Interview with Joan Heartwell, author of HAMSTER ISLAND

Joan Heartwell is a an award-winning author (with several novels published under another name) and a former indie publisher now working as a freelance writer, ghostwriter, and book consultant.

About the Book

Heartwell chronicles her heroic (and often hilarious) determination to live an unremarkable life as a member of a poverty-stricken, super-dysfunctional family that includes a mostly absent father, a religious fanatic mother, a kleptomaniac grandmother, and two special needs siblings, all residing more or less in the middle of a parking lot. The story moves from Heartwell’s lively coming of age in the sixties to her role as caretaker for both siblings after her parents’ deaths, at which time she must resort to extraordinary measures to locate the midpoint between their needs and her own.

Brilliant and magical, Hamster Island takes its rightful place among such darkly comic and original memoirs as Augusten Burroughs’ Running with Scissors and Jeannette Walls’ The Glass Castle.

Q: What’s inside the mind of a nonfiction author?

A: Generally I write fiction. But the circumstances of my youth—growing up the middle child between two special needs siblings in a family that was totally dysfunctional—are somewhat unique, and when friends suggested I write about them, I began to think it might be good to look at my life objectively, the way I would the subject of a novel. And it has been good. And even better, I am learning that my story is turning out to be helpful to a lot of other people.

Q: Tell us why readers should buy Hamster Island

A: Well, number one, it’s a good story, truly told. Since I’m a fiction writer, it reads like a novel. There’s plenty of humour in it, and also plenty of heartbreak.

As far as being helpful to readers, Hamster Island addresses issues that are common to anyone who has a loved one with mental illness or developmental disabilities in their family, especially if they are siblings. As a kid, I was really shy to begin with, so I lived in fear that if I made a mistake—academic, social, whatever—people would assume there was something wrong with me too. That’s quite a challenge for a little kid/teenager. And of course I felt incredible guilt for feeling ashamed of my siblings, our poverty, our whole dysfunctional family, and even our house, which was more or less situated in the middle of a parking lot.

My book brings up a lot of social issues too that will be of interest to some readers. Hamster Island is the real deal. You can’t read it and not get what it’s really like for families to raise developmentally disabled and/or mentally ill kids—not wealthy families who have the money to do it in style with nannies and outside help, but working-class families who have to get up every day and fight for food stamps, Medicare, and social justice—often to the exclusion of their own needs. I can think of several prominent politicians who might learn a thing or two from reading Hamster Island and, I’d like to believe, might actually change their stance on how we deal with people who just can’t make it all on their own, without state and government programs.

Q: What makes a good memoir?

A: My favourite memoirs are those by writers who are able to look back and find the humour in the hard times. I’m thinking Mary Karr, Augusten Burroughs, Jeanette Walls, Rachel Simon. If what I’ve done with Hamster Island comes even close to their work, I’m thrilled.

Q: What is a regular writing day like for you?

A: My personal writing schedule is irregular. I write for a living, generating everything from newsletters to full-length “ghost-written” manuscripts for clients. So I might only get one or two days a month free to work on my own projects. When I have a free day coming, I do the same thing I do when I have client work. I settle in front of my computer and I stay there for six or seven hours. For me, tenacity is key.

Q: What do you find most rewarding about being an author?

A: The process. It’s fun. It suits my disposition.

Q: How did you celebrate the completion of your book?

A: By starting the next one.