Authors Interviewing Characters: Laurie Petrou

Award-winning writer Laurie Petrou returns with a dark campus novel. Stargazer features two girls in the 90s at a remote college campus, Rocky Barrens University, set in the woods in Ontario cottage country. A delicate, slow-burning portrait of privilege, fame, art, and ambition, the novel follows artist Diana Martin and quiet Aurelle Taylor as they come quickly and intimately together, and follow each other to RBU. The lines between love, envy and obsession blur in Laurie Petrou’s utterly enthralling, unceasingly tense fourth book. Here, Laurie interviews one of the characters, Diana Martin. 

Famously private artist, Diana Martin, has agreed to a rare interview on this, the ten-year reunion of the class of ’99 at Rocky Barrens University. Since she left RBU, Martin’s career has skyrocketed, and she has steadily remained one of the most well-known painters in the world. Her legendary paintings are, of course, her continued Girl series, one of which hangs in the art studios here at Rocky Barrens: a haunting portrait of her muse, Aurelle Taylor, whose name is synonymous with the artist herself.

Martin arrives in an old convertible, having driven around the lake from her cottage, where she spends most of the summer months. She is wearing a cream cashmere sweater and tweed skirt: a delicate outfit for such a towering figure. Her trademark red lipstick is expertly applied, her hair smoothly brushed. I await her on a patio on campus so she can smoke freely. She lights up immediately, before sitting down. Current students stare at her, star-struck, some not-so-subtly pointing, but she takes little notice. With clearly no interest in small talk, she stares at me, legs crossed at the ankle, waiting for the interview to begin. I clear my throat.

Laurie Petrou: I read somewhere that you still swim regularly in the lake here. Even at night? 

Diana Martin: (nods) I don’t need light to swim in a straight line. No capable swimmer should need that. But the night sky is often quite bright anyway. The stars here are protected with more compassion than the people.

[Interviewer’s note: there are topics I have been warned against bringing up by Martin’s agent, although at times during the interview, I feel she is taunting me, baiting me, to see if I will.]

LP: You’re referring to the Rocky Barrens Dark Sky Reserve, imposed to protect the sky here from light pollution. [Nods, exhaling smoke.] And about the people here. Do you feel that times have changed in the intervening years since you left RBU? You were part of a kind of artistic awakening in your own fine art cohort. Was it worth it? [She stares again. I wait, but no more is forthcoming.] 

Tell me about what you’re working on now. 

DM: I’d rather not. That is completely private. What are you working on? You’re a writer, no? 

LP: You are a difficult person to talk to. You must know this is your reputation. Have you always been this way? Is it intentional? 

DM: [shifts, looks out over the lake. There is a long pause, during which I worry that she will leave altogether. Then she turns back to me.] 

I wasn’t always. My personality is…it’s like scar tissue that just, in the end, became flesh. Affectation that became the real thing. Are you the same all the time? The same as you always have been? Is this who you are? 

LP: We all shift and adapt according to our surroundings, I suppose.

DM: Exactly. And then, sometimes, our surroundings change, and we find we have become the same in all of them. 

LP: And yet you have chosen as your constant state to be … impenetrable.

DM: I think it’s our generation’s great loss to feel the need to give so much over to anyone who asks. 

LP: Some might say that is ironic, given the nature of your work. 

DM: Art is different. Art asks things of us, and we are fools to refuse.

LP: Some might say it is a privilege to feel and live that way.

DM: They wouldn’t be wrong. I have led a charmed life. That’s not news, perse. 

LP: And yet, your life has been marked by tragedy. How has –

[During this sentence, Diana stands, takes a final deep inhale of her cigarette and mashes it into the small tin ashtray afforded the table.]

DM: No. 

[She turns, leaves, her hair whipping around. She doesn’t look back.

I watch her stalk off to her car, certain that the interview was only ever going to end this way. She puts on dark sunglasses in the car, and backs out without looking behind her.]

—

STARGAZER

A darkly compelling coming-of-age story, perfect for fans of Donna Tartt’s The Secret History or Liane Moriarty’s Big Little Lies.

It is the fall of 1995 at Rocky Barrens University, hidden amidst the pine trees and starry skies of Northern Ontario. Aurelle Taylor, daughter of a world-famous fashion designer becomes the closest friend of burgeoning painter Diana Martin; they have bonded over a mutual desire to escape their wealthy families and personal tragedies and begin new lives as students at RBU.

They are closer than lovers, they are like one thing, intoxicated by their own bond, falling into the hedonistic seduction of the woods and the water at a university that is more summer camp than campus. Diana, who has lived her life under the shadow of her sadistic older brother, rockets to fame with a series of scandalous portraits of Aurelle, whose response is to tumble further into a drug-fueled escapism. Diana must choose whether to rescue her kindred spirit from destruction, or to abandon Aurelle for the fame she has forever thirsted after.

The lines between love, envy and obsession blur in Laurie Petrou’s utterly enthralling, unceasingly tense second novel.

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Laurie Petrou is an award-winning, internationally published author. She is also an Associate Professor at the RTA School of Media at Toronto Metropolitan University (formerly Ryerson). She has a PhD and Master’s in Communication and Culture (York and Toronto Met), a diploma in New Media Design (Sheridan), and a Bachelor of Fine Arts, specializing in painting (Queen’s). She lives in Niagara . Stargazer is her fourth book.

Find out more about Laurie on her website https://www.lauriepetrou.com/

Tags: featured, women writers

Category: Interviews, On Writing