Cold comfort

Author Vendela Vida. (Heidi Meredith/HarperCollins Canada Ltd)

The dark Freudian nooks of fairy tales are haunted by missing mothers. Forget goblins and witches, the real threat is the severing of the maternal bond. Think of poor Cinderella, Snow White, or Hansel and Gretel all of them lost or in peril, because they lacked the magical protection of mother-love. And so it is too for Clarissa Iverton, the flinty, fragmented heroine of Vendela Vida’s spare, fairy tale-like novel Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name.

Clarissa was abandoned by her mother when she was 14. In an act of mortifying cruelty, she strands Clarissa at a Poughkeepsie mall while they are Christmas shopping, leaving a goodbye message with a store clerk (“She said to tell you she got tired of waiting”) before she disappears without a trace. When Clarissa is 28, she becomes wholly orphaned by the death of her father. On the day of the funeral, she happens upon her birth certificate and discovers that the man she just buried was not her biological father after all. Her birth father is a man with the otherworldly name of Eero Valkeapaa, a Sami priest from Lapland, where her mother once lived. Clarissa is a kind of changeling, and this revelation sends her, wounded and furious, first to Helsinki, and then further north to find, if not her father and mother, then at least some answers about her identity. “People assume those in mourning aren’t thinking clearly,” she explains. “Ha! My brain was a razor. A flesh-eating predator.”

Vida, the author of one previous novel, the much-admired And Now You Can Go (Joan Didion, one of Vida’s favourite authors, blurbed that she was “a writer to watch”), and a non-fiction study of female initiation rites, had long wanted to set a novel in Lapland. “My mother is Swedish and when I was growing up I would spend a lot of time in the southern part of Sweden with my aunts and my cousins,” the San Francisco native says over the phone from her office in the city’s Mission district. “I would hear stories about Lapland and it struck me as a fairy-tale landscape that was very mystical. My mom bought me a pair of Sami boots, really beautiful reindeer skin boots with colourful trim, and I would wear them around even in the summertime. Lapland got a hold on my imagination from a very young age.”

The region, which spans the northern stretches of Finland, Norway, Russia and Sweden above the Arctic Circle, is the cultural homeland of the Sami, a nomadic people who traditionally herded reindeer. It also has the storybook distinction of being the residence of Father Christmas. And it was this combination of geography and mythology that made it the ideal backdrop for Clarissa’s quest. Where else could she ride through endless night on the back of a snowmobile with a handsome reindeer herder, or sleep in a hotel made from ice, “an architect’s version of a child’s dream fort?” And when Clarissa collapses from exhaustion and illness, she is given a cup of reindeer blood to drink by a Sami healer (it “tastes like electricity,” she thinks). Even the title, which Vida found during a research trip in a collection of work by the Sami poet Marry Ailonieda Somby, captured both the setting and theme of the novel.

“Here’s someone in shock,” Vida says. “She’s just found out she’s not who she thinks she is. She’s really completely bereft and in mourning. And she goes to Lapland and almost feels at home because the physical landscape mirrors her emotional landscape in many ways. Both are sparse and cold.”

(HarperCollins Canada Ltd)

Like her first novel, this one examines an act of violence, its aftermath and the possibility of forgiveness. In And Now You Can Go, a young woman talks a suicidal gunman out of killing them both; in Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name, the crime is rape. And there’s one more novel, set in Turkey, forthcoming on this theme. “The reason I wanted to write three books on the subject as opposed to one is that I don’t write books to be morally prescriptive and say, ‘This is the right way to do something.’ I’m more interested in raising questions about why we do the things we do. I do think forgiveness is possible, personally, but I’m trying to dive into that question with various scenarios and various solutions.”

These sombre obsessions puzzle the people close to her. “I have a really, maybe, scary ability to separate what I’m writing about from the rest of my life. I’m a pretty happy person. I wake up happy; I go to sleep happy. When my friends read my work, particularly this recent book, they say, ‘Oh my god, I didn’t know you had this darkness in you.’”

The 34-year-old author’s life does seem particularly blessed. Raised in San Francisco by two devoted parents (“They’re fabulous,” she gushes), Vida completed an MFA in creative writing at Columbia University. There, she became friends with classmate Heidi Julavits, a fellow novelist. Along with Ed Park, Vida and Julavits co-edit The Believer, a playful, high-minded literary magazine that they launched in 2003. Vida also happens to be married to literary wunderkind Dave Eggers, with whom she has a young daughter. The couple are reluctant to discuss their private life – Vida once told a journalist, “I hope [readers] don’t see [our marriage] as in any way relevant because I don’t think it is.” Nor does she spend much time thinking about her place in the coterie of young, famous writers like Michael Chabon and Zadie Smith, who are loosely connected through McSweeney’s, the website and quarterly journal, founded by Eggers. “For me, that’s not as important as feeling like I exist in a community of readers. Just being a writer and spending so much time by yourself, it’s nice to know that there’s someone on the receiving end.”

She is happy to discuss her involvement with 826 Valencia, the free writing lab for eight- to 18-year-olds, which Eggers established in 2002. With a pirate-themed toy shop up front (zoning laws required that some of it be a retail space), the drop-in centre is part of “the compound,” Vida jokes, that includes the offices of McSweeney’s and The Believer. “Sitting in your office all day by yourself thinking, ‘Oh, my ideas are sooo interesting,’ is really not appealing to me. I like to complement that solitary time with giving back to the community by teaching these kids and helping them with their writing skills.”

And somehow, between all these projects, she still sneaks in time to write. “That’s where the fun is, coming up with stories. And there have been periods in my life when I thought, ‘OK, I’m going to carve out four months to write!’ But when it happens, it’s completely scary. I wake up at seven and I have a whole day in front of me to write and it freaks me out. I’d rather load on all these responsibilities. And then at the end of the day, after I put my daughter to bed, I freak out because I haven’t done anything. It forces me to get right to work. It’s a much more efficient use of time to have just two hours each day to be annoyed with yourself, rather than a whole day.”

Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name is published by HarperCollins Canada and is in stores now.

Rachel Giese writes about the arts for CBC.ca.