fall on your knees ann marie macdonald summary

It was like being next to a nuclear reactor.' 'Sales were impressive, sure,' she says 'But I mean more the American celebrity machine.

And I had that bracing, if not startling, brush with American celebrity, which is just nuclear-sized, right? It's huge, the power of that.' And she's not just talking about the effect on book sales. First off, I was able to earn some money from that book, which gave me some creative freedom. 'And then getting that sort of attention - that had a big impact, too. And novels take longer to write, so everything else had to kind of move over and make space for that.' 'I mean, I continued to work in theatre, but now there was this other big ship.

'It was a big, huge thing because it was such a big career shift,' she says of the book's success.

And I thought, 'This is accidental, I didn't mean to be doing this.' I didn't know how to write a novel.' 'I realized that it was, in fact, prose fiction,' she laughs. When I started writing Fall On Your Knees, I really did believe I was writing another play.'īut the stage directions in that supposed play ended up getting really long - and all of a sudden MacDonald discovered she wasn't writing a play at all. I'd acted in film and television and written television. I had co-created plays either collectively or with one other partner. 'The experience of publishing that book was really definitive,' MacDonald says. Chronicling three generations of Cape Breton Island's Piper family across the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the epic novel was translated into 19 languages, won countless awards (including the 1997 Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best First Book) and, most famously, was chosen to be a part of Oprah's Book Club in 2002. But the mere existence of the play, which will be staged in four Canadian cities (Toronto beginning January 21st, followed by Ottawa, Halifax and London, Ont.), is already a dream.įirst published in 1996, Fall On Your Knees has been a wildly popular read - particularly for queer women, on whom the book centres - ever since. It'll be up to the many fans of Fall On Your Knees surely already with tickets in hand to let MacDonald know if her dream ends up being realized in the show. Queeries Playwrights assemble: 10 theatre companies are teaming up to give LGBTQ artists a dreamy opportunity

Fall on your knees ann marie macdonald summary