Lauren B. Davis on
the Story Behind the Novel

I write to figure out what I think about things and to attempt to find meaning. I try to find metaphors through which to explore my feelings about what obsesses me. One of the things I’ve been troubled by in the past few years is the increasing polarization I see around me. It pops up in any number of places—religion, politics (both local and international), public rhetoric, the media, and the like. We don’t have to look far for examples—perhaps no farther than our prisons, or the

town next door, or even our own families.

As I pondered these ever-widening gaps, a story from my past kept rising to the surface. I lived in Nova Scotia for a brief time in the early 1970s. While there, I heard stories about a community based on a nearby mountain. They were terrible stories, involving incest, aborted and deformed babies, prostitution, and so forth. I told myself that these dreadful tales couldn’t be true. I believed, naïvely, that if they were true, surely someone would have done something. Then, a decade later, one of the children of the Goler Clan told her story of generational abuse to a teacher. This teacher came from another province and hadn’t been in Nova Scotia very long. She in turn called an RCMP officer who was also new to the community. They insisted an investigation begin, and eventually many of the clan’s adult members were put in jail and the children placed in foster care.

I was horrified, but also mystified. If all those rumours had been true, why had it taken so long for someone to intervene? The answer seemed to be that the people who lived on the mountain had, for generations, been considered “Those People,” as in “What do you expect from those people?” The residents of the prosperous Annapolis Valley nearby, who lived in communities founded on Puritanical religious principles hundreds of years earlier, believed their neighbours were so “Other” as to be beyond the pale.

The extreme marginalization of the community and the terrible repercussions of ostracism haunted me. The episode seemed the perfect framework for exploring how such ordinary people could do such dreadful things, or permit such dreadful things to continue.

I have had several instances in my own life of feeling like the “Other.” Although I explore the theme more personally in my previous novel, The Stubborn Season, in which a young girl battles the tyranny of living with a mentally ill mother during the Great Depression, the character of Ivy Evans in Our Daily Bread is based on some of my own experiences with marginalization. My family, afflicted by mental illness and alcoholism, was going through a rough time the summer I was nine. I was an only child, adopted, bookish and prone to making up stories, all of which helped to make me an outsider in the eyes of some of my peers. That summer, a lady who owned a little antiques shop near my house let me hang around the store. I’m sure she never knew how much that meant to me. It was a refuge from loneliness and bullying, and I’ve never forgotten it.