Fayne: Ann-Marie MacDonald

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Is it the places where the women live that shape and develop their character or is it their relationships? Because the strength of female character dominates this story. And whether you like her or not, even Clarissa is a reminder of the sacrifices and compromises that women make on a daily basis, and I loved the moments when Clarissa's sharpness were punctuated with why she was the way she was. And in retrospect, I loved all of the women’s strength in this novel. It’s one of its best features of the story, for even in the face of adversity, the women fight and prevail. Does that make the ending a bit too much of a happy one? One could argue it does. But it’s fiction, and I read too many books where women are afterthoughts instead of heroines, so this “sappy” ending sat well with me. Most of the drama could have been easily avoided if there were sincere communication. But we have to face the time when the story was set in. But Jimi, she says, so young and in love, was also “insanely jealous”. She has an extraordinary collection of love letters from him, written in florid, lyrical prose – the same style later evident in his lyrics – that prove without a shadow of a doubt the intensity of his infatuation; an intensity that scared her. “As I write more and more, I feel myself grow so very weak under the power of you,” he wrote in one.

Alternately touching, harrowing, enraging, and memorable, this book took me through a range of emotions to structure a tale that will definitely become an instant classic.She remembers the day it was recorded. She had just come off the road with James Brown in 1968, a tour he had expressly asked her not to go on. “I was gonna make it up to him so he wouldn’t be pissed,” she says. “That’s what I did sometimes, you know, I’d spend a little extra time go and hang with him and stay for a while, just so we’d be OK.” That day, he had called Lithofayne and asked her to come over to his apartment on 12th Street in the Village. While waiting for her to arrive, he began to spontaneously commit to tape his deepest thoughts and feelings for her. The recording lasts about as long as it probably took her to get there. Towards the end, he improvises a line: “I can hear her footsteps coming down the hall”. Soon after, the machine shuts off. MacDonald’s heritage has given her an abiding interest in “the subjugation of peoples within peoples”. I admire Ann-Marie’s prose so much,” says Hannah Moscovitch, who co-created the upcoming stage adaptation of Fall on Your Knees with Palmer, and wrote the script. “The book is iconic. I read it when I was 19, and it meant a lot to me. We didn’t want to make the mistake of putting a book onstage; we tried to create a piece of theatre that would be, in its own right, masterful.” It’s a daunting task; the book was a smash hit, shortlisted for the Giller Prize and winning the Commonwealth Prize, in addition to Oprah’s seal of approval, among other accolades. The stage adaptation is a co-production between five theatre companies, a massive undertaking to support the sheer scale of cast and crew required to tell the story. As such, the play will, unusually, be presented in two parts—“a two-evening extravaganza,” says MacDonald—and will tour Halifax, Ottawa, Toronto, and London, Ont. in 2023. Adds Palmer, who will also direct the adaptation, “The book doesn’t need the theatre adaptation, but the theatre may need the theatre adaptation.” It was our habit to while away an evening's hour in sorting and restoring specimens or reading aloud; tonight, however, I was at a loss to dispel the dullness that had descended unaccountably upon me, and so pleaded sleepiness brought on by wholesome exertion. "Goodnight, Father." I bent and kissed his temple. He reached round and patted my head. He made enough of an impression on her then, as a lover, that her heart skipped a beat when she realised who it was after bumping into him again. “I was like, ‘Oh my God, it’s him.’ I was trying to be real cool.”

She didn’t react for two weeks, until she overheard a commotion, her downstairs neighbour being told her husband had died. Lithofayne didn’t even know the man but broke out “blubberin’ and cryin’” – a delayed reaction, she believes, but possibly not just to Jimi’s death. The arrival of that tutor changes her life. She decides she wants to attend university, though that is not really an option for women in the late 19th century. Her father takes her to Edinburgh for an examination which she assumes is the first step towards admission, but it turns out to be entirely different from what she foresees. The treatment for her ailment is also something she never imagined. Thus begins the unravelling of deep and dark family secrets. I’ve directed her as an actor, I’ve worked with her [on] theatre pieces, I’ve directed plays she’s written on her own and I’ve read drafts of her novels,” says Palmer, a frequent collaborator since the pair met at a theatre festival in 1987. “I feel like I’ve had the privilege of seeing her exploratory process from different points of view, but there are things that are similar no matter the form. There’s a kind of listening she does that I recognize actors doing: listening to voices that are in the world around us, the world of nature, and, like a divining rod, finding out the sources.”When Charlotte's appetite for learning threatens to exceed the bounds of the estate, her father breaks with tradition and hires a tutor to teach his daughter "as you would my son, had I one." But when Charlotte and her tutor's explorations of the bog turn up an unexpected artefact, her father announces he has arranged for her to be cured of her condition, and her world is upended. Charlotte's passion for knowledge and adventure will take her to the bottom of family secrets and to the heart of her own identity. (From Knopf Canada) cod: …A husk or integument; a pod. 1526, William Tyndale, trans. Bible, Luke XV: And he wolde fayne have filled his bely with the coddes, that the swyne ate: and noo man gave hym. (now rare)…