Featured Interview With Jeff Beamish
Tell us a little about yourself. Where were you raised? Where do you live now?
Born in Vancouver, Canada, spent the first five years of my life in Auckland, New Zealand, moved back to Vancouver where I have lived ever since. I think living in two such beautiful parts of the earth has encouraged me to seek beauty in writing.
At what age did you realize your fascination with books? When did you start writing?
Starting with the first novels I read on my own in school, each work of fiction I cracked open helped me navigate this messy thing we call life, even if I wasn’t aware of it at the time.
Pat Conroy’s The Prince of Tides and, a decade later, Beach Music showed that family dysfunction can be overcome. Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner proved you can atone for mistakes. Cormac McCarthy’s The Road demonstrated that love can endure under horrific circumstances. Jonathan Franzen’s Purity humorously revealed that even the most successful are sometimes hobbled by their own messy limitations. And Yann Martel’s Life of Pi, the best-selling novel about a boy who survives 227 days at sea in a lifeboat with a Bengal tiger, provided the best lesson of all: That our world can be viewed in more than one way.
I began writing fiction in college but didn’t write my first novel until I was in my forties. Maybe because writing a book is so much damn work and I had always put it off.
Who are your favorite authors to read? What is your favorite genre to read. Who Inspires you in your writings?
I have always liked David Mitchell. He’s got an insanely creative mind. So Cloud Atlas and Number 9 Dream are two of my favorite novels.
I also admire Jennifer Egan. A Visit from the Goon Squad is one of my favorites. I always enjoy non-linear stories and authors who mess with the timeline.
One of my favorite genres is speculative fiction, maybe because I always love to be surprised, especially by someone who sees the world far differently than me.
Tell us a little about your latest book?
No, You’re Crazy is a novel about a delusional and suicidal teenage girl who claims she has psychic ability. Of course, no one believes her. But after she helps her drug-addict parents win several jackpots while gambling, some dangerous people start to take an interest in her. Or, at least, so it appears.
My novel examines the many ways a family can wound and heal us. It also takes a sensitive look at neurodiversity, and in doing so, questions the nature of the reality we think we live in.
No, You’re Crazy is also one of few novels out there with a main character beset by Cotard’s Syndrome, a rare condition where the sufferer believes she’s dead. In the case of my character Ashlee, she’s convinced she’s left her physical body behind and has transcended into a higher being blessed with clairvoyance, either because this is true or because she’s trying to escape a terrible trauma. Ashlee is diagnosed and put on medication, but she questions whether her diagnosis is just the medical community’s way of making sure she is medicated.
I wanted to write a novel that left the reader to make many judgments. Throughout the novel, the reader will constantly ask the same question: Is the girl with Cotard’s crazy or is there something to her wild beliefs? So, ultimately, the question is, what’s real and what isn’t? And, why do the same things need to be real to everyone? Can’t some people see and experience the world in a different way? I am not sure I set out to write a story about neurodiversity, but that’s what happened.
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