Lawrence Hill, Reading a Sister’s Stuff as a Brother
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/07/28
Lawrence Hill is one of Canada’s most distinguished and published authors. In this extensive interview, we discuss everything in Hill’s purview. In his words, “I have to say that I don’t think I’ve ever been interviewed by somebody who had such a profound grasp of such a wide variety of things that I’ve shared, written, or spoken about whether they are personal, professional or things to do with my books or my family life.” This series will explore his life and philosophy, just for you, part 3.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Your late sister, Karen, suffered from bipolar disorder. She went to a restaurant, choked, lost consciousness, and died in the hospital 5 days later. How did this life battle with mental illness and then the death affect you?
Lawrence Hill:It affected me in all the imaginable ways. It took my sister from me. I lost one of the people that I most love in the world. It was a visceral, immediate, loss. Many will face it. It is hard to lose a loved one unexpectedly far before their time. It affected me by taking someone from me that I love very deeply.
Jacobsen: For those that might read this in the future with family members suffering from mental illness, any advice for coping with the emotional pain that might coincide with it?
Hill: My advice: don’t be alone. It is tremendous work emotionally, intellectually, and financially to help somebody who suffers from mental illness. It is alienating if you have to do that alone. If you have a community of people to come and work together in supporting the ill person, it can help.
If you are alone, it can be brutally alienating, lonely, and crushing. However, if you have institutions, nurses, social workers, psychiatrists, friends, family members and neighbors involved with the ill person, everyone can help in their respective ways. It can become less overwhelming. That’s one of the most important things: to build a network. If you are helping an ill person, you will need help too.
Jacobsen: She wrote a book entitled Café Babanussa (2016) and an essay inside called On Being Crazy.You have read these.
Hill: Yes, I read them.
Jacobsen: Did her written work impact you?
Hill: I have been reading Karen’s fiction and non-fiction for decades. It has been a lifelong process. Karen worked on Café Babanussa for 20 years. I’ve been reading it, tuning into her life, commenting on it, encouraging her, and being a brotherly figure by reading her stuff for a long time now. The book was intertwined with her own life. Discussing it became an extension of our sibling relationship.
Jacobsen: One thing that comes from the written word by you. For me, the genuine compassion and open-heartedness in pursuit of real narratives and concern for people. You write on slaves. You write on immigrants. You write on freedom of speech, freedom of expression, and freedom of the press. Uncomfortable truths are still truths. The truth matters. To me, this seems humanistic. Universal truths relevant to everyone. What motivates this passion for compassionate truth?
Hill: It’s giving back. Most writers examine issues of injustice, imbalance, or societal wrongs, whether they are tiny wrongs or tiny instances of public awareness. No matter how heinous, tiny wrongs done in the household up to genocides perpetuated on the whole mass of people.
Writers tend to explore inhumanity. Hopefully, to put a stop to it or protest against it, I’m not alone in this. Writing is a profoundly moral act. You’re asserting your morality every time that you pick up a pen and take it to the page. For me, writing is engaging with the world.
Writing is a way of expressing our own humanity, failings, a way of struggling to make sense of life and inhumanity, and to push ourselves to a better place. But when I am at work writing, I don’t think on such a grand scale. Typically, it is pedestrian and manageable. I am burning to tell a story.
Jacobsen: Any religious or secular framework, perspective, or worldview supporting it?
Hill: No. Certainly, not a religious framework, I was raised by two atheists. Those two atheists in turn were raised by two religious people. On my father’s side, my grandfather and great grandfather were both ministers in the African Episcopal Church in the United States.
My father went from being a church minister to being an atheist. I have great interest in religion and people’s perception of religion throughout history. Religion sometimes informs my stories, but I’m not a religious person myself.
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