Q&A with Eric Beck Rubin

  

Photo by Nolan Begley

 

 

Eric Beck Rubin is the author of the new novel Ten Clear Days. He also has written the novel School of Velocity. He teaches architectural and cultural history at the University of Toronto.

 

Q: How much did your grandmother’s life inspire you to write Ten Clear Days?

 

A: Her life, her character, the relationship I was lucky to have with her – these were all reasons I wrote this book. I tried to show her many sides. I imagined her reading it, and hearing what she thought of it.

 

Q: How was the novel’s title chosen, and what does it signify for you?

 

A: The title refers to the 10-day period during which doctors decide whether or not to grant a patient’s request for medical assistance in dying. In this novel, it is also the 10 days during which the story’s narrator tells the reader what he’s discovered about how the patient came to make her request. It is an extremely tense time.

 

Q: You’ve said the book began as a memoir--why did you decide to turn to fiction?

 

A: Memoirs are, at least to me, a cloudy mixture of fiction and fact. Whatever a writer says, the people in their pages are still characters, and the events are often foreshortened or magnified, as in a novel.

 

While writing in the memoirs mode I was often wrestling with whether I was pushing my recollections into inventions. It was a question I couldn’t answer and, when I left the idea of memoirs behind, it was beside the point.

 

Q: The writer Sheila Heti said of the book, “This is a beautiful and important novel about the end of life and what a life adds up to.” What do you think of that description?

 

A: What do I think? . . . I’m grateful for readers, and this one especially, as her words helped get the book published.

 

Q: What are you working on now?

 

A: I am midway through a story about a claim that a painting, sold at auction, was in fact looted art that had never been restituted. It is about the self-dealing of the art world, about whether restitution is possible, and the effects of making claims about a past that is far from certain.

 

--Interview with Deborah Kalb