Toronto-based novelist Michelle Winters.Chris Harms/Supplied
In Hair for Men, the Toronto-based novelist Michelle Winters explores the long tail of trauma in a story bookended by two very different experiences with the Tragically Hip and its fans.
The New Brunswick-born Winters’s second novel, after 2017′s Scotiabank Giller Prize finalist I Am a Truck, follows Louise, a sudden punk fan, through high school, Toronto-area hair salons and an East Coast marina as she grapples with decades of trauma after an assault by high-school classmates.
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It’s a story about the outsized level of control men have over society and about a woman reclaiming her body – and also about forgiveness and the meaning people imbue upon pop culture. Hair for Men (House of Anansi, Aug. 20) is a deeply human novel, one about the things that draw us together and help us understand the world around us.
The author spoke with The Globe and Mail by phone from Toronto last month, on the eve of Hair for Men’s publishing, to unspool how pop-culture connections, youthful stubbornness and carefully plotted ambiguity helped her tell the book’s story.
In the ways that Louise embraces hard-core punk and later, the Tragically Hip, we see a lot of personal growth in the aftermath of trauma. How did this framework fit the story you wanted to tell?
It’s about growing up, and forgiveness, and about the capacity to get beyond the sometimes-harsh perspectives that you cleave to as a young person. A friend of mine once said to me, “God, I miss the time when I could just hold an opinion without any proof or backup at all.” That’s reflective of young Louise, who’s so burned, and who through this incredible humanizing experience, comes around to the capacity to love music that she once hated.
At first in Hair for Men, Hip fandom comes across as an emblem for a certain kind of person – someone who sees radio rock as messages from a god, with a blindered view of other people’s experiences. You also thank the Hip for their songs in the acknowledgments. Walk me through your relationship with their music and their fans.
I was superalternative as a young person – if I was one of three fans of that thing, that was my thing. I obviously had feelings about the Tragically Hip while in university at McGill, when they were superpopular with everybody else. I could not allow it into my ear.
But then, in 2001, I saw Gord Downie perform at a place where I was bartending, and he did an improvised show with Sook-Yin Lee and an orchestra. They passed a line back and forth between them, and then they gradually started building other lines on top of that. By the end of it, they had constructed this pop song. That changed my cellular makeup to a large extent; it brought me down a peg. I just started off with their greatest hits and listened to them on my headphones all the time – learning the subtext and thinking through the melody construction, like, “Why did they go there?” They felt amazing.
The works of director David Lynch fit into Hair for Men as well. What role do you see for pop culture, broadly, in connecting people the way Louise comes to see it?
I’m listening to a lot of Taylor Swift right now. They just had that terrorist threat in Vienna, and the fans are getting together and walking down Cornelia Street. It’s so wonderful. The capacity of pop culture to guide you through human experience is what unifies people. Something like David Lynch, when you discover him, you’re like, “Oh my god, does anybody else know about this?” It’s so personal, because it understands you. If there’s anybody out there consuming it, it understands them, too, and they might understand you.
You said this is a book about forgiveness, but it’s not without a little bit of schadenfreude with one character. Forgiveness isn’t something we talk much about these days in a world that can feel full of absolutes. How did you want to approach that theme?
The concept came from #MeToo in 2017, from watching all of those men, like little lights being snuffed out, and I’ve never seen anything like it. I couldn’t stop thinking, “What do we do with the men?” Does Louis C.K. have to go and work at the gas station? I thought, “Whatever the solution is, is going to involve some muscles of atonement and forgiveness, and the kind of principles that you employ in restorative justice, where you put the accuser and the accused together and they come up with a solution.” My mother was on a restorative-justice board, and I thought, “That’s humanity at its best.” I sort of went off on this idea.
The titular hair salon of Hair for Men may or may not be what it seems, which has significant consequences for the story. How does this ambiguity, particularly the potential involvement of sex work, fit into the story you’re telling?
The illicitness is really what I wanted to get to through Hair for Men – and secrecy, and that there was something that wasn’t allowed by the outside world, and in particular, by men. There’s a beauty to the ambiguity, because there’s so much in the book that doesn’t get a name. What I want to leave open is that there’s a service being rendered. The service is intimate for all kinds of reasons.
This interview has been edited and condensed.