when my husband fiddled with the AV. My guests would drink heavily, I promised him. Joking. Not joking. Sweating. Anxious. Hair too flat? Dress too short? I felt overexposed and also under. Would nobody show up? Would I? Because those bathroom taps could have infected me with a pathogen that made my eyes bleed. You couldn’t hold that against me.Then my father walked in, his head poking around the corner. I saw him through the enormous keg of water, lemon wedges where his eyes should be. “Don’t mind me, Embo,” he said. “You keep doing what you’re doing.” What I was doing was rifling through my novel, desperately deciding on what to read to my friends, my mother and sister, to my husband so handsome in a tie. But, mostly, to my father. Who drove the five hours from Ottawa to Toronto, speeding along the scenic route until two lanes became eight became a monstrous 18. It was a long, stressful journey to get to me. *

“He once wrote a letter to The Globe and Mail denouncing my beloved Harry Potter.”

My novel, The Weather Inside, is about what happens when religion takes an unruly turn, when people mess it up and get ugly. It’s about revenge, power, marriage, and the lies we tell ourselves to survive. The first chapter is a shower sex scene. The ones that follow explore the hazards of institutionalized faith. There is sexual abuse and swearing and infidelity. My father has no patience for these things, in life or in literature. A deeply religious man, he has taken pains to avoid stepping inside the apartment that my partner and I—then unmarried—shared. He sends me copies of the Catechism in the mail. He once wrote a letter to The Globe and Mail denouncing my beloved Harry Potter.My father doesn’t read Harry Potter. He reads Christian novels, specifically Amish. He orders copies from bookstores that don’t stock them, reserves them via inter-library loan, borrows them from church friends. Any way he can get them, he gets them. Lots of them. There are stacks by the couch. Every now and then he sends a copy to me in the mail. They have titles like The Amish Bride and The Quilter’s Daughter. He wasn’t always into books like these. As a young man, he worshipped Salinger and Vonnegut. He even interviewed one of Hemingway’s old drinking buddies for a newspaper. Today, though? It’s all Amish this and Amish that. “Why do you read these books?” I once asked him. “They’re relaxing and easy,” he said. “And they speak to my values.”I wasn’t conscious of my father’s values being separate from my own until my First Communion. I was only eight, but I remember my unease building moment by moment. White dress not unlike a bride’s. Bishop’s ridiculous hat. Disc melting on my tongue. Notes of cardboard and vanilla. Something about the Body of Christ. Afterwards, a throng of family back at the house. A bible-shaped cake. I had no idea what I’d just agreed to.

 “The more I found myself in books, the more my father found himself in religion, and the further we travelled away from one another.”

The rest of my religious life was much the same. Confusion and doubt disguised as rebellion. When I turned 13, my father let me make my own decisions about God. I stopped going to church, and spent my Sundays reading fiction instead. Anne Rice, Maeve Binchy, and Wally Lamb. The more I found myself in books, the more my father found himself in religion, and the further we travelled away from one another.  * I was in the Dark Ages bathroom taking a deep breath. There was salt on my glasses but I couldn’t remember crying. It was possible though, the anxiety seeping out. After all, I’d been worrying about this moment for ten years: my father’s realization that his daughter’s life’s work was in direct opposition to his.When I emerged, the free room was nearly full. I looked for my father and found him at the back near the projector. The stream of digital snowflakes was shooting above his head, just missing him. He hadn’t cracked my book yet, which was a relief. Maybe he never would. Maybe he’d heed my warnings: It’s not your thing, Dad; you won’t like it. Maybe all he’d know of it was the reading I was performing, the dad-appropriate passage I’d chosen. No sex, no heavy religious overtones. Only a bus ride, a thing about cancer, and a Keanu Reeves reference he wouldn’t get.I barely saw my dad for the rest of the night. I was hidden behind my boxes of books, signing copies for my friends, mini essays that filled the page after the copyright page. She’s writing another book, was a joke often repeated. It was 8:55 p.m. when I emerged and hugged my dad goodbye, promising I’d see him tomorrow for brunch in another room in another hipster neighbourhood. When he walked out into the night and through a cloud of marijuana vapour, my worries intensified. He would be at his hotel soon. He’d read the book; he couldn’t not. Oh God oh God please don’t hate me, Dad. It was the only kind of praying I did anymore.           * Says me and every novelist: My book is fiction. I am not Avery, my main character. And I didn’t base Calvin, the weatherman, on you or your boyfriend. Each page is the product of creative subduction—truths, half-truths, and pure imaginings colliding like tectonic plates and raising a new world. The father in the novel is a fiction, too. Mostly. Except for the feelings associated with him. The comfort Avery finds in him, the safety. The fear of the loss of him, the panic that took her away from herself. That’s all true. When I wrote of this father, I thought of my own. Wrestling in the living room, us kids piled on top of him like animals. Hitting tennis balls. Crunching breadsticks on the deck. Finding me in the crowd at my first concert. Hours-long debates about abortion, God, the Catholic Church. Two-sentence letters wrapped around a photo. Blood in the cardiac ward. Hugs, rare but warm, and now with a kiss on the head. * I showed up for brunch the next morning. More salt on my glasses but still no memory of tears. I was worried that my father had read the first page and slammed the book shut. That he’d driven back to Ottawa in the middle of the night, changed his phone number, changed the locks. Instead though, he was early. He didn’t even mention the book. He just ordered and ate his off-menu eggs. Cooed at my niece as she stuck her fists in all the water glasses. Made small talk with my mother, mostly listening. He paid the bill, then drove back to Ottawa taking the scenic route, stopping for some Pringles where the Greyhound busses stop.           * I gave him two weeks and three days. One week to read it and one to digest what he’d read. Plus three days for me to work up the nerve to call him. I was over caffeinated on bad coffee from the café I like only for its long oak tables, so I was shaking when my father answered. “Hello?” His voice deep and curious. I could picture him standing in the kitchen next to the door to the basement. It was open, so I could see all the way down. Cement floor. Ping pong/pool table. My brother’s room and the windows he used to climb out of. The walls my dad let sister number two paint an unspeakable purple. She moved to New Zealand, brother to BC, sister number one to the burbs, me to Toronto, my mother to Regina. My dad still in Ottawa, with those hideous purple walls.“I finished your book,” he told me. My flight/fight response dialed up, preparing me for his disappointment, a melodramatic monologue I’d been writing in my head for ten years. It’s an insult to religion, to God, to me and my beliefs, to everything I wanted you to grow up and become. Our name is on that book. My name. What were you thinking? But what he said was this: “I want to congratulate you; you put a lot of work and effort and thought into this, Embo. Now I wouldn’t say that I liked it. But it’s very descriptive, very articulate. I wasn’t happy about the language. The f-words. They detracted from the book. Minus the vulgarity, it was interesting. In many ways, it was about forgiveness.” *If I could, I would transport myself back to that free room, stand next to my father in the light of my Art Haus film shuddering on the screen. He’d smile at me and say, surprised, “You’re projecting?” And I’d turn to him and laugh. “Yeah,” I’d say, “I do that.”***Emily Saso writes fiction and screenplays. She lives in Toronto and blogs at egoburn.blogspot.ca. The Weather Inside (Freehand Books) is her debut novel.