AlliterAsian by Allan Cho Read Free Book Online Page A

response to the gritty subject matter. They thought the book might tank, and it was difficult to plan a book with a writer who might not have a fixed address. Luckily, HarperCollins took the chance and picked up Runaway . The book proved to be a critical and commercial success. It was a bestseller for thirty weeks and has been translated into multiple languages.
    In 1993, Runaway was optioned to become a movie and aired on CBC as The Diary of Evelyn Lau . The intense subject matter demanded skilful acting and as a result launched the successful acting career of Sandra Oh, a Canadian actress most recently seen in Sideways . Evelyn, who worked as a consultant on the CBC project, never actually saw the entire film. The visual rendition of the reality Evelyn lived hit too close to home. Unsurprisingly, Evelyn stills finds the book to be rather painful.
    â€œI can’t read it,” she confesses. “If I’m asked to read it at a reading, there’s only one passage that I’ll read.”
    â€œWhat is important, I think, about Evelyn Lau,” wrote critic Patricia Pearson in 1993, “is that she blends startling prose talent with a fierce determination to be true.” This combination unfortunately led to a nonfiction exposé of her ruined love affair with writer W. P. Kinsella, a relationship that began when he was sixty and she was twenty-four. The media cast an eye toward Evelyn again, in 1997, when the older Vancouver-based author of Shoeless Joe sued Evelyn over the article, titled “Me and WP,” in Vancouver Magazine . The lawsuit diminished respect for both literary talents. The two writers had signed a pact giving one another permission to write about their relationship, but Kinsella alleged that Lau’s portrait of him was malicious and erroneous. A lengthy court proceeding eventually settled in a fairly innocuous way with a letter of retraction in the magazine.
    Evelyn tells me that getting sued by her former lover caused her to react in two ways. “I wanted to write more, and I also wanted to retreat. It was so hard for me to imagine not writing about my life or the lives I intersected with,” she says. “If you’re writing about your life, you might have people who take offence, even if you’re a genre writer. And then some people get offended if you don’t include them, so you can’t win at all,” she says with a smile. In the essay about the lawsuit that appeared in her collection of personal essays, Inside Out , she confesses that the lawsuit had a negative impact on her writing, and her output has slowed in recent years. This is one of the reasons she turned to poetry. “Whoever heard about being sued for a book of poetry?” she says with a laugh. Her endless fascination with relationships compelled her to keep writing. She says that as she gets older she probably won’t be as fascinated withromantic relationships, but “in your twenties it’s at the forefront of your thoughts.”
    In many of her stories, couples play out romances and power struggles. People struggle to communicate with each other and try to find ways to relate to one another. Evelyn admits to a fascination and idealization of older men—“father figures.” She cherished the relationship she had with her father, and in the prologue to Runaway laments the distance that grew between them as she became a teenager. Evelyn’s work doesn’t shy away from the unconventional side—the otherness in each of us. Her empathy drives her to tell the untold stories of the human soul. Despite genre, time, or space, it is this side of Evelyn that remains timeless.
    Evelyn confides that writing is hard, and a finished product takes effort. After the success of Runaway , she was intent on proving to the literary world that she wasn’t a one-hit wonder and tried to publish one book a year for several years. In Inside Out , she writes about her