The first time Sarah Fulford ever read Stephen Marche’s writing, they were still teenagers at the University of King’s College in Halifax and Marche was dispatched by the school newspaper to review a play that Fulford had directed.
As Fulford remembers it, Marche gave the play, written by schoolmate Roberta Barker and set during the Irish Easter uprising of 1916, a bad review. Little did either of them know that his critical pan was the dawn of a partnership and seemingly never-ending creative dialogue. More than 20 years later, Fulford and Marche are married with two children, she the editor-in-chief of Toronto Life and he an Esquire columnist and the author of five books including the upcoming The Unmade Bed, an introspective exploration of gender politics annotated by Fulford.
And even when Fulford isn’t overtly scribbling in the margins, Marche says her influence over his writing is “pretty much total.” That first negative review didn’t deter Fulford from reading pretty much everything Marche has written since.
“A lot of our marriage is discussing what constitutes the best possible second nut graf in a magazine feature. When we’re off at some romantic getaway, having dinner, that’s actually what we talk about all the time,” Marche said.
“We’ve been doing that for 20 years. It would be very difficult for me to separate what part of my writing has not been influenced by her. Influenced doesn’t even seem like a strong enough word; she’s in the workshop. She’s changing the sentences of almost everything I’ve written.”
A relationship that happens to be professionally beneficial wasn’t a totally unfamiliar concept for Fulford, whose journalist father Robert fell in love with her mother, Geraldine Sherman, when she was a producer on his radio show. Still, there’s something unique about a husband-wife team sharing words so fluidly.
Among the many possible configurations of a literary family, the writer-editor partnership is perhaps the fortuitously efficient ideal. In other cases, life in a bookish brood can have great benefits and some drawbacks.
Growing up, Emma Richler knew she wanted to be a writer, but didn’t tell anyone. The daughter of famed Montreal author Mordecai Richler, Emma only shared her ambition after she had written what would become the first chapter of her award-winning debut novel Sister Crazy. With her parents in London for Christmas, she showed her writing to her mom first before being urged to share with her dad.
“He called me up to his office and gave me an enormous bear hug and basically said: ‘more, more,’” she recalled over the line from England.
Well, “more, more” is a fitting mantra for Emma Richler’s latest, the sprawling novel Be My Wolff. It’s a complex tale about star-crossed sibling lovers that required 12 years of Richler’s life and a research deep-dive that saw her becoming a functional expert on topics including 19th-century boxing, Russian fairy tales and the Napoleonic Wars.
Richler’s whole family is composed of writers and creatives — her brothers Noah, Jacob and Daniel are journalists and her sister, Martha, is an artist — and perhaps one of her admittedly inherited advantages was knowing exactly how much energy her father devoted to his craft.
“He worked every day of his life and he worked very, very hard,” she said. “I had no intention of saying, ‘oh, I might like to write.’ I had to be absolutely convinced that there was nothing else on Earth I could do.”
Certainly, Richler is quick to acknowledge that her name and connections to the literary industry can be viewed as an advantage. For an aspiring writer with a family tree flush with published writers, cracking into the industry might not seem like an insurmountable mystery the way it might to an outsider. But the work ultimately has to stand on its own, Richler pointed out. “No one publishes a novel as a favour,” she said.
And yet, the perception of privilege — or even nepotism — can be a persistent burden as well.
“If you have a famous name, you are probably judged a little more harshly,” said Richler, whose father died months after her first book was published. “There’s a prejudice that can be slightly burdensome, or merely a little irritating. The presumption is that someone wrote the book for you, or that you never had to work hard to survive.”
Since she has a different last name than her famous mother Lisa Moore, Eva Crocker might be spared the weight of surname-related expectations and accusations of her mother pulling strings when she publishes her debut Barrelling Forward, a collection of short stories, with House of Anansi next month. But she’s proud of the influence her parents had. Her novelist mother once published an article about the joys of having Crocker read short stories to her on winding road trips, stories by George Saunders and Zsuzsi Gartner that reduced the duo to hysterical laughter.
So did Crocker seek her mother’s advice with that first book, a series of carefully observed character sketches?
“Yes, and I really value and respect her opinion,” Crocker said. “She asks me to read her stuff, too, which I love to do because I love her writing. Also, I guess I find it flattering that she’s interested in my opinion.”
Almost all major pieces of Marche’s writing are similarly subject to Fulford’s scrutiny.
She’s the “best magazine editor in the country,” he says. There’s the odd short story or blog post of Marche’s that might go unexamined by his wife, but otherwise, he says, “big pieces, long pieces, pieces that could be dangerous, pieces where I’m like, ‘hey, honey, am I going to get crucified for this?’ I’ll show her those pieces.”
Neither has much experience in sugar-coating criticism, and Marche is happy to receive his eagle-eyed partner’s unvarnished feedback — with one rule, that is.
“She would write ‘huh?’ in the margins, and it drove me crazy. I just hated that. But she stopped. When it was the ‘huh,’ it just made my blood boil.”
Chuckled Fulford: “I have to be more genteel in my notes.”
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