Jane Smiley, in a review for the Chicago Tribune, called My Year of Meats ‘a comical-satirical-farcical-epical-tragical-romantical novel.’

I see this paradoxical nature in my writing, and apparently others do, too. So yes, paradoxical, multifaceted, hybrid … this is who I am. I have homes, real and spiritual, in three cultures. I’m American and Canadian, and I speak Japanese. I think we’re all paradoxical, but in my case, the paradox is overt and conspicuous. Do you find this paradox at work in your own personality? Ruth, as you point out in the book, is a paradoxical bilingual pun transposed into Japanese, it can mean either roots or absence. This is magic-the very ordinary magic of writing fiction. What happens when a character appears and calls the novelist into being? It’s not meant to be taken literally. You can look at the novel as a parable about the process of writing fiction. But the fictional memoir plays out of a set of ‘what if?’ propositions: What if I had found such a diary, and started reading it, and become obsessed with it? What if I’d never encountered Zen, or learned to meditate? What if I could change the past in my dreams? What kind of Ruth would I be?Īnd the fact is, I did wake up one day with the words and voice of a young girl named Nao in my head, and like my fictional Ruth, I could not stop thinking about her until I discovered her fate. Obviously, I did not really find a young Japanese schoolgirl’s diary on the beach. In common-a husband named Oliver, a mother with Alzheimer’s, a moody cat, a house on an island in Desolation Sound-but character Ruth has a more limited perspective and a different set of experiences.

Pressed, I would have to call myself semi-fictional, too!). The character of Ruth is semi-fictional (although if I think of Ruth’s story as a fictional memoir. In what ways are you and the fictional Ruth most alike, and at what points do you most widely differ? In creating the character of Ruth for A Tale for the Time Being, you appear to have drawn heavily on your own recent life, situating her in British Columbia, giving her your name, and even naming her husband after yours. Read more about this enchanting book here. A Tale for the Time Being is the story of sixteen-year-old Nao who lives with her parents in Tokyo and Ruth, a writer who lives on a remote island in Canada, and the ways their very different lives interact. Ruth Ozeki is the bestselling author of My Year of Meats, All Over Creation and, most recently, A Tale for the Time Being.

Author of a tale for the time being