Martha Baillie on the Ethics of Making Literature From a Loved One’s Suffering

In all of Martha Baillie’s books you can feel her sister. Her words offer a portal to the multiplistic experiences of existence—to understand better how cut off we can be from each other and where true connection flickers too.

This year, Baillie’s memoir There is No Blue was published by Granta Books. As well, a screen adaptation of her novel, The Incident Report, launched at the Tribeca Film Festival. The filmic incarnation is called Darkest Miriam; it was executive produced by Charlie Kaufman and stars Britt Lower of Severance fame.

Both Darkest Miriam and There is No Blue consider how mental illnesses impact the people who walk around in the world with them and the folks who are consistent in their daily lives. 

Darkest Miriam features a librarian moving through enormous grief while navigating public facing work. She records the unusual occurrences of the library in a log of incident reports. As she receives notes from a stalker, she starts to knit details of her own life into these accounts and a longform narrative is born within the institutional record. In There is No Blue, Martha details the deaths of all three members of her original family (her mother, father, and sister). She turns over her incomplete understanding of them and the grief of losing them individually. The stories intertwine in the disorientation of their disagreeing conceptions of each other. Baillie spends the largest portion of the memoir with her sister, Christina. She and Martha co-authored the Trillium Award nominated Sister Language. Christina was diagnosed with schizophrenia and died by suicide about a month before that book’s publication in 2019.

I spoke with Baillie in my studio space, a refurbished industrial building in the west end of Toronto. We discussed the ethics of sharing stories that characterize mental health, her attempts at capturing pieces of her relationship with her sister in different texts throughout the years, and how Christina lives on in Darkest Miriam.

Sarah Feldbloom: So Martha, you’ve written eight books, if I’m counting correctly. Six novels and two works of nonfiction. Characters experiencing mental health challenges appear across your work. Can you tell me about what’s guided your choices in illustrating them? 

Martha Baillie: I’ll start with The Incident report, as that’s a book that ethical and aesthetic concerns held me back from writing for a long time. 

When you work in a public library, as I have for decades, you witness strange events. You’re assisting people of all ages, from all walks of life. For those living unhoused, some with mental health issues including addiction, the library offers a crucial refuge. De-escalating conflict between library users and handling aggression aimed at staff are key components of a public library worker’s day. One way of dealing with residual tension is to tell stories. For years I’d tell library stories at home, out loud, emphasizing parts that felt absurd. I knew that if I were to put those oral stories down on paper, I would have to address what’s behind them, including a great deal of pain and isolation, and so for a long time I resisted using the material. And then my sister gave me a novel by Thomas Bernhard, the Austrian writer, called The Voice Imitator. It’s a tiny collection of supposed court reports that are all absurdist. In one, the mayor of Venice and the Mayor of Pisa get in an argument, and end up switching the Leaning Tower for the Bridge of Sighs, then get arrested. In every report there is this delicious tension between the style of the prose and the content. Everything about this little collection set bells ringing in my head and I suddenly thought, ohh, if I were to write a novel made of a series of tiny reports, I could be true to the fragmentation at the heart of the stories I wanted to tell. I had been worried that if I wrote a traditional novel, the people I wanted to include might feel like decorative elements, which didn’t sit right at all. At the same time I didn’t want to take any one of their stories and make it the focus. I didn’t feel I had the right to try and elaborate. All I could do was report the fragments that I’d received. So once that structure came to me, I felt as though I’d found a way to honour how fragmentation is central to many conditions of mental instability, and to living unhoused. I’d found a structure that worked both aesthetically and answered some ethical questions for me. I ended with a novel consisting of an arrangement of 144 incidents.

SF: In other novels you’ve focused on a single character living with a mental health issue who you develop fully. Tell me about your process with that.

MB: You’re right. In If Clara, the protagonist is living with schizophrenia, and in The Search for Heinrich Schlögel the protagonist’s sister makes a suicide attempt. Both those characters are based on my sister, Christina. I felt I knew those characters as well as I knew my sister, by which I mean both very well and not at all. My sister knew I was writing those books. I gave her both manuscripts early on. After reading my description of Heinrich’s sister recovering in a hospital bed following a suicide attempt, Christina said the scene was “a very good aestheticization” of her own experience. 

My sister was afraid to bathe. Her hydrophobia meant that she washed herself minimally. I asked her if she would mind me including this detail in If Clara. She said no, no, that’s totally fine. I want people to understand what I’m up against—they so rarely do. Then she added that what she did find painful in my book was that Clara succeeds in writing a novel, something Christina felt she couldn’t do. I had thought that I was giving my sister a gift by having her character write a novel; I’d imagined her vicarious pleasure. But instead my “gift” felt like a dagger. I so easily got things wrong when trying to guess what would upset her or please her. Slowly, the importance of asking became clear. 

When it came to those I portrayed in the Incident Report, many I’d not seen in years, so I couldn’t ask; I could only draw on memory. I altered details and further fictionalized to make people less recognizable. I wasn’t making exact portraits but creating something new, building meaning from what I’d observed.

SF: I wonder if this may be a good time to talk about your approach to writing Sister Language.

MB: Sure. It was a work of call and response. Certainly, part of the impetus was that I’d used Christina, who was a writer herself, as a character in my books. I’d done so several times, and so I wanted to create a bridge for her to put her voice out into the world more directly, if she wanted that. When I’d approached her in the past, she’d expressed a deep ambivalence about publication, but this time she responded eagerly, asking me to provide a prose framework for her poems, a framework that explained the Formal Thought Disorder that caused words to shatter inside her head. If you said to her “appear,” it would break into “app” and “ear” or “app” and “pear,” and this constant crumbling of language made conversation difficult for her. On the other hand, she was the queen of neologisms. She played with language stunningly. James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, and Beckett were her heroes. She couldn’t write coherent prose, she claimed. But later, as Sister Language evolved, she composed beautiful letters to me that she made part of the book. In actuality, it wasn’t that she couldn’t produce prose, but she regarded doing so as a betrayal of her inner fragmentation. Her selves were numerous; one would take over from another; each had its own function, she said. 

SF: So, when she wrote in a linear way, did you feel that she did that to be of service to you – that she was trying to provide you with ease, give you a gift?

MB: It was, yes, definitely a gift to me, but to her also. She told me that it brought her relief to discover she could do it. Maybe writing letters addressed to me felt so familiar that it was acceptable to her? With any new person she had to develop a whole new language, she said, which felt like “climbing a razor blade.” But between us a language already existed. 

SF: How did you begin drafting the book together? 

MB: I interviewed her about Formal Thought Disorder then took my notes home and typed up what I thought would be a little introduction to one of her pieces or a beginning of a prose framework, and brought it to her. Immediately she said: you know what? Maybe we could put my writing on one page and yours on the opposite page. That way our languages won’t contaminate each other. 

She led the process of creating the book. Since she used a manual typewriter, she put pages of her poetry into an old school binder. My role was to respond on the opposite pages. Every few days the binder changed hands. A little way into this, after I’d included a question in one of my responses, she typed an answer on my page. That she’d broken her rule and snuck onto my page, I saw as an expression of trust. Not long after, she began composing the letters within the text, and from then on the whole thing kept evolving organically. She asked that we put in some of my work as well, and said that what it turned out we were looking at was our two different ways of dealing with language.

We included intricate word collages she’d made, and some of her found photographs. When our publisher accepted the manuscript Christina said: if we’re going to do any editing, I don’t want to be involved because I’ll just want to destroy the whole thing. That’s a process I could care less about. I want to create environments, verbal environments, language environments, that people can enter from any direction. Do what you have to so humans will read it, but any of my pages that go in have to remain untouched. 

So we scanned her pages. 

SF: That’s such a smart method for ensuring that purpose wasn’t lost. It’s a fascinating way for me to think about what’s possible with language, too.

MB: Christina once taped a piece of paper to her fridge door that declared: “language believes in the patient’s existence.” Often, she had difficulty believing that she existed, but she told me that when she read those words she felt witnessed by language. She explained that those words were more alive than she was, that the border between animate and inanimate no longer existed for her.

SF: Martha, what do you think about the danger that people often attribute to artists seeing themselves as being the things they create? 

MB: Well, Christina ended her life several weeks before our book came off the press. Friends of mine have suggested that completing what she’d so wanted to write freed her to leave. They may be right. She may have also not wanted to face being read by strangers. There were many reasons she took her life. 

In a speech she composed, to be read at the book launch she stated that “To reach someone who is schizophrenic and creative can only be done, in my experience, by connecting with the person through the person’s creative endeavour… The Sister Language experience has worked, it has reached me and strengthened me…[it has] achieved what ten years of dedicated psychiatric treatment failed to achieve.” Yet sister language failed to save her from suicide. 

SF: I also have a sister, and maybe because of how dear that relationship is to me, I experience this incredible comfort while reading your books. I think that’s because, for me, your sister feels ever-present in your writing.

MB: That makes me laugh. Early in Sister Language I admit to Christina that I keep referring to her as “my sister,” because of having a hard time writing her name. I explain that writing “Christina,” starts me longing for our old intimacy. Christina’s response was: I can see how you might think that there’s warmth in this exchange, but just let me tell you, schizophrenia is a cold condition: though I can feel genuine excitement about what we’re doing, all emotion feels to me like a form of rape.

In one of the journals she left, she wrote: my sister’s all about bringing people together, and I’m about the opposite. 

But we both needed to make art, and were excited by each other’s art. That was the connection she could allow.

SF: That makes me think about how people classify love in traditional ways, but there are profound examples of how much bigger a concept like love can be. Maybe that’s the same with any concept of connection?

MB: In There is No Blue, there’s a lot of discussion of love and the nature of what love is in the opening piece. My 99-year-old mother is dying and I’m washing her body and making a death mask. And at a certain point, I say that I’ve replaced the word “love” with “attention.” I’m thinking, now, that “attention,” was what could be shared by my sister and me—a shared attention to language. 

SF: A question I want to ask about There is No Blue, which was the book you published next after Sister Language, is that in that story you’re sharing with the reader the characters of your sister and your mother and your father, who have all passed now – and I don’t know if it was my reading of it – but it felt like you were with Christina for the longest, and that her spirit and essence were dominant.

MB: Mm-hmm.

SF: And I was curious about that choice – whether I was reading it as you were meaning for the text to feel. If so, why did you make the decision to structure the piece that way?

MB: Well, I started writing There Is No Blue within a year of Christina’s suicide. She’d inscribed her final message on her bedroom wall, and I took that to be her final poem. That I could read her farewell as a work of art, allowed me to continue a conversation with her, artist to artist. It gave me a structure to hold on to. The book tells the story of my family, but it is dominated by my response to Christina’s last words.

SF: I see the book as a family portrait. And maybe Christina is standing a little closer to the front of the photo.

MB: Yeah, when you have someone within a family who is struggling with a mental health issue, that can take up a lot of space. For us, it was what everybody was responding to—this situation of trying to figure out how to navigate, how to assist, or how not to fail to assist, how to address the struggling. But interestingly, while others feel that a person’s taking up a lot of room, that they are right at the front of the photograph, that all the attention is there—from what I understand based on what Christina told me —inside that person can feel as though they’re not seen at all, because they’re so misunderstood that they’re actually invisible, and that all this attention is coming towards somebody else, a false version of themself. If she read the book, she might say: I’m not here. 

Who knows? I hope that she would recognize herself in the portrait, but would she feel that she was present in the book in the way that I feel she’s present in it, or that you, as a reader, feel she’s present? Hard to say.

SF: Yeah.

MB: And that brings us back to ethics. Publishing this book after my sister had passed away, she couldn’t give me her answer anymore about what was okay with her to include. In the end, I had to ask myself: am I doing this from a place of love? Am I doing this out of respect for this person? Am I trying to encourage understanding of schizophrenia? And if I am, then I have to hope that it’s worth going ahead. But it’s very important to me to make as clear as possible that I’m not an authority on anybody else’s experience. Any memoir is an act of imagination.

SF: The film Darkest Miriam, which is based on your book The Incident Report, recently premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival. Where do you feel Christina in it, and where do you think the audience will feel her in it?

MB: For me the film is saturated with her. A young version of me is very present, too. Writing that book, I was not thinking of the character of Miriam as being my sister, but Britt Lower brings a vulnerability and extreme sensitivity to the role that reminds me of Christina. Maybe I’m just more comfortable seeing Christina rather than me in Miriam. Tom Mercier, who plays Janko, the young Slovenian taxi driver and painter – I can see my sister in his character too. He brings a mesmerising intensity to his performance and his love of language is palpable. One day on set, I asked him to recommend a book, one he really loves, and he said, ohh, The Diary of Vaslov Nijinsky. So, I borrowed it from the Toronto Public Library. In it, Nijinsky is going mad, and his family is about to place him in an asylum. He writes letters to fellow artist, Jean Cocteau, in a language more similar to my sister’s than I’ve ever encountered. Perhaps it was Tom’s interest in Nijinsky’s madness that attracted him to the role of Janko? I didn’t ask. I see Christina to a more limited extent in the library users who behave in strange ways, because my sister was very careful not to draw attention to herself in public. Alone in her room she might have resembled one of those characters. The time she made photocopies of a squashed dead rat (in a plastic bag) at the Toronto Reference library, she made sure her artistic experiment went undetected. 

The director, Naomi Jaye, is brilliant and she’s created a film that is haunting, at least for me. Now you have me wondering if readers who have encountered my sister as you have, in numerous works, will feel her in the film, too.

If you are in crisis, please call, text or chat with the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline at 988, or contact the Crisis Text Line by texting TALK to 741741.

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