Before she was a best-selling writer, Joy Fielding ignored her high school English teacher’s proclamation that she would, in fact, be a writer.
First, she wanted to be a star.
That’s why, at 22, the Toronto native moved to Hollywood to pursue her acting career. Fielding had, after all, acted in over 20 plays while studying English literature at the University of Toronto.
So — off she went.
After countless auditions, a bit part on the TV series Gunsmoke, a chance to kiss Elvis Presley and a narcissistic hangover, Fielding decided she had had enough.
"I was really unhappy. Hollywood is just a horrible, horrible place to live. It’s just dreadful. It’s really soul destroying," said Fielding, 65, from Yorkville, where she now resides. "I spent two-and-a half years there, and I was pretty much miserable for most of them. But that’s what really renewed my interest in writing," she said.
After moving home, she renewed her vows with the keyboard, and her partnership with the pen was reborn.
These days, Toronto, is "somewhere where I’m very comfortable and I feel very secure, and I love the city," said Fielding.
Now, 22 books and a whole lot of fan mail later, Fielding is a prolific presence on the Canadian literary scene, steadily writing a book every year or two.
Her paperback fiction has found a home on both the Globe and Mail and The New York Times best seller lists and drawn accolades everywhere from People Magazine to Publishers Weekly. From “See Jane Run” to “Mad River Road” to “Charley’s Web” and beyond, Fielding’s page-turners have been hailed as “first-rate mystery thrillers” (St. Petersburg Times, "a drama that hits home" (Cincinnati Enquirer) and "the stuff of nightmares” (San Diego Union).
Fielding says she honestly doesn’t know how many books she’s sold around the world; one Globe and Mail estimate easily puts it in the millions.
"When I moved onto writing I just assumed at some point it would work out," said Fielding. And it’s not over, either. Fielding’s new work, The Wild Zone — about a mysterious woman who turns the lives of five characters upside down — comes out Feb. 23, with a reading at the Hyatt Hotel for World Literacy of Canada, on Feb.24.
As a kid, Fielding was always interested in both acting and writing. She used to write plays and star in them (naturally) for the neighbours. But at Forest Hill Collegiate Institute she had trouble getting parts.
Then at U of T, she was the belle of the theatre department, acting in everything from musicals to plays by Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen.
After things didn’t happen in L.A., Fielding remembered her English teacher’s wise words — literally announcing to the class that Fielding would be a writer — and got serious about her craft.
She wrote her first book, The Best of Friends and sent it out to five Canadian publishers. Two of them replied with offers. She was 27.
That got the ball rolling on a career that was aided by Fielding’s unique background. “No question, the acting has been invaluable,” she says.
“First of all it taught me a lot about drama and conflict and what makes a scene dramatic and what makes a scene work and helped with my ear for dialogue, which I think is very strong.” The Wild Zone is told from five different points of view, something Fielding says could not have been done without her past experience, which also includes a stint at the famed Stratford Festival.
“It absolutely did help me in my ability to get into the souls of the characters I’m writing about. So that when I’m writing from a particular point of view, I am that character or that character is me, and I have to imagine myself in that particular set of circumstances.” Her books, while all different, can effectively be summed up in the term someone once christened “domestic noir.”
They’re also called “psychological suspense,” but Fielding says she’s written love stories, family sagas, horror stories, domestic dramas, thrillers and mysteries.
In general, however, her stories share a common thread: a woman finding her way in the big city. While three novels are set in Toronto, Fielding says her experiences here mean she can write about any city. (She just has to like it, she says. Take that, L.A.)
“Being in Toronto has really helped me just understand the pressures of being a modern woman in a big city,” she says.
They are pressures that Fielding, as a mother of two women now in their 30s, knows well. She calls them the “stresses of modern life” faced by every modern urban women, herself included. “We tend to take on, I think, more responsibility,” she says. “I think women not only take care of themselves but of everything else.”
Some issues touched on in her books also include the frenetic pace of urban life, family expectations, modern technology and isolation.
As a gregarious socialite but a dedicated wordsmith, Fielding embodies what she calls the “dichotomy” of the urban life portrayed in her novels.
“What I do is very isolating. Being a writer, it means spending hours, most of the day, alone in a room by myself with my computer. And yet I’m a very social, outgoing person,” she says. “I like to live right in the middle of a big city. I like that kind of environment and stimulation. And yet I spend most of my time alone. So I’m probably the epitome of the kind of thing I’m talking about.”
Not that she’s complaining.
“I think being a writer is really an ideal profession for someone who is trying to balance both (personal and professional) because I never had to make the very difficult choice of whether to stay home and look after my children or whether to go back to work.”
Over the years, Fielding has honed her process for writing, which was sometimes done with a baby or a dog on her lap.
She can’t say how she comes up with her ideas. It’s just the way her mind works now. “Everything that happens or I see or read about or that happens to me or to a friend or whatever my mind digests and sort of figures out how to spit out in the form of a book,” she says. “I eavesdrop on every conversation I’m around, and I rely on my friends to have interesting crises on a regular basis.”
Her writing process is more defined. While myriad ideas bounce around in her head, she lets them percolate —sometimes for years — and then eventually writes one down. Then she comes up with an outline, fleshed out by some ideas about character and plot. She goes to work, writing for a few hours every day.
She always knows, in detail, the beginning and the end of her books because “you can’t build suspense if you don’t know where you’re going.” While she spends some time every year in the U.S. and has an American publisher (she is represented by Doubleday in Canada), Fielding has no plans to leave her hometown. Although she heads to Florida for the winter, Fielding has learned she doesn’t have to move south to sell her books.
And she wouldn’t want to, anyway.
“My life is here, my family is here, my friends are here,” she says. “Toronto is home.”
WEB EXCLUSIVE CONTENT:
Almost forty years after her first book was published, Fielding says she still can’t believe it happened, and that people enjoy her books so much they write her hundreds of letters a month from across the globe.
"It’s wonderful. Every day I’m really grateful for everything that I have and the way everything has worked out. I worked very, very hard, and I don’t think people have really any sense, because writing is such a solitary act and such a mysterious process, that I don’t think people have any real grasp of what’s involved. Even when you’re not actually writing, your mind is always going." she said. "It’s very nice that people respond to what I do. Because in many ways, it’s like giving birth, and nobody wants to be told that they have an ugly baby," she continued.
"To get this kind of positive feedback and reinforcement and know that there are so many people out there who do appreciate what I do, that’s just tremendously gratifying."
Surely for her fans, good genes run in the family.
