Journalist Elizabeth Kelly recently published her debut novel, Apologize, Apologize! (Rory Dean/Knopf Canada)

Let Elizabeth Kelly tell you her story, and you'll hear about a life lived with little forethought: married in her early 20s (to her high-school sweetheart), four kids straight away and a stop-start — if ultimately award-winning — career in journalism.

"Typically for me, everything that could go wrong would go wrong," the writer says during a telephone interview from her home in Merrickville, Ont. "I'm not saying that as a whine — it's made for a life of high interest."

Apologize, Apologize! is set to be published in the United States, Italy, Germany and the Netherlands, and it's already been optioned by Hollywood producers.

Kelly began as a summer intern at the Brantford Expositor, eventually landed at Hamilton Magazine (which she edited for 13 years) and won five National Magazine Awards between 1987 and 1999. Her CV also includes six unpublished novels – each represented by a literary agent, and each in turn rejected by a string of publishing houses.

"I started to think of myself as the world's greatest choker: I'd always just collapse at the finish line," she says, describing her days of child-rearing, household duties, work, pets and "writing feverishly" on the side so she "didn't have to be a journalist anymore."

Now, at 56, Kelly's wish has finally come true. Two decades after she began what her kids came to call her "futile efforts," Knopf Canada has published her debut novel, Apologize, Apologize!, a ribald, rollicking tale of a fractious New England family called the Flanagans.

And after many false starts, Kelly might have just hit the mother lode: Apologize, Apologize! is set to be published in the United States, Italy, Germany and the Netherlands, and it's already been optioned by Hollywood producers Daryl Roth and Richard Gladstein. Apologize, Apologize! lands like Andrew Davidson's The Gargoyle or Tish Cohen's Town House (which was summarily sold to Hollywood, as well): that rare Canadian novel that arrives with all the hubbub of a hit.

For novel No. 7, Kelly knew she needed to think tactically; this time, her manuscript wasn't getting stuffed into a drawer. So she read up on the publishing business, on editors and literary agents. And when she finished Apologize, Apologize!, in late 2006, she immediately aimed at New York. Her target? A bona fide "super agent."

"With publishing being as it is, I needed a champion with a lot of clout," she says. After being turned down by one agent, a New York-based friend offered to introduce Kelly to Molly Friedrich, whose agency counts novelists Sue Grafton, Frank McCourt and Terry McMillan among its clients. Contacted during a rare lull in her schedule, Friedrich let Kelly e-mail her the entire novel. Within a week, Friedrich phoned, suggested some revisions and shortly thereafter Kelly signed on.

(Knopf Canada )

"It was one of those things, that you just imagine: what if somebody like Molly Friedrich loved my novel? And what if she was able to sell it? And what if, and what if, what if? I know it's a cliché to say the stars aligned, but we all hope we get one moment like that. Everything just worked."

Kelly's plan was proof of the elite agent's power. Friedrich sold Apologize, Apologize! to Knopf Canada, then to Twelve, an imprint run by New York publisher Jonathan Karp. Karp sent the novel to Roth, who, after being asked to write a blurb, said she'd actually like to turn the book into a movie. Kelly won't discuss the financial terms of these deals, but she's currently writing the Apologize! screenplay for the Hollywood production company FilmColony.

Why did Apologize, Apologize! spark such interest? It's quick and quirky and filled with characters that fit neatly into an off-centre yarn. A pair of brothers lie at the heart of things: Collie (the narrator) and Bing, growing up to the "dissonant soundtrack" of a house fueled by wealth, banter, alcohol and domestic fury. The novel, set largely in upper-middle-class New England, pivots on a springtime crisis, and the unravelling of an already troubled household.

Apologize, Apologize! can be extremely funny. Take the spelling bee Collie's Uncle Tom creates, with words such as "auntiefrankensteinestablishmentitarianism."

"It's not a real word," Collie says to his uncle.

"Oh yes, it is," Tom replies. "I wouldn't expect you to know with your limited intelligence and lack of sophistication."

"What's it mean, then?"

"It refers to the sweeping powers possessed by a categorically ugly female relative."

"Use it in a sentence."

"My sister, your maiden aunt Brigid Flanagan, is a classic example of the terrifying phenomenon known as auntiefrankensteinestablishmentitarianism, whereby children, at seeing her hideous visage, instantly turn into turnips. That's why they're known as turnips, by the by, just one more thing about which you're abysmally ignorant."

Kelly says she wanted the story to "resonate" with an international audience — hence, the American locale. "I've never been anywhere," says Kelly, a self-described homebody, before listing a handful of Ontario cities she's lived in. She ended up in Merrickville, a village just south of Ottawa, when her husband, a systems analyst, switched jobs.

"I love Canada, obviously; I never leave! But I never wanted to be held hostage to that. Frankly, it just doesn't compel my imagination the same way, to set [the novel] in Saskatchewan or something."

Kelly's own family, she says, is nothing like the Flanagans. She's had a longtime fascination with the relationship between brothers. Apologize!, she says, is "a love letter to the family," and she's been surprised that people have called the Flanagans dysfunctional. She considers them, in their way, performance artists.

During our interview, Kelly spoke frequently, and affectionately, of her own domestic life: her 100-year-old house, her love of pets (dogs figure prominently in Apologize!) and, above all, her husband of three decades and her four adult children.

So what's next for a 56-year-old first-time novelist? Much depends, Kelly says, on the success of Apologize! She has an idea for her next book. After a career at under-the-radar publications, she seems delighted, and nervous, about her new stature. Still, her years as a journalist have steeled her for this moment.

"It's the one thing in my life I take very seriously," she says of novel-writing. "But once it's done and once it's out there, I don't take it seriously at all — neither the slings nor the arrows."

Apologize, Apologize! is published by Knopf Canada and is in stores now.

Greg Buium is a writer based in Vancouver.