A conversation with the author and journalist Cathrin Bradbury

'You pin people to the page like a butterfly... there's a ruthlessness to writing you just can't get around.'

Apart from a tiny handful of editors (two of whom are my mother and husband), I’m pretty much self-taught as a writer. I’ve been afforded many opportunities, but I had to figure out what to do with them myself. Teaching takes time and patience. Most editors in the 21st Century have very little of the latter due to a severe shortage of the former. If your need your writing needs to be “workshopped,” be prepared to pay for it. And if you’re being paid to write, you probably already know how to self-edit. That’s how it’s been for me.

Cathrin Bradbury, however, stands as a singular exception. Not only did she give me my first writing job (as a staff columnist and feature writer at The Globe and Mail, way back in 1999), she taught me how to write a story.

Back in 1999 when I was a 22-year-old a summer intern at The Globe, I filed some wooly, half-baked copy to the desk. An hour before deadline, Cathrin, who was then Weekend Features Editor, messaged me to come talk. I entered her huge windowless overly-air-conditioned office with trepidation. She told me to sit down without looking up from her screen. When she’d finished typing, Cathrin spun around in her huge black office chair, whipped off her drugstore bifocals, narrowed her eyes at me and said, ‘You have no idea how to write a feature do you?’

‘Well I didn’t go to journalism school—’ I began.

‘I know,’ she snapped. ‘I don’t care about. Look, you’re fast and you’re good but your stuff is too uneven.’

Then, in precisely the time it takes to soft boil an egg, she taught me how to write a colour feature. It went roughly like this: Anecdotal lede, real-person quote, nutgraf [must have 2-3 hard numbers, if you can’t dig up DIG HARDER] pointy-head quote, bridge, joke, anecdote, real-person quote, bridge, hard number, pointy-head quote, anecdote, joke, bridge real-person quote, summary, bridge, joke, kicker.

She drew a diagram of this magic formula on the back of a page proof, circled it, then told me to have the story back on her desk in exactly 17 minutes, which I did. It was a longest one-on-one meeting we ever had; she was my boss for over a decade.

In newspapers, that’s a good thing.

After both of us left the Globe, Cathrin and I became mates and I discovered a whole other side to her — a warm, companionable, whimsical, relaxed, girlfriendy side which was a total revelation.

(Isn't it astonishing when you you have a strong, rigid perception of another person, built on years of evidence and close personal observation that later turns out to be… not wrong exactly, but just a minor facet of who they are? For me, getting to know Cathrin has been a bit like entering an impressive and rather imposing, meticulously organised walk-in closet and then after a decade or so stumbling on a hidden door that led to whimsical corridor that led to a serious of dazzling interconnected rooms.)

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I’d always admired Cathrin, I was (and remain) grateful for the way she championed me, especially early on in my career. But I also found her very intimidating. Her emotional boundaries are very much in tact, especially at work. In the newsroom Cathrin is a force of nature — a pusher, a prodder, a relentless, an unapologetically pragmatic “little tug boat” as she aptly describes herself in her book.

But as a friend Cathrin is insightful, reflective and soulful. A doter, a listener, a talker, a girls’ girl. She can even be — as she would be the first to admit — a bit scatty. A goof.

She does not use fucking exclamation points!!! in her emails. She absolutely does not care if people mistake this for coldness or haughtiness or whatever because, as she points out, male managers do not use fucking exclamation points!!! in their emails. She advises young women not to use exclamation points in work emails.

If you are a young woman, please don’t use exclamation points in your emails.

It’s bloody good advice.

She’s a marvel of multitudes, really, and on top of this Cathrin writes like an angel (an angel with a jaundiced eye and a withering sense of humour) — not that she bothered to reveal this little secret until she was well into her 50s. Until then Cathrin was too busy editing copy and running major news organisations. The list of writers, editors and reporters she’s mentored over the years is long and lauded, but it turns out she not only nurtured talent, she is a talent. A major one. And, as you will read in the interview she has astonishing insight and wisdom to share with her fellow writers and readers. ////CUT??

Cathrin and I spoke earlier this month, during her final weeks as Senior News Director at CBC News. As of the fall she will “retire” to her writing shed in Toronto’s Annex neighbourhood. Journalism’s loss, will undoubtedly be publishing’s gain because she’s currently at work on a novel. Her first book, a memoir entitled, The Brightside: A Happy Book About a Sad Year, recently came out in paperback. It’s absolutely brilliant and you if you haven’t already bought it you should.

LM: Why were you moved to write a memoir? Was it something you'd been thinking about for a while or the result of the confluence of events you describe in the book?

CB: I’d been thinking about this book, or rather the events of this book, for about three years before I began to write. 

In 2015, the year I eventually wrote about, a lot happened right on top of each other: my mother died; my ruined brother came back from near certain death just in time to see her out; and my oldest friend, whose life my mother saved when we were girls, returned to my own life after a 20-year absence. It was the confluence of those events, as you say, that I carried around for some time. I wanted to follow the string that connected us when we were young, and then again in my mother’s final year, when we all unexpectedly came together once more. 

Alice Munro wrote, “Something happened here. In your life there are few places, or maybe only one place, where something happened. And then there are other places, which are just other places.” For me, this year I wrote about, with all these events crammed together, became my place where something happened. Time became so dense it took on a kind of physical terrain. It felt like a place worth exploring. It felt like if I could understand what went on in that year it might help me understand what went on everywhere. 

LM: Your voice in The Bright Side is incredibly human -- hilarious, self-deprecating, empathetic, emotionally present, and at times devastatingly withering about the people and events in your life. Did the prospect of being that open in print scare you at all? How did you decide what to reveal about your internal state and how? Was there anything you kept back, and if so, why?

CB: Oddly, as someone who’s been an editor her whole career and therefore, by choice, very much behind the scenes, I had absolutely zero problem writing about myself – intimately and at length. I have no idea where that came from. 

I will say that the events of the year I eventually wrote about changed me. They internalized me, is one way to put it; and the way I changed became the arc of the book, not one I’d anticipated when I started writing. As you write you’re uncovering information about the book you’re writing: Martin Amis said something like that in Inside Story, his autofiction book. I found it to be true.

LM: Much of The Bright Side is about the dynamics of your big, diverse family of adult siblings and how you intersected and related to each other around the time of your parents' deaths. What was it like bringing your siblings to life as characters on the page? How did they react and how did it change or challenge your relationships with them?

CB: That's a good question about bringing real people to life on the page, because of course my siblings are real but they're also characters in my book. As is my own character, the “I” of the memoir. Deborah Levy, in her brilliant Living Autobiography trilogy, wrote that the “I” who was writing was close to herself, yet not herself. She said you invent a persona through which you speak in non-fiction as you do in fiction.

This was also the case with writing about my siblings. I wanted to capture them, their real selves out in the world, as accurately as I could. But as the book went on, they also became characters that I needed to be true and consistent to on the page – not by making things up about them, but through a process of deciding what to put in and what to leave out. 

LM: Most of your long and accomplished career has been in hard news. How did you square the subjective and impressionistic "remembered truth" of memoir writing with the more empirical truth of news journalism, the field in which you were deeply immersed?

I’ll just mention that my career was part hard news, but mostly it focussed on long-form journalism and feature writing.

But to your question: I think memories are true. And if you aren’t certain about a memory, there are reliable tools, as there are with journalism, to help verify them. For The Bright Side I used AccuWeather, to give one small example, to check if my memory of the cloudy day my mother died was correct. It was. (Fortunately, I was writing about 2015, for which there were detailed weather records online). Newspaper reports, bank records, social media – my own posts and other people's – helped me with the facts of that year. My older sister Laura read everything and corrected family details.  

I also interviewed almost everyone who appeared in the book about their own memories of that year. I did this after I wrote the chapter in which they appeared because I needed to work out what I wanted to say before I heard anyone else’s story. And sometimes there was what I called An Inconvenient Truth. My brother Tim had a different version than I did of our brother David's miraculous recovery from addiction; and his version didn’t fit the chapter I'd written. It was super irritating. I resisted Tim's version for some time. But when I finally revised the story to align with the facts he’d given me, it made it much better. 

And when all my siblings had completely different memories of an event, as was the case with my father’s death, I let the reader know that we were going with my version. 

LM: The subject of your memoir is in many ways a litany of difficult/tragic midlife events -- divorce, death, addiction, heartbreak, career setbacks, home-renovation disaster, financial quagmire, health crises -- recounted in a way that manages to be funny and weirdly optimistic without ever being glib. It's quite a trick. How did you manage it? 

Weirdly optimistic – I like that. I get that from my father, the king of the bright side. I can’t do anything about my weird optimism; it’s part of my DNA. As for funny, I think of myself as much less funny than most of the people I know; I know some very funny people. I didn’t set out to be funny, I didn’t think I could pull it off, but it seemed to come out on the page now and then. 

And thank you for saying I avoided glibness. I have to guard against being glib constantly, in writing and in life, especially around hard or painful things. It’s a dead end, glibness, it takes you nowhere.

LM: Did you have any other memoirs or books/authors that became touchstones during the writing process? If so, what were they?

As I was writing The Bright Side I read as much as I ever have, before or since. But I only read one memoir, Mary Karr’s The Liars’ Club. And that was a bad idea. I decided I had nothing whatsoever to say after I read her story. From that point on I didn’t read anything even remotely like a memoir, and I would advise the same to others: don’t read the thing you’re writing while you’re writing it. It’ll throw you off your own voice.