Twenty Questions with Harriet Bernstein – Part 2 of 2
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Thank you for reading our first instalment of ‘Twenty Questions with Harriet Bernstein’! Have you fallen in love yet? I hope so! We’ve got ten more questions and answers for you to read, and continue to get to know the incredible woman who is Harriet Bernstein!
Of course, if any of this has resonates with you, you simply must purchase her memoir! I honestly could not put it down, and half the time my mouth was open so wide in shock, wonder and awe it’s a miracle no bugs flew in! I kid, I kid. But really, it’s an important memoir to read on so many levels. Not only does it shine a brilliant light on the relationship between Harriet and Irving Layton – a different and very real ‘other side’ – it exemplifies the brilliant light that is Harriet Bernstein – writer, poet, reader, lover, traveler – and the first woman executive in the Canadian film industry blazing trails that didn’t exist before her. Her story leads us across Ontario and Canada to Italy to Greece…it is a whirlwind of worldly adventures with a young, brilliant, full-hearted, full-lipped feminist woman.
Here’s a link to purchaser Harriet’s book RIGHT NOW!
https://www.inanna.ca/catalog/irving-layton-our-years-together/
(And you can feel great about purchasing the book directly from Inanna Publications too!)
Alrighty friends, here we go! The final ten questions! Enjoy!
11) How did it feel to find a publisher who wanted to publish your story? Was your goal always to get this story published?
Writing this book took a very long time, for reasons already stated. Initially, I may have just wanted to get our story on paper for myself, for some cathartic process, or for family history purposes. However, with time came many other people writing about our life, people who did not speak with me, but felt entitled to offer their usually uninformed opinions nonetheless. It is a truly horrible, traumatic experience to open the pages of your daily newspaper, and see a two-page story, with photos, that some journalist wrote, to sensationalize & exploit your life. Try to imagine how that feels. Then come the “serious” writers, those who take a more academic approach, who write serious biographies about artists; but you can’t speak with them either, because your legal counsel advises against it, and you are mothering a baby while all this horror is unspooling around you. Then you hear your former partner on television or radio, telling his side of your private life in a very public arena. And still you do not engage, you maintain your silence. So, I most definitely crafted this book with the ferocious intention of finding a publisher for it and, finally, putting my truth, the truth as I lived it, out there. I felt that Inanna would be the perfect home for my book, and I was overjoyed when they accepted it for publication.
12) Describe the editing/revision process? Overall, how can you describe this process?
The process of writing this book took decades. In a way, the hardest part was getting down the first draft, because I am very self-critical, so just allowing the words to come out raw without self-editing was difficult. Then, in later versions, the fact that my young woman’s voice sometimes made me, as an older woman, cringe and I wanted to edit, to change my words from my journal, but I could not because this was a truth-telling book and to edit my words would have been dishonest. You have to, above all, blacken the page and edit later. This book was edited more times that I can say, and like many writers, I probably would have kept on editing it forever. Deadlines are hard, but necessary, and force a clarity of vision, a distillation. The book is just the right length. At the end of my process, Inanna offered an invaluable editorial process for which I will always be grateful, and from which I learned much.
13) How did you feel leading up to your book launch? 14) What was it like to get on stage, book in hand, and talk about and read from your book?
The week of my book launch, I had a bad tooth that was causing acute & extreme pain. We’ve all had that experience, and know how absolutely distracting tooth pain can be. I was on antibiotics and painkillers! The tooth came out the very next week, in fact. So, that was an additional little challenge I would have loved to have done without. I was nervous and excited about the launch. Nervous partly because we had been a bit tardy in getting the final edited galleys to the printer, so I did not actually have the book in my hands until I arrived at the launch venue. I was trying to select excerpts to read at the launch, and I was having a very hard time doing that online, and I had to do it online because I hadn’t been able to get to Staples for toner, so I couldn’t print out anything! See how the tooth becomes a factor here 
