Claudia Dey's new novel Daughter, out this fall, explores despair and father-daughter relationships

Daughter is the latest book from Canadian novelist Claudia Dey.

The story is about a playwright, actress, and titular daughter named Mona Dean, who is caught in her charismatic father's web a man famous for one great novel, and whose needs and insecurities have a hold on the women in the family.

Daughter exploresthe regenerative power of art, and how making art is making selfhood, when Mona Dean strives to make a life and art of her own.

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"I think of Daughter as [the TV series] Succession sometimes, but the empire at stake is writing, not media,"said Dey to CBC Books via email.

"It has the magnetic King Lear-esque patriarch, Paul Dean, the duelling siblings, the embittered stepmother, the broken expressions of love, the dark undercurrent of pain, the cheating, the lying, the betrayals all that gore but it also has the hotter elements via its centre, its nucleus, its sun, the playwright and actress, Mona Dean sex, humour, celebrity cameos, a scene built around a backless dress, and more."

Deyis a Torontoauthor, playwright and actor. She is also the co-designer of women's clothing brandHorses Atelier.Dey's debut novel Stunt, followed nine-year-old Eugenia Ledoux who is obsessed with tracking down her absent father. It was a finalist for the Amazon First Novel Award.

Her second novel Heartbreaker, tells the story of a woman named Billie Jean and her disappearance through the perspectives of her teenage daughter Pony, loyal dog Gena Rowlands and Pony's crush, a boy nicknamed Supernatural. Heartbreaker was a finalist for the 2019 Trillium Book Award.

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Below, Dey spoke to CBC Books via email about the inspiration behindDaughter, and the new book's cover design by artist June Park.

Daughter will be available on Sept. 12, 2023.

What inspired the story?

It's a pandemic novel. It came out of despair, restlessness and a reordered self. I needed to reinvent because, in lockdown, my usual mechanism felt broken. I had a new view, a new impatience, I needed a new way to work. I created a list of constraints for myself, and looking back on them, I see they were the antidote to how I had written previously. It felt beside the point to make a sentence more beautiful, to describe a room, to mythologize a person. I wanted to make something that went directly to the reader's bloodstream. I wanted to write the hottest emotions in the coldest way. Something closer to how life feels. I wanted to write a family story as a tragic love story. It started with the image of a father and daughter whose entire relationship takes place in the darker corners of restaurants. Why so secretive?

It's a pandemic novel. It came out of despair, restlessness and a reordered self.- Claudia Dey

Can you tell us the inspiration behind the cover design?

I'm just obsessed with the way June Park's artistic genius interfaced with this story. I know she spent two months, night and day, with the novel and kept it in the deepest recesses of her heart the design came from that very personal place. I know she was after minimalism, grace and layers of meaning. Whatever you see in the image is right wave, shard, death, birth, love, beginning, ending, cave. She found the visual expression for the novel's soul. She got inside, behind and above the book.

The design also has aclassic feel which I love. The unplaceable font, the white on black and then of course, the effect of the metallic foil. When the reader picks up the book for its title, they seethemselves reflected in the cover.The reader is everything for me.

I had been writing in a searching way for a couple of years, and nothing felt right; in fact, it all felt wrong, like I had been miscast.- Claudia Dey

What was your experience writing it like?

My fingertips went numb. I had been writing in a searching way for a couple of years, and nothing felt right; in fact, it all felt wrong, like I had been miscast. Once I hit the voice forDaughter once I had that opening line of the novel the book just started to write itself. I only had to put my body where it needed to be, at a desk, behind a closed door. I could hear it and see it.

I wrote the whole first draft in two months. That first draft is intact; I've built on it and refined it over the last two years, expanding and deepening the novel, working with the combined brainpower of my brilliant editors they asked all of the right questions and sent me into all of the right places with the aliveness of that first draft motoring the novel I always believe a first draft holds a special power.

What do you hope readers will take away from it?

The companionship only fiction can give. As June's cover so brilliantly achieves, I want the reader to feelreflected and seen. It is in many ways the novelistic sequel to my Paris Review Essay, "Mothers As Makers Of Death." In the darker emotions it articulates, but also in its fundamental expression of hope, I want Daughter to unite readers in the same way.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.