Novel approach

Author Tish Cohen. (HarperCollins Canada)

If he or she is lucky, the typical unknown, first-time Canadian novelist will spend one or a dozen years sneaking in time around day jobs and family demands to finish a book. If she or he is luckier still, there will be an agent kind enough to weed through a slush pile of unsolicited manuscripts and kinder still to offer representation. And if that typical unknown, first-time Canadian novelist really hits the jackpot, he or she might get a smallish advance — say, a low four-figure deal — from a reputable publishing house.

An infinitesimal number might actually see their books become bestsellers (in Canadian terms, that’s about 5,000 books), get nominated for a literary prize or be sold abroad.

Then there’s Tish Cohen. In September 2005, before she’d even found a publisher, the 40-year-old mother of two from the Toronto exurb of Richmond Hill sold her first novel, Town House, to Fox Studios. Director Ridley Scott (Alien, Thelma & Louise, Gladiator) has been brought on to produce and Quills screenwriter Doug Wright is adapting the book for the screen.

Only an anointing from Oprah could have ensured a bigger buzz. After a bidding war, the publishing rights were sold to HarperCollins, a sister company to Fox in Rupert Murdoch’s media and entertainment conglomerate.

Sitting in a Toronto café a year and a half later, just a few days after the novel’s release in the U.S. and Canada, Cohen wears her success discreetly. Model-slim, with an expensive haircut and stylish, black-framed glasses, she looks a little like a finer-boned J.K. Rowling. She won’t reveal the details of her publishing and film deals, but says the money was enough to allow her to “quit my job and get a therapist and a cleaning lady.” The bulk of her movie money will arrive once production starts (Scott’s company is currently searching for a director). Still, until then, she says, she can “comfortably afford to write full-time.”

(HarperCollins Canada)

Town House has already earned the sobriquet About A Girl for its similarities to Nick Hornby’s About A Boy (which was adapted into a hit film starring Hugh Grant). Like Hornby’s novel, Town House is also about a stunted man. In this case, Jack Madigan is an agoraphobic  36-year-old who lives off the dwindling royalties of his late, rock-god father’s recordings in his shabby-genteel and much-borrowed-against home in Boston’s posh Beacon Hill neighbourhood. Jack is slowly drawn out of his panicky, insular world by his precocious nine-year-old neighbour, Lucinda.

It’s no wonder Hollywood came calling: The novel’s quirky characters and feel-good storyline read like a movie and the casting is obvious. Little Lucinda is a dead ringer for Dakota Fanning and Jack is described as a John Cusack type.

In a country that tends to sneer at light literature and beach reads — even the globally famous, literary and unabashedly patriotic Douglas Coupland has never won a major CanLit prize — Cohen is a rare and refreshing breed: an unapologetically commercial author. Like the best-selling Canadian thriller writer Joy Fielding, Cohen is a populist with an eye for the lucrative American market.

“I did approach Canadian agents and I didn’t get a single response,” she says. “I did think I’d have a better chance in the U.S. because the book is commercial and in Canada [the book industry] is much more literary and serious.” Taking the advice of her editors, she decided to set the book in Boston because “Americans wouldn’t read a book set in Toronto.”

Cohen was born in Toronto and raised for a time in Montreal, but her chutzpah was forged in California. When she was 13, her parents separated, and she and her brother moved to Los Angeles with their father, a successful businessman from an artistic family. (One of Cohen’s uncles, Severn Darden, was a journeyman actor; another, Paul Sills, was the co-founder of Chicago’s Second City comedy troupe.) A rebellious teenager, Cohen came of age in Orange County’s punk and new wave scene of the late 1970s and early 1980s. Baz, Town House’s Ozzy Osbourne-like shock rocker, was inspired by the '80s metal bands that Cohen’s two sons, aged 11 and 15, adore. It’s Baz’s son, Jack, who shares Cohen’s musical allegiance to Elvis Costello and The Clash.

Although she had a talent for illustration and an interest in writing, Cohen enrolled in the business program at Ryerson University in Toronto. “It was the '80s, everyone wanted to be in business,” she says, “and I wanted to please my father.” Married soon after graduation, she drifted from job to job — selling insurance, editing a newsletter for a not-for-profit agency, doing decorative painting and running a women’s lifestyle website. She wrote several children’s books that didn’t sell and began to write adult fiction in her late thirties.

Her first book was a semi-autobiographical chick-lit novel about a job-hopping woman trying to find her true calling. A few of the big, commercial U.S. agencies that Cohen approached declined the novel with enough sympathy to encourage her to keep trying.

Her next novel didn’t sell either, but Cohen was picked up by Daniel Lazar, a young agent with Writers House in New York, which represents best-selling authors Ken Follett and Nora Roberts. Cohen pitched him on an idea about an agoraphobe living in a ramshackle mansion.

Lazar asked for an outline and three and a half weeks later, Cohen handed him her first draft. “At that point, I was so desperate to get published that there was nothing else that mattered,” she says. “I didn’t want to eat or sleep. I just wanted to get published.”

She still writes that compulsively when she’s working on a book. After her sons leave for school, she writes from nine in the morning until seven at night. When asked if she’s trying to make up for lost time, Cohen laughs. “You mean, is this a sick feeling of desperation? It’s definitely an obsession. If the book isn’t written and it’s sitting there, I can’t do anything else until it’s finished. I’m sure this isn’t healthy.”

Yet her success turned out to be as painful as the struggle to be published. The night Cohen found out that the book had been sold to Fox, “I woke up at three in the morning with the biggest panic attack of my life. It felt like the rug had been pulled out from underneath me. My life had entirely changed. I’m an anxious type anyway and for three weeks I couldn’t leave the house. Which is ironic, considering I’d written a book about an agoraphobe. Be careful what you write about! When the story broke about the [film] deal, I was getting all these media requests and publicly I was saying, ‘I’m so happy, this is great.’ But privately, I was decomposing.”

Biweekly therapy sessions have helped, as did diving back into writing. Cohen’s at work on a series of young adult novels. The first instalment, titled The Invisible Rules of the Zoë Lama — written in a week and a half — will be released in July, and Cohen’s next adult novel is due out in 2008.

The late bloomer has few regrets about not pursuing a career as a writer earlier in her life, though Cohen says she might have felt less conflicted about success in her 20s. “But I think I would have gotten into a lot of trouble. I was a little too wild when I was younger. I had always thought I was meant to write. I’m just glad I finally did.”

Town House is published by HarperCollins and is in stores now.

Rachel Giese writes about the arts for CBC.ca.

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