Essayist, novelist, voiceover actor, publisher, and comedian, Charles Demers is Vancouver’s own Swiss Army Writer. Some of Demers’ credits include appearances on CBC’s The Debaters, a comedy album called Fatherland, a book of essays called The Horrors: An A to Z of Funny Thoughts, and three novels. The latest of these is Primary Obsessions (Douglas & McIntyre, September 2020). Set in Vancouver, it features a cognitive behavioural therapist, Annick Boudreau, who becomes embroiled in a mystery when one of her clients is accused of murder. We talked to Charles about therapy, patient/doctor confidentiality agreements, and writing about his hometown.
Shawn Conner: Did you start writing Primary Obsessions as soon as you finished your previous novel, Property Values (2018)?
Charles Demers: There was a little while in between. It grew out of the same sort of conceptual exercise I tried to take into Property Values, which was one that was based on my former sketch comedy partner Paul Bae’s approach. He’s had some amazing success in the world of scripted podcasts (The Big Loop, The Black Tapes) and I was talking to him about his projects and looking at the work that he was doing. The thing that occurred to me about it is that, and maybe it’s very obvious, he was making stuff that only he could make and using every part of his story.
So, starting with Property Values, I’m trying to write stories that I thought I could make work, as opposed to something that was just a neat idea. Like, why am I the person to tell this story? With Property Values, it was my love for Vancouver, my suburban Vancouver experience, my fixation on organized crime. And with Primary Obsessions it was like, what kind of story can I tell that draws on not only my OCD and experiences with anxiety disorders and depression, but this long history I’ve had with being in behavioural therapy with one very amazing psychologist?
SC: Is your psychologist also a woman?
CD: She is. I tried to separate for myself very clearly as of the first page of the book that Annick Boudreau is her own fictional creation, that she has her own life and back-story. Obviously I’m writing about her life in an intimacy that I do not have access to with my own psychologist. I’ve also borrowed very generously from her traits, her treatment style, and her personality. I talked to her while I was putting together the book and I let her see an early draft. I also wanted to dedicate the book to her and wanted to know if that was something she was comfortable with.
SC: So the patient/doctor confidentiality agreement doesn’t work both ways.
CD: No, it doesn’t. You’re allowed to tell whoever you want who your psychologist is. I figured the CBT (cognitive behavioural therapy) community is pretty small. People would probably be able to figure out who I was writing about. She told me that soon after the book came out that patients, in the middle of a session, would go, So are you like solving crimes now? Apparently it was fairly transparent to anyone who knows her who the inspiring figure was.
SC: How do you approach writing about Vancouver? Are you writing for Vancouverites, for people who’ve never been here, or people with a passing acquaintance with the city?
CD: My basic philosophy is that there is this unspoken agreement that part of mystery fiction is that, included in the price of admission, is a visit to the place where the action is set. If you’re reading an Inspector Montalbano novel, you get to hang out in Sicily; if you’re reading an Easy Rawlins novel, you get to hang out in Los Angeles. If it’s Inspector Brunetti, you’re in Venice. I feel that’s so much part of the joy for me as a reader of the genre, that for me as an author, I was just going to pack the book to the gills with as much Vancouver as I could. To me it’s one of the great advantages of the mystery genre. I get to hang out in this other place with this very well-informed tour guide for the span of the book.
SC: You finished writing the novel before COVID-19 hit. How do you think you might approach the pandemic in future books?
CD: For me, films and books are on just the wrong timeframe for dealing with it. They take just the span of time that this thing will hopefully be all wrapped up in.
The other thing is, I know there’s this feeling of, is this the new normal? I could be totally wrong about this, and I have been totally wrong about everything to do with the pandemic so I don’t know why I keep offering prognostications, but it seems to me that, once this is done, life, at the level of people’s day-to-day life, will go back to something fairly recognizable from its pre-pandemic state. People will be hanging out with each other and they’ll be going to places and going to restaurants. We can barely stop them from doing it right now when it’s literally killing people. So I don’t buy this idea that “Nobody’s ever going to go to the movies again” or “People aren’t going to want to go to concerts.” People are having underground parties right now.
I feel like, in 11 months or whatever, we’re going to be coming out of this thing and someone’s pandemic novel is going to be coming out and it’s going to be a period piece. Somebody’s got to write those books, I guess. I sure as hell do not want to read them. At least not for a while. One of the very first feelings I had when this whole thing started was this dread certainty that one, there were a thousand people writing screenplays or novels about what was happening, and two, that I had absolutely no interest in even one of them. I just want to get out of this experience as soon as I can, and the idea of sitting down to read the Great Pandemic Novel is the furthest goddamn thing from my mind.
SC: Is there anything you want to plug?
I’m working on the follow-up to Primary Obsessions. And I am really enjoying this Substack experience so far. It’s been neat to be doing regular essay-writing again. Essays are my first love as a literary form. It’s one of the few forms of writing where I actually feel like I can say I’m pretty okay at this. And I’ve gotten enough of a following that it’s a little bit of a part-time pipeline during a very difficult time for comedians when that part of my life has been shut down.
You can find Charles Demers at charlesdemers.com and charliedemers.substack.com.