Michael Christie’s new book is about an agoraphobic woman and her son.Fred Lum/The Globe and Mail
Before he was a writer, Michael Christie was a very good skateboarder. He dismisses himself as a "Junior B-level" skater, but footage on YouTube shows a younger Christie launching himself into the air, landing tricks that defy gravity – grinding on handrails and kick-flipping over park benches and generally turning downtown Vancouver into his own personal playground. Watching him, one sees a young man, fearless and immortal, taking on the world.
In 1999, when Christie was in his early 20s, he broke his tibia and fibula attempting to jump down a flight of a dozen stairs; he landed funny and his leg "just went sideways," a twig snapping in two. He continued skateboarding for several more years, "but mentally I was essentially done." He thought perhaps he should find another line of work. "When I broke my leg – that moment, I knew that I was afraid now," he says, sitting in a near-empty Toronto bar on a recent afternoon. "That invulnerability, that adolescent bubble, had been burst."
Christie, now 38, published his first book, The Beggar's Garden, in early 2011. A gritty yet polished collection populated by junkies and transients, the homeless and the mentally ill, social workers and paramedics, the stories were partly based on his experiences working in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside after his professional skateboarding career came to an end. It won the City of Vancouver Book Award, was long-listed for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, was a finalist for the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize and was generally regarded as one of the most impressive debuts of the year.
Not long before The Beggar's Garden was published, Christie moved to Thunder Bay, where he was born and raised. There, he bought a house on a hill overlooking Lake Superior and began writing a new book partly inspired by his own peculiar childhood. The resulting novel, If I Fall, If I Die, was published last week. The title comes from Kid Cudi's 2009 #YOLO anthem Pursuit of Happiness, though Christie insists it was a case of subconscious borrowing rather than knowing theft. "If I fall, if I die, know I lived it to the fullest," he says, quoting the song's chorus. "It's a dangerous idea, but it's also kind of an amazing sentiment."
Thematically, the lyrics fit the novel to a tee. If I Fall, If I Die tells the story of Will Cardiel, an 11-year-old with no memory of ever having been "Outside." His mother, Diane, suffers from extreme agoraphobia and anxiety, and together they have created a world removed from the world, hidden and self-contained. When he finally goes outdoors, Will grows obsessed with a missing local teen – a disappearance linked to his own family's strange history – and, much to his mother's horror, skateboarding. Both a mystery and a coming-of-age novel, Christie's book captures the moment when every child ventures out into the world on their own, and the point when every parent must finally let go.
"Becoming a father, for me, was running right up against that," says Christie, the father of five-year-old and one-year-old boys. "Having this incredible, soul-crushing love for these beings who you've brought into the world, and then, at the same time, having to let them go. Having to watch them fall down, not being able to fight their battles and hold their hand through everything. You have to watch them hit the ground – that's something you have to contend with as a parent. And that was a big motivation for writing the book."
Around the time when Christie was finishing the manuscript, the journalist Hanna Rosin published The Overprotected Kid in The Atlantic. The article examined the rise of helicopter parenting through the prism of an acre-sized patch of dirt in North Wales called the Land, where kids play with old tires and dirty mattresses and set things on fire and behave like wildlings under minimal adult supervision.
"It really spoke to me," Christie says of the article. "Life is venturing out, it's acquiring skills. Growing up is learning to do stuff. And if you're constantly doing things for someone, or if you're constantly insulating them for the sharp edges of the world, then you're doing them a disservice. You're hurting them in a de facto way. And I see that with my kids all the time. I'm not one of those parents who are like, 'I let my kids play with the flamethrower!' Obviously there are limits. There are things that are not possible to allow. But, at the same time, I think we need to be really careful about what we protect our children from."
After high school, Christie moved to San Francisco; the lo-fi videos he'd produced of himself riding around Thunder Bay had come to the attention of a skateboard company, Stereo, which agreed to sponsor him. He lived rent-free in a house in the city's Mission District with a bunch of other skaters – Will's dream, basically – and spent his days skateboarding. His parents "were supportive of skateboarding, but they didn't understand it," Christie says, though that was part of the sport's appeal: "It was completely outside the world of adults. … It was just this arcane language and world that I shared with these other people."
Christie and his family now live on Galiano Island, B.C.; they moved back out west almost as soon as he sold the novel. He says he's now "exorcised" himself of Thunder Bay, though his father still lives there. The new novel is dedicated to his mother, who died in 2008. She, too, suffered from agoraphobia, though not as severely as the kind that paralyzes Will's mother. Still, he says, there were panic attacks, and family vacations proved impossible: "There were points when she was not functioning very well at all." He doesn't say this with any bitterness. In fact, he says, "I look back on this time with an incredible amount of wonder."
His mother, an early childhood educator, often allowed Christie to stay home from school to keep her company, and mother and son would spend the day together, just hanging out. "It was when I learned how to be an artist, in a way," he says. "She really taught me a lot about making things, and doing things yourself and figuring out how things work. We would sew, and bake bread – there was always something happening.
"We created this magical world, the two of us."