The novel that would not be denied

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This article was published 16/11/2023 (926 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

For more than a decade, the story of a crotchety farm couple with a child they nabbed from a hospital has rattled around in Jann Arden’s brain.

The problem for Arden, 61, is that life kept getting in the way of finishing what would eventually become The Bittlemores, her first novel, published earlier this month by Random House Canada.

Arden, who lives outside Calgary, launches The Bittlemores in Winnipeg tonight at Knox United Church at 7 p.m. as part of a book tour with Rick Mercer — the launch, presented by McNally Robinson Booksellers, is sold out.

The Bittlemores is set on a decrepit farm run by an older couple, Harp and Mrs. Bittlemore. In their younger years they abducted a baby girl from a nearby hospital, raising her (poorly) as their own.

The girl, whom they named Margaret, had a child of her own as a teenager and ran away, leaving the baby, Willa, behind with the Bittlemores.

As Willa grows up, she learns bits and pieces of the truth about her past, enduring the cruelty inflicted on her and the farm animals by the Bittlemores. Margaret tries to contact her daughter through letters, which are inevitably intercepted and hidden by Mrs. Bittlemore. Eventually, Margaret heads back to the farm to see her and a showdown with the Bittlemores ensues.

“I had the idea many, many years ago — I just thought, ‘What would it look like, in a time before cellphones and the internet and DNA, to be in a very rural community, and steal a baby?” Arden says by phone in advance of her Winnipeg appearance. “And then the whole thing was laid out when I thought about their kidnapped daughter having a baby herself. I thought, this is where this can get really fun… the whole idea of secrets getting more complicated the longer you draw them out.”

Between the first notions for The Bittlemores and the finished project, the award-winning singer-songwriter penned a pair of memoirs — If I Knew Then, a treatise on aging, and Feeding My Mother, chronicling her mom’s final days in the grips of Alzheimer’s — started a podcast, starred in and produced the TV series Jann and, of course, wrote and released new music.

But the story of The Bittlemores wouldn’t leave Arden alone, and she kept picking at writing the book for years.

“The running joke at my office was like, ‘I’ll have it done by June, I’ll get it in by January, I think end of May’ — this has been the last five, six years of my life,” says Arden, laughing.

Eventually Arden’s own curiosity spurred her to finish the novel, regardless of whether it ever got published.

“I finally just thought, ‘I need to get this done — just for myself. Am I going to kill the Bittlemores — what’s going to happen here?’ I wanted to know how the story was going to end.”

She also had friends in the book business holding her proverbial feet to the fire.

“My dear friend Nigel, who works for Simon & Schuster in the U.K., he said, ‘If you don’t bloody send that bloody book in, I’m going to bloody kill you,” Arden says in her best British accent.

Arden didn’t find the process of switching between music, memoir and fiction to be overly difficult. “It’s all to do with making your ideas clear, making them understood, having some poetic licence but not being so flowery, not using so many superlatives that you’re mired down by your own idea of what a writer should sound like,” she says.

“I was really mindful that I just write the way I talk. If I read this back to myself, and it doesn’t sound like me saying this, then it’s not real.”

It also behooved Arden to include talking cows in her novel — a trio of bovine BFFs who can converse with each other and other animals, with one able to draw rudimentary letters in the dirt with her hoof.

Arden, who has long been an animal-rights advocate, saw a chance to give the farm creatures some agency and personality. “I wanted people to have empathy for these living sentient beings, see them in a different light — like when they walk by a field or drive by a field that they could imagine a thoughtfulness… I wanted them to be the heroes of their own story,” she says.

Once the final edits on The Bittlemores were done, Arden wasted no time diving back into writing fiction — she’s already working on her second novel.

“It’s turn-of-the-century, nuns running a girl’s school, bad guys out on the Prairies, pioneers going to find their fortune,” she says, adding with a laugh, “I keep telling people, ‘It’s Home Alone, the 1912 edition… with nuns.’”

ben.sigurdson@winnipegfreepress.com

X: @bensigurdson