The McLaren vs. Onstad Championship Chicklit Canlit Catfight

I was just too lectured-out from the Location-Based Services Seminar to sit through the Katrina Onstad’s and Leah McLaren’s book reading at the Gladstone Hotel, but luckily for posterity, ace reporter Eldon Brown was on the scene. Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you his write-up of the reading.

In case you’re not familiar with the Accordion City lit scene, some introductions are in order. First, Leah McLaren. I’ve written about her before:

You might remember her from last year’s fuss over an article she wrote in The Spectator complaining about how British men were pretty useless at the art of seduction (You may also recall that another pretty North American woman, Gwyneth Paltrow, had the same complaint). Leah writes the what-it’s-like-to-be-young-blonde-and-beautiful-like-me-in-this-crazy-old-world column Generation Why, which I presume is the Globe and Mail’s bid to attract the twenty-something entry-level-at-the-firm crowd. Middle-level white collar worker bees make up the lion’s share of their readership, and they have to come from somewhere.

I have met Leah in passing at one cocktail party or another (hey,

the accordion opens doors) but I what I know about her, I know through

her columns. Let’s just say that I’ve seen better paper after wiping my

ass. The self absorption is so great that not even light — and

certainly not humility — can escape. There’s not much

research or thought put into the writing; one can imagine that she

bashes them out just before deadlines between venti macchiatos at ‘Bucks (and one can imagine she calls it “‘Bucks”, too) while multitasking between the Pottery Barn and Holt Renfrew catalogues. Her writing doesn’t contain so much personality as metropolitan hipster responses to urban stimuli.

Leah’s new book — not yet in stores — is The Continuity Girl, which is described as such:

The novel tells the story of Meredith Moore, a continuity girl who

monitors the minutiae of the film biz, assessing whether props,

costumes, and actors move through their scenes realistically. Meredith

is also fanatically consistent outside of her job: she wears flat

shoes, lives in a lacklustre Toronto condo, and gets neurotic about

things like dirty dishes. All this changes when Meredith wakes up on

her 35th birthday convinced that her family-planning window is about to

slam shut. So begins her transcontinental quest for daddy material, in

which she and best friend Mish party their way through England and

Italy shopping for a sperm donor.

Egad. I think I’ve met an army of Merediths.

The reading’s other author is Katrina Onstad, whose book, How Happy to Be, is describes as follows:

Maxime is an

entertainment writer at a flailing neo-con newspaper. She’s been dining

out too long, literally and figuratively, on a culture of celebrity

worship and empty punditry. She seeks refuge from her better judgment

in endless parties, ritual substance abuse, and half-hearted attempts

to get herself fired, but in a libertarian newsroom where outrageous

spin is the easiest way to sell papers, her bad-girl behaviour just

wins her more accolades.

Along this path of self-destruction,

Max’s past, comic and poignant, keeps intruding: memories of her

mother’s brutal death and her hippie father’s crippling breakdown; the

reappearance of an aging vegan idealist who briefly played her stepmom

on the West Coast commune where she came of age; tender realizations

about the bad artist she was supposed to marry and a long-lost

boyfriend who seems exotically sane. When a host of prior indiscretions

finally catches up with her, Maxime realizes that any chance at

happiness depends on uncovering, at last, her one true story.

The press had noted that How Happy to Be includes a number of “thinly-veiled caricatures” of Toronto media “personalities”, including “one is clearly drawn from the [Leah McLaren] school of self-involved young female columnists, writing

columns about “her ass, her boyfriend’s crooked penis, her loft….”

And thus, the local grapevine, knowing that the present-day audience feeds like ghouls off manufactured conflict, promoted the event as a catfight. Under normal circumstances, especially since the Gladstone is crawling distance from work, I wouldn’t have been able to resist.

Eldon did better than just go to the event and write it up for me — he even got me an authographed copy of Leah’s book:

The inscription reads: “To Joey: It’s my Bovine Sex Club, not yours!”, which is in reference to this blog entry.

Well, that’s enough preamble. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Eldon Brown’s report.

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Like a grainy poster on a Queen St. West telephone pole promoting Mexican Burlesque Wrestling, I came across the Scene column in the weekend National Post promoting a mud match of the media: Leah McLaren vs. Katrina Onstad. 

A Chicklit Canlit Catfight?  

Hey, why not?  

There was a much better chance of this getting interesting than say, if Douglas Coupland and Russell Smith were to square off. 

When I arrived, the art room at the Gladstone was already more packed than the streetcar I took to get there. There were also a lot less people being tossed out of it for yelling obscenities. It was standing room only, overflowing back towards the bar. While getting settled in by perusing the draft taps it took me a moment to realize that the person blocking my way to them was the Continuity Girl herself, Leah McLaren. 

The evening was being hosted by Pages Bookstore as part of their This is Not a Reading Series. At the time of this writing they were the only place in Toronto that currently had copies of Leah’s new book, The Continuity Girl.  

After introducing the night and some of their upcoming events, they welcomed CTV host Seamus O’Regan to the stage to referee the fight, err, MC the night. He first welcomed, “K.O” Katrina Onstad in the green, standing pretty tall, and weighing not much soaking wet, having gone 3 and 0 in the National Magazine Award nominations to the stage. She was followed by Leah McLaren in the brown, also taller than I thought and maybe weighing a bit more than Katrina. As the newcomer, her record stood untested. It was looking to be an interesting title card match. 

They both took to their respective corners, clutched their drinks and started to size each other up. 

Seamus started them off with what would have seemed to have been an easy question, “Can each of you give us a synopsis of your book?” 

Like the kid in the class that always sits in the front row, Katrina jumped right in, reciting an almost verbatim synopsis of her book from the publisher. Leah, probably one of those kids that sat at the back, appeared a little less prepared for class, started by first explaining what a continuity girl was, “You know the person in the movie, especially Canadian produced movies, that makes sure the actor’s cigarette is the same hand between takes, or if you have ever watched a scene where the cigarette gets longer, then shorter, then longer, then shorter…” 

The room started to heat up as we wondered where Leah was going with this. Did she just need a smoke or was there more to this erectile simile? What kind of words would she have to make up to explain the made up word Sperm Banditry?  Seamus seemed to express the view of most of the guys in the room, putting a couple of fingers in the collar of his shirt to loosen it as he changed the subject, “Can each of you tell us what it was like while you were writing your books?” 

Leah looked at it from being a newspaper columnist, explaining that it was just like a job, where she cranked out 875 words each day before she started to shut down. Katrina trumped her by comparing the editing to the same as being at a magazine, where she didn’t feel like she really owned the copy so it was fairly painless for her. Whether reacting to the barb that she was just a columnist and not a magazine writer, or her less fond memories of the editing process, Leah likened it to trying to skin a cat in a very animated way, “You keep trying to kill the damn thing, but it keeps coming back. It just won’t die!” 

The passive aggressive Championship Chicklit Canlit Catfight that the Saturday National Post had billed this as was starting to shape up. The Yummy Mummy takes on the Gettin’ Bummy Wannabe Porn Star. 

Seamus tried to distract them both with the catnip of a question, “How did you come up with your characters?” 

Katrina described her lead character as being a past her zenith, party girl writer at a flailing neo-con paper that had grown up on a commune with hippy parents in BC. “Where did I come up with that?” she asked, innocently towards the crowd, then, with a menacing sidelong glance that promised more smackdown to come, towards Leah. 

Leah, looking for cover, ducked into a gushing admiration of Katrina’s book. She recalled the experience of her first reading it while hiding down in her cubicle at the Globe and Mail, just to find Katrina was expecting her there, having her own character waiting in the cubicle just on the next page, ready to pounce. 

Finding no safety there, Leah stumbled on the heels of her boots, attempting to regain her footing, “Ok, everyone, I don’t want this to become some kind of gushy love in here.” 

“I think it is a common experience for women in their late 20’s or early 30’s to have had that one long relationship that they have come out of having been hurt. But then I realize, hey wait, I wasn’t married, so it is not like I’m divorced or anything.” Again the lines between characters and writers blurred as Katrina reeled from this foreshadowing blow. 

With Katrina stunned as her happily married, two kids and dog life flashed before her eyes, Leah turned to the crowd, and struck again, “Hey, did anyone of you see The Bachelor last night? There was this girl, Jehan, who, was like, “I have a big secret to tell you Travis. I was recently divorced.” And he was like, totally freaked out about it. How weird is that?” 

It was as if to say, “Katrina, I’m taking you downtown and I’m doing it on the Vomit Comet.”  

In the ring, Leah stomped around the fallen Katrina, elaborating on her own lead character, “She is tiny! Dark. Fragile. Organized, meticulous and totally anal. For those who know me, she is the complete opposite of me!” 

She could have finished it with “I will crush her!” like a super villain revealing all their plans before ending the captured hero’s life. 

In the contrast of opposites, it sounded like Leah was describing  herself as big, blond, and kind of messy. Sort of like the disheveled Afghan puppy from the children’s books, What-A-Mess. After that, the mental image of her hair matted with leaves from falling in a duck pond just didn’t make seem that scary anymore. 

If Katrina didn’t get up soon, her wit would still be no match for Leah’s waist. Not wanting the match to end before some good hair pulling and clothes ripping, Seamus distracted Leah, “So, how about those male protagonists, and what’s with those wacky names?” 

Katrina, propped herself up on one elbow and swung high, in a literary sense, “My character is a Salinger reference, and no one has got it yet.”  

Leah looked hurt by it, “Hey, my character has a literary reference too.” 

Continuing the colour commentating, Seamus added, “In both of your books the characters seem to go full circle, from earnest artist boyfriends, to earnest science boyfriends, while shagging a few bankers along the way for good measure. So is that the new thing? Do you look for science nerds yourselves?” 

One was wondering if Seamus thought the corduroy blazer he was wearing might pay off. 

Katrina flashed a smile full of domestic bliss, “Well, yes I guess I kind of have now, haven’t  I? How about you Leah, how’s that working for you?” 

Like a Newfoundland cod fisherman, Leah came back empty handed, “Um… Well… I sort of did, but, well, he got away.” 

In the same way a rock band would shout out “Hello Toronto. You Rock!” to get the local crowd going, Seamus next asked the ladies to talk about the locations and Toronto as the backdrop in their books. 

Katrina answered first, “Well after reading so much Canlit in my undergrad and then reading even more again during my Masters, I didn’t want to write another typical stormy east coast, wind in the grass prairie, closing scene in small town Ontario book. I think Toronto is over its own self consciousness and can stand internationally as its own location.” 

Self consciously mulling her own single undergrad degree, Leah decided to come back with her worldliness, talking about her experiences in London, “It is a great place to be a writer. They have like 60 daily papers that need good copy. They have actual evening editions that say “Extra! Extra!” It even pays as much as magazine writing. It can be a pound a word. It’s like being a porn star but for writers.” 

I wasn’t sure if Leah was channeling all the burlesque shows that had been on the stage before her at the Gladstone or some other hidden desire. 

Adding to her haymaker, Leah coloured in the windswept prairie scenery a bit more for Katrina, “Mind you, the prairies can be pretty bleak too. It is one thing to get divorced, but I sure wouldn’t want to have a divorce, in say, Portage La Prairie.”  

Katrina looked as if she was making a mental note to herself, “No long family road trips in the minivan out west. Especially through Manitoba.” 

The match went back and forth as they both commented on how various Canadian cities, like St. John’s,  were now standing on their own as locations in new Canadian fiction and not their quaint stereotypical selves. However, just like the stereotypical boyfriend not content to watch from the sidelines as the two girls went at it, Seamus jumped in with, “Hey, I’m from Newfoundland and it’s not like I’ve ever jigged a cod either.” Later on we found out that this, in fact, may not have been true… 

The next fishing trip was more obvious as the two were asked to what extent was what they wrote about memoir or fiction.  

Leah started it with a good observation, that even in a memoir, how much is actually the truth vs. fiction anyway. Did the writer actually have a notebook or record everything as it was being said or was it just their own memory of the events and what was said?  

I hope everyone keeps that in mind while reading this. 

She further illustrated it with the example of James Frey, the author of “A Million Little Pieces”. She recalled how the book was initially written and shopped around as fiction until an editor asked James to rewrite it as a memoir. She shared a good insight that, “Hey, the temptation to not take out all the juicy parts is pretty great when you have a multimillion dollar publishing and movie contract deal on the line.” 

The truth isn’t always stranger than fiction. But apparently it pays better. 

Both Katrina and Leah also noted that the market for fiction is a fraction of what it is for memoir these days and apparently the new thing to do is take a year off to do something and then write about the experience. By way of example, Leah mentioned, “The Year of Yes” by Maria Dahvana Headley where the author says yes to every guy who asks her out on a date. Leah then went on to add, “So you could take a year off and get into porn and then write about it.” 

There it was again. The porn star thing. In her defense there had been quite a few burlesque shows at the Gladstone before last night. Maybe she had found some discarded tassels backstage and was starting to get ideas. Just the same, I was beginning to wonder. 

If sabbatical memoir was the new thing then if some guy was to quit their job to wander back and forth between Vancouver and Toronto for the next five years would that count in this new genre? “Something about a Boy” meets “Timbit Nation” meets “Noise”. I’d have to ask them if I got the chance. 

Like all good wrestling storylines the time had come for Leah and Katrina to overcome their differences and join forces to fight a bigger evil – celebrities.  

Both of them said that something they didn’t want their books to be while writing them were lists of anecdotal things that had happened to them as they were journalists. Even though everyone apparently wondered what celebrities smell like, it was something neither of them wanted to touch on. They had both approached the problem in different ways, Leah, by not writing about a journalist, Katrina , by not writing about a journalist that had the same experience as her. By staying further from shore, Leah faired better as Katrina admitted to name dropping a celebrity from her real life in her book. 

Not wanting to let Leah cash in on all the sexpot glamour of porn stars and hookers, Katrina backed her up and added to all of Leah explanations of what it was like to interview a celebrity,  

“It was just like being a hooker.”

“Yep. You felt like a total whore.”

“You usually met them at the Sheraton or the Four Seasons, but usually it was the Four Seasons. You would arrive early and have to wait outside their hotel room until it was your time. Then you would be led in to the room and you would have like 15 minutes. You tried to make them feel comfortable and then just try to get it all done before you had to go.”

“If you couldn’t get the atmosphere between you and the person it was really awkward. It felt awful.”

“Totally. I  would  rather offer to do something else with them for the 15 minutes than ask my questions.”

“Sometimes it would be really weird when you were trying to get them to open up and they would ask how you were and to tell them something about yourself.” But like a pro, she wouldn’t let them kiss her on the mouth, “I’m fine thanks, now how about more about you?” 

Between her experiences in London, frequent references to porn stars, and her intimate knowledge of the inner workings of Four Seasons hotel rooms, I kept finding myself asking, “Could Leah McLaren actually be Belle de Jour, the author of The Intimate Adventures of a London Call Girl?” 

With all of the celebrity name dropping going back and forth in the context of a hotel room at the Four Seasons filled with hookers, Seamus couldn’t take not getting in on any of the sisterly love any longer, as he finally erupted, “I have a Tom Cruise story!” 

It was like a needle skipping off a record as both of the girls, and the room went silent. Everyone looked at him expectantly. “Tell us! Tell us your Tom Cruise story!” Leah, and Katrina said in unison. 

After quickly realizing that a guy talking about being treated like a hooker by a celebrity wasn’t as cool as a girl doing it, he demurred with an apologetic fist over his mouth and turned to the crowd to bail him out by starting the Q&A session. 

To stir the coals again I was tempted to ask, “Ok, I have enough to get just one of your books. Whose should I get and why?” 

Unfortunately, the somewhat more milquetoast question of would they be writing another book or not got the floor instead. Surprisingly, it seemed to be enough to get the game back on. 

Katrina was the first to swing again, “I don’t think I would write about a partying it-girl journalist again. It’s covered ground and I don’t think there is anything interesting left to say about it. I’m already working on something new.” 

Staying with a common theme, Leah came back with, “It’s kind of like breaking up with a guy. The first thing people ask you is, Do you think you will get back together? What? I just broke up with him. No. We won’t getting back together. I just wrote a book. Leave me alone.” She finished with, “Well, ok, I have an idea, but…” 

There was a bit of a break as both Leah and Katrina stayed to sign books and chat. In between myself and the people in front of me, they took a moment to chat with each other about the night. I didn’t catch the conversation, but they struck me as a couple of pro wrestlers back in the dressing room as they happily discussed the match and congratulated each other,

“So Leah, great comeback tonight, hey tomorrow, do you want to lead in with soccer mom joke before I go for the boyfriend thing. Oh, and your nails look great.”

“Sure, that sounds cool Katrina. Do you really like them? I was at the St. Anne’s Spa last weekend. You should totally come out to my place sometime and we’ll go there.”

“I’d love to.” 

I figured it would be worth the look on her face alone when I asked her to sign a book for Joey, letting him know the Bovine Sex Club was hers, not his. She had a great sense of humour and didn’t hesitate to go along with it. She genuinely appeared puzzled by my request and seemed not to get the reference at all. So either the Party Princess doesn’t read the Accordion Guy or she sweetly and completely pulled one over on me. We compared some local knowledge as people from neighbouring small towns are apt to do before I left. 

As someone who lives in a bit of a Wonder Bread glass house myself I am hesitant to throw buns. For all I remember, Leah may have been the girl at my high school dance I didn’t have the nerve to ask to dance. It turns out she used to write on the same student paper as someone in my family, the same way Joey and I did back at Golden Words so the one of degree of separation is there. Besides, anyone who is a bit self conscious about being messy and indelicate, likes to drink cheap draft on Queen West, while contemplating the life of porn stars, and has a potty mouth that may rival Christie Blatchford’s one day can’t be all bad. In a lot of ways she is a lot like another young journalist Joey and I knew back at Queen’s. 

Before leaving the Gladstone I came across Seamus and asked about the Tom Cruise story. He had a good sense of humour about it too, but downplayed it as not being that interesting compared to the stories the girls had been telling. He wasn’t specific and all I could gather was that it involved Tom Cruise putting his arm around Seamus, taking him into his hotel room and closing the door. Apparently Seamus only got one shot while he was in there and it was all over in less than three minutes. He reflected that Tom had been a professional and meticulous throughout their abbreviated time together.