HEATHER O’NEILL is a novelist, short-story writer and essayist. Her work, which includes Lullabies for Little Criminals, The Girl Who Was Saturday Night and Daydreams of Angels, has been shortlisted for the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction, the Orange Prize for Fiction and the Scotiabank Giller Prize in two consecutive years, and has won CBC Canada Reads, the Paragraphe Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction and the Danuta Gleed Award.

Born and raised in Montreal, O’Neill lives there today with her daughter. And it’s there that I met with her to discuss her 2017 CLC Kreisel Lecture published in 2018 by The University of Alberta Press as Wisdom in Nonsense – Invaluable Lessons From My Father.

Among other things we talk about hating and loving your life, happiness and wonder, relationships with your parents dead and alive, memoirs versus fiction, truth, abuse and #metoo and witnesses, the legal system and power, Concordia, lying to tell the truth, editing the real world, heads being eaten off by dragons, magical radical worlds, deception versus folly, pretending, class, ignoring fathers’ advice, metaphors, loneliness, ugly babies, conventional versus internal beauty, clowns, collecting, stealing cheese, Montreal’s Plateau neighbourhood, and roses.