BY DAVID LENNAM | PHOTO BY JEFFREY BOSDET
Jean Paetkau on her novels, her cancer and how one informed the other.
They say mystery writing is all about the plot twists.
Jean Paetkau had only just finished writing her second mystery novel when a frightening plot twist wrote itself into her own life story. Paetkau was diagnosed with ovarian cancer, stage 3. And she admits there’s no way she would have completed The Sinking of Souls, the sequel to 2023’s surprise bestseller Blood on the Breakwater, if she’d known how grave an illness she had.
Reaching Out
The day before her sixth chemo session, we sit to talk. Paetkau is funny, a nimble and opinionated talker. She’s unafraid to discuss her cancer or the journey it has taken her on and continues to take her on. A longtime journalist with CBC, she speaks fast, moves around a topic, circles it for different angles like she’s on assignment. But when she talks about her health, that nimble voice trembles.
“Right at the beginning you cry a lot,” she says. “Nobody expects to join the cancer club. It’s always somebody else. This is not how I want to make my exit.”
A single mom of two school-age kids with health issues of their own, the 54-year-old rallied when she got the bad news, creating a cancer community on social media that has been a support group for not only Paetkau, but those who share their survivor stories.
Paetkau says she treated cancer like she treated novel writing: 500 words at a time, not worrying about the last chapter.
“I hate the idea of people being isolated and hiding things. I want to reach out to others who feel alone. In the past, people were ashamed of cancer. I just got on there and talked about it.”
It’s been what she calls an honour/slash/burden — buoying the spirits of others while waking every day and having to look over the edge. “I feel I’m doing something meaningful,” she says. “As with journalism, my goal was always to end isolation. That’s why I often did stories about people and communities who were struggling. I just wanted to make people not lonely.”
Paetkau says she treated cancer like she treated novel writing: 500 words at a time, not worrying about the last chapter.
“Knowing I could write a novel and get through to the end helped me with the pacing of cancer. Don’t try to guess what’s coming in six months. Don’t try to guess the next CT exam. Just try to focus on now.”
She adds: “You sit in bed all day when you’re sick. And I’m literally looking at social media every minute. It’s like that movie, About A Boy. You divide your day into units to get through it. That’s the social media. You just keep refreshing, refreshing, and they call it a dopamine hit. Fine. You need dopamine when you’re going through cancer. So every little message I get from someone knowing that it’s meaningful to them, or they lost someone to cancer, it just gets me through another 15 minutes of hell.”
Where Victoria is a Character
Paetkau grew up “Mennonite-Lite,” as she calls it, in Edmonton. She laughs, quickly adding, “I don’t want people thinking I was in a colony.”
The work ethic that’s part of Mennonite life informed the way she approached writing, waking at 6 a.m. and putting down 500 words. Every day. From November to March for two years and novels. “The guilt of not writing, if you get to 8 a.m. and you haven’t written, is insufferable. Then I don’t write all summer. I let the ground lie fallow, as they would say in the Mennonite world.”
Before tackling Blood on the Breakwater in 2022, Paetkau wrote for a pair of TV shows and self-published three children’s books, with help from her own kids. But it’s the two mysteries in the Breakwater series that are letting her put pieces of herself on the page.
The central figure, a detective named Helene Unger, packs plenty of Paetkau. A strong woman, a single mom living in Victoria. A new archetype perhaps from a writer tired of reading about women as victims or just ineffectual.
“If you turn on any detective show, in the first 10 minutes, 90 per cent of the time, there’s a beautiful woman who’s dead and a man solves it. And the man is always this guy who can’t have functional relationships and is probably an alcoholic.”
Something that made Breakwater such a success (and she’s finding that out with The Sinking of Souls, too) is the Victoria setting and the local references.
“The people in James Bay are mad to read about the grocery store that doesn’t have enough parking, or the fact there’s no housing in Victoria. People love reading about themselves. They’ll stop me at these book fairs, and go, ‘What’s the secret to your success?’ Write about your community. I do not know how to write a book set in New York or on Mars.”
Self-Published Success
Paetkau admits to being stubborn, which is perhaps why both novels are self-published. Breakwater was sent to three publishers, but no replies came back until the book was already on local shelves and up on Amazon’s platform. “Self-publishing only worked for me because I wrote about my community,” she says.
Although she reveals she’s been wanting to be a mystery writer since she was in her teens, Paetkau has no desire to swap places with her protagonist Helene and experience a detective’s intimate relationship with suffering and pain, death and sorrow.
“I’m wise enough to know there’s a difference between fiction and reality,” Paetkau says. “It’s just like I want to see England, but I want to see the made-up England that’s on Masterpiece Theatre and I know that’s not England.”