Amy feels that she has lost her creative identity to motherhood. Though she loves her daughter Alice and her husband Max, a math professor studying “geometric topology” and quantum field theory, she cannot help but feel that her career as a musician has been permanently sidelined.
Lindsay Zier-Vogel’s new novel “The Fun Times Brigade” (Book*hug Press) is as much about the joy and struggle of musical collaboration as the way that motherhood can eclipse everything else a person has ever been.
“The Fun Times Brigade,” by Lindsay Zier-Vogel, Book*hug Press, 352 pages, $24.95.
“She used to be able to sit down and churn out lyrics,” the narrator writes, “whipping out a song in an hour, sometimes less, but now she’s stuck bouncing and swaying in her backyard, unable to even walk down to Bloor to get herself a coffee. She doesn’t know who she is without a guitar in her hands. She doesn’t know who she is without an audience waiting for an encore.”
Zier-Vogel has written the novel in alternating chapters that skip across swaths of time, with Amy’s life as a children’s TV entertainer and touring musician carefully joined with the realities of diaper changes, playdates and late-night internet searches about infant socialization. When a marital indiscretion puts her relationship at risk, Amy is forced to consider the actual cost of living in the past when a promising future beckons.
Toronto-based Zier-Vogel’s books include “Letters to Amelia” and “Dear Street.” Her work has also appeared in Chatelaine, Today’s Parent, the Globe and Mail and the Temz Review.
What did you last read and what made you read it?
I just finished “Moon Road” and am still reeling. Sarah Leipciger’s conversations between old partners on a road trip to find answers about their daughter’s disappearance were irreverent and heartbreaking and pitch perfect.
Lindsay Zier-Vogel calls some of the writing in“Moon Road” “irreverent and heartbreaking and pitch perfect.”
I’m in a book club that is less book club and more a bunch of writers, publishers and librarians who sit around and talk about books we love, and I got the recommendation from our group chat. I’ll read anything they suggest.
What book would your readers be shocked to find in your collection?
I read a lot of middle grade fiction these days. It began as I started reading what my kids were reading, but I’ve fallen in love with middle grade books — to the point where I’ve started writing one myself. My favourite recent middle grade books include “My Life as a Diamond” (Jenny Manzer), “Fast Pitch” (Nic Stone), “Living With Viola” (Rosena Fung), “Asking for a Friend” (Ronnie Riley) and “The Firefly Summer” (Morgan Matson).
When was the last time you devoured a book in one, or very few, sittings?
One of my very greatest pleasures is gulping down books in a single sitting. It’s not always possible, but I recently had a weekend that was filled with kid activities and birthday parties I didn’t have to attend, and I devoured Teri Vlassopoulos’ “Living Expenses.” We’re in a writing group together, so I’d read parts of the book in their infancy, and it was such a revelation to read the completed book, and even more glorious to read it all in one gulp.
Lindsay Zier-Vogel read “Living Expenses” in one big gulp.
Who’s the one author or what’s the one book you’ll never understand, despite the praise?
Hemingway. I tried in grad school, but I could never get into his work. I would’ve rather read Chaucer a thousand times over.
What’s the one book that has not garnered the success that it deserves?
I really loved “The Second Season,” by Emily Adrian, and I don’t think it got its due in Canada. In it, a former college basketball player turned sports commentator is gunning for the job that will allow her to be the first woman to call an NBA game on national television, and it fills my ideal Venn diagram of basketball and motherhood and ambition, with a side of sports injuries. Adrian’s rendering of basketball players is so convincing that at one point, I looked one of them up to check their stats.
“The Second Season,” Lindsay Zier-Vogel says, hasn’t gotten its due in Canada.
What book would you give anything to read again for the first time?
Last summer, I gulped down Xochitl Gonzalez’s “Anita de Monte Laughs Last” in a single day, and though I loved every single page, after I finished it, I wished I’d read it over a few weeks instead and savoured it. The book is such an incredible exploration of privilege and power, asking whose voices matter and who gets to decide whose artistic legacy lives on. I might have to read it again this summer.
When you were 10 years old, what was your favourite book?
I was either reading “Anne of Green Gables” for the billionth time, wishing I too could float down a river in a leaky rowboat, or anything by Jean Little: “Mama’s Going to Buy You a Mockingbird,” “Mine for Keeps,” “Hey World, Here I Am!” When I was in Grade 3, I wrote a fan letter to Jean Little and asked her if she could come to my school, and in Grade 4, she did! I got to introduce her and her guide dog to the entire school, and it was the moment I knew I wanted to become a writer.
What fictional character would you like to be friends with?
I wish Rocky, from Catherine Newman’s “Sandwich,” was real. She’d be like my big sister, and we’d sit around and talk about perimenopause and the impossible juggling act of caring for aging parents and parenting young adults. She’d be irreverent and make me laugh and I’d leave with a list of podcasts to listen to, feeling lighter and less alone.
Lindsay Zier-Vogel would like to be friends with Rocky, from Catherine Newman’s “Sandwich.”
Do you have a comfort read that you revisit?
My comfort fictional read is “Tom Lake” by Ann Patchett. It’s a perfectly plotted book, and I will never tire of the conversations her characters have under those cherry trees, or the shenanigans the actors get up to at the summer theatre. My comfort non-fiction book is “Swimming Studies” by Leanne Shapton. The illustrated swimming pools and her descriptions of being in the water are transportive.
What was the last book that made you laugh or cry?
“Leap,” by Simina Popescu — a coming-of-age graphic novelabout two teenage dancers at a performing arts school in Romania. I used to dance, and I haven’t read a book that truly captures the day-to-day realities, power dynamics, dance friendships and physicality of dance training the way this one does.
What is the one book you wish you had written?
Though I generally don’t read — or write— mysteries, I wish I’d written “The Amelia Six,” a middle-grade mystery by Kristin L. Gray. It is set in the present day, and a bunch of preteen Earhart fans win the chance to sleep over at her house turned museum. Of course, things go sideways and Amelia’s famous goggles go missing, and the girls have to team up and find the culprit. It’s truly one of the most perfect books about Amelia Earhart I’ve ever read — and I read all of them.
Lindsay Zier-Vogel wishes she had written the kids’ mystery “The Amelia Six.”
What three authors living or dead would you like to have a coffee with?
I’ve been working with andrea bennett editing a collection of essays on swimming, and what I’d give to meet them in person rather than over Zoom or in the notes section of a Google doc. I’ve also been editing brilliant essays by Adrienne Gruber and Jessica J. Lee for this collection and I so wish we could meet to chat about writing and parenting. And after coffee, we’d all go swimming.
What does your definition of personal literary success look like?
My definition of literary success is having more time to write. I’ve recently been able to take Thursdays off client work — when I’m not writing books, I work as a grant writer — and it has been truly transformational for my writing process. I’d also love to publish more picture books because I love doing author visits at schools and libraries.
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