Writer’s Block: Rebecca Păpucaru

All Lit Up: What inspired the idea for As Good a Place as Any?

Rebecca Păpucaru: As Good a Place as Any is my first novel. Its heroine is based, loosely, on a woman I worked for, briefly. Let’s call her Marcela. I’m ashamed to admit that I first intended to write a sort of The Devil Wears Prada; instead of fashionistas and New York, the backdrop would be international development workers and Latin America. My heroine would be a wide-eyed, naïve young Canadian intern—me, basically, except this me would expose the corruption and cruelty of my jaded boss. Probably because it was based on such a superficial reading of my experience, this novel never really jelled.

The real-life Marcela had lived in Canada for decades, returning to Chile when democracy was restored. She was also a closeted lesbian. Perhaps not surprisingly, her fictional counterpart became much more compelling than my own. One day I had a revelation: what if I rewrote the entire novel from her perspective? What if I made my antagonist the protagonist?

Years after my time in Chile, I began to imagine Marcela’s life in Canada. I made Marcela, now Paulina, 16 when she left Chile, young enough, I hoped, not to be burdened by the past, by loss and grief. I even gave her my younger self’s dream of becoming an actress. Unlike me, Paulina manages to earn her living at it.

Being neither gay nor Chilean, I felt obliged to do Paulina’s story justice. I read everything I could find, not just about Chile, but also about the burgeoning gay and women’s liberation movements of 1970s Toronto. For Paulina, exile would be painful but also liberating, even exuberant. As a fellow actor, a Shakespearian veteran, tells Paulina when she comes out, “…being a young lesbian actress was not a bad thing, not at all. In fact, it was the most wonderful thing in the world…Paulina would have her choice of parts, and of choice parts.”

This novel is my small attempt to write myself into someone else, that radical act of imaginative empathy.

All Lit Up: What do you hope readers take away from your book?

Rebecca Păpucaru: That the experience of exile is complicated, that not all refugees are some combination of sad and grateful, or even law-abiding. In my novel Paulina breaks the law, a law that today we know to be unfair, repressive, but at the time, was the law of the land, in this case, 1970s Canada.

Just as there’s no such thing as a perfect victim of sexual assault, there is no perfect refugee, no ideal immigrant. People should be afforded the grace of just being people.

All Lit Up: What books have you read lately that you can’t stop thinking about?

Rebecca Păpucaru: The Siege by Helen Dunmore is a novel about the first winter, in 1941, of the Nazi siege of Leningrad. It’s a beautiful novel about an ugly subject, starvation. It’s about what people will do to survive, to protect the people they love, the most vulnerable. It’s a historical novel but it feels contemporary, alive. The characters are so likeable, you’re just swept up, as they are, by events beyond anyone’s control.

All Lit Up: How do you celebrate when you finish writing a book?

Rebecca Păpucaru: I’ve never really celebrated. My first instinct is to touch grass, to get outside, whenever I’m done, either with a book or a chapter or a story. And to eat something sweet. Get in touch with my body, in a lazy, pleasure-seeking way. Back in the day I might rub one out, if that’s not too crude.

All Lit Up: Are there any real-life experiences or people that have influenced your storytelling?

Rebecca Păpucaru: Ernesto, Paulina’s brother, is arrested because he volunteers at the city morgue. His story is directly inspired by Héctor Herrera. I lived in France for three years, in the south. I was in Nîmes, at a restaurant, El Rinconcito. Someone had painted a colourful wall mural telling Herrera’s story, of hearing the call for volunteers at the Santiago morgue over the radio, just after the coup. The morgue wasn’t used to so many bodies, they needed help. Somehow Herrera recognized Victor Jara, the folksinger, among the bodies. He tracked down Jara’s wife to tell her that her husband was about to be dumped in a mass grave. He and Jara’s friends gave him a proper burial, in secret. It’s an awful story for so many reasons, the brutal killing of an artist, that a morgue would need volunteers, that Jara’s widow might never have known what had happened to him if not for this young man. To see his story told like that, through folk art on the wall of a Chilean restaurant in a small French town, was startling. The Internet tells me the restaurant has closed. I hope someone saved the mural.

All Lit Up: If you could spend a day with one of your characters, who would it be and why?

Rebecca Păpucaru: I wouldn’t say no to a day in the company of Deirdre Zeldin, the abortion-rights crusader who mentors Paulina. She’d probably offer me a cigarette and show off the Del-Em, or menstrual extractor, she picked up stateside. We’d both agree that the world would be a better place if women could terminate a pregnancy in the comfort of their own home. Maybe she’d introduce me to Dr. Henry Morgentaler. As a time traveller, I could tell her that women no longer need to convince a panel of (mostly male) doctors that their abortion is medically necessary. We’d agree that Therapeutic Abortion Committee would make a great band name. I might not tell her about the reversal of Roe v. Wade, but I would tell her that Morgentaler’s Toronto clinic now shares building space with the Bank of Montreal. I think she’d like that.

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Rebecca Păpucaru is a Montreal-based writer. Her poetry collection The Panic Room won the 2018 Canadian Jewish Literary Award for Poetry and was a finalist for the A.M. Klein Prize for Poetry, as well as longlisted for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award. Her work has appeared in publications including Grain, Event, The Dalhousie Review, and The New Quarterly. Her novella Yentas won The Malahat Review’s 2020 Novella Prize. Her debut novel is As Good a Place as Any.