FICTIONALIZED FAMILY: Writer Nathaniel G. Moore’s latest work Savage 1986–2011 is based on his years growing up in Leaside, but includes elements, like an older sister, that aren’t true to life.
On the verge of releasing an autobiographical novel, author Nathaniel G. Moore has a few people a little worried.
“My mom’s a bit concerned but I’m like Mom, who is going to read it? Are you going to run into someone at the grocery store and [they’ll] be like, ‘Oh I read your son’s novel, I can’t believe you made meatloaf for dinner in 1992?’ ” he says. “My mom’s one friend was sending me all these articles in The New Yorker about this guy who wrote about his family and they cried. I’m like, ‘Is there a point to you sending me this?’ ”
Although Savage 1986–2011 revolves around his family and growing up in Leaside, Moore chose to write a fictionalized memoir, which includes the addition of an older sister, for more creative control like unraveling a series of events over a single Easter weekend.
“I wanted to have another female character and she ended up becoming my favourite character. She’s actually named after a girl I went to high school with,” he says. “I wanted it to be impactful and very specific, very deliberately taking place in the house that I grew up in, using my real families’ real names but again changing enough where it’s like okay, but it’s fiction.”
Spanning 25 years, the novel unfolds between 1986, when Moore first saw Randy “Macho Man” Savage in person, and 2011, when the wrestler died. Referencing Running with Scissors and The Royal Tenenbaums, Moore describes the novel as being about the human experience growing up in a middle class to upper middle class neighbourhood as his family comes to terms with experiences like economic turbulence and the effects of teenage love.
“It’s a dark comedy about a family and it’s just about how the individual members of a family all have different coping mechanisms for going through divorce, going through separation of siblings. It’s not just the parents that break up, it’s the brothers and sisters, all those dynamics change,” he says. “I just really want people to understand that it is a coming of age story, it’s a story about a family, it’s a specific family, one of millions of families in Canada. This is the cross section of those memories.”
While he wrote his previous book in nine months, he gave himself almost 10 years for this project because it took a lot of time to get right and properly develop a story that takes place over such a long period of time.
Revisiting some of the dark moments of his past like being a lonely teenager and fighting with his dad also proved to have its difficulties.
“It wasn’t a lot of fun remembering them and I kind of rushed through them,” he says of the writing process. “Then I had to go back and really edit them.”
It was at Leaside High School that Moore’s English teachers would tell the students that Margaret Atwood went to the school and based the opening scene of The Handmaid’s Tale on the gymnasium.
“That’s in the book, there’s little anecdotes about that because that’s what all our English teachers would tell us, like we were supposed to be excited,” he says, adding he used to toboggan down the hill near the school on McDonald’s trays. “I think it’s cool now but I certainly wasn’t excited about that when I was 16 years old.”
Moore, who grew up on Glenvale Boulevard, occasionally returns to the high school to do book readings and says his former English teacher Mrs. Fertuck can still be found in the classroom.
“I had her like three times and I’ve come into her class a couple of times,” he says. “My mom still lives near there so I do go there every once in a while. It’s always a bit surreal to be around Bayview and Eglinton and things like that. It encompassed such a huge part of my life for so long.”
When he’s not writing books — his other releases include Wrong Bar, Let’s Pretend We Never Met, Pastels Are Pretty Much The Polar Opposite of Chalk and Bowlbrawl, — Moore works in the book industry as an editor and journalist, as well as on designing books for a small publisher. He designed the cover of Savage 1986–2011, which will be released through Anvil Press in the fall but can be pre-ordered this summer, to resemble New Order’s **Substance** compilation album.
Describing his latest novel as his best work to date, Moore draws comparison to what musician Morrissey used to describe The Smiths: as Manchester’s answer to the H-Bomb.
“I wanted to describe my book and the idea of Savage and my family as Leaside’s answer to The Gulf War,” he says. “Because the idea was there was conflict going on in ‘91 during the Operation Desert Storm and that’s sort of when my family starts to fall apart.”
