This week on The Chat, I’m thrilled to speak to author Trevor Cole, whose complex and heart-tugging novel Hope Makes Love explores issues of love, trauma, and the lengths we will go to make amends for our past.

Hope Makes Love tells the story of Zep Baker, a former major league baseball player who believes all he needs to put his life back on track is to revive his marriage by convincing his wife to return to Tampa with their daughter. In order to do so, he enlists the expertise of Hope, a neuroscience researcher. Hope, meanwhile, is struggling with a traumatic past and relationship issues of her own. The novel follows both characters as they travel into new and uncertain emotional terrain.

Trevor Cole has won international acclaim for his fiction and journalism. His first two novels—Norman Bray in the Performance of His Life and The Fearsome Particles—were each shortlisted for the Governor General’s Literary Award and longlisted for the Dublin International IMPAC Literary Award. His third novel, Practical Jean, published in Canada, the US and Germany, won the 2011 Leacock Medal for Humour and was shortlisted for the Writer’s Trust Fiction Prize. In 2013 Trevor won the Canada Council's Victor Martyn Lynch-Staunton Award for outstanding artistic achievement as a writer in mid-career, and as one of Canada’s leading magazine journalists, he has won nine National Magazine Awards. 

Writing for The Globe and Mail, Robert J. Wiersema called Hope Makes Love “gracious and graceful, powerful and clear-eyed, thoughtful, and full of life.”

Thanks as always to Publishing@SFU for their sponsorship of The Chat.

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THE CHAT WITH TREVOR COLE

How was Hope Makes Love born?

There are two important components to the story of Hope Makes Love and they each had their own story of birth. The main driver of the novel is a man—Zep—who wants, essentially, to trick his ex-wife into falling in love with him again. Every one of my books, so far, has had a seed from some personal experience and it was true in this case too. The idea probably wouldn’t have occurred to me if I hadn’t recently lost my own marriage. I went through a period of wishing for an easy, magical solution to the pain I was going through, and the magical solution would have been for my ex-wife to suddenly be in love with me again, the way she had once been, so that we could start over. Eventually I got through that painful period. But later, after I had the necessary distance, it came back to me as the beginnings of a story—what if someone in that situation had actually acted on the wish, had actually tried to make that magical solution happen? What would it take? How would he proceed?

Those thoughts were percolating in my head at a time when there was a lot of investigation going on into the chemistry of human emotion and so they merged naturally into one concept—a man uses neuroscience to “recreate” feelings of love in the mind of the woman who’d once truly loved him. One of the early working titles for the novel was ReLove.

The other major component of the novel has to do with a woman—Hope—who has experienced a terrible trauma. It was always in my mind, once I’d begun to conceive the novel, that the man who wanted to make his ex-wife fall in love with him would need the help of someone. And I knew it would be a woman who had been traumatized and could not allow herself to wish for love in her own life. That came from meeting, in a very short period of time, a number of women—it seemed like everyone I met!—who had experienced some sort of sexual violence. The scales sort of dropped from my eyes as to what a lot of women were going through, and it troubled me greatly. I wanted to contribute something artistically to the awakening around that, by exploring the deep, long-term effects of sexual violence. And because I was embarking on a novel about love and brain chemistry, it made sense to look at love’s neuro-chemical evil twin, which is fear. They are equally biologically primitive and, in the brain, they are made or signaled by many of the same chemicals.

Your protagonist, Zep, is a former professional baseball player. Imagine you’re spending a day with him. Where does he take you? What do you talk or argue about? What’s the most important thing you learn from him?

Zep is always on the move, and always thinking positively. Anything and everything is possible, and he is frustrated by things that try to stand in his way. Zep would have a number of things he wanted to accomplish in his day—it might be dealing with issues at the Florida car wash outlets he owns, or buying a snazzy new suit or rounding up a bunch of friends for a party—and he would not be denied.

If I was joining him for the day, he would want to know what I wanted to accomplish, and it would become his mission to help me. He would take it as a matter of pride and principle that I, too, would get what I wanted on that day. If I didn’t, it would be his failure as much as my own. And if I were to express doubt or concern or, worse, apathy, he would bear down on me with intense can-do-ness. “Stay positive!” he’d shout. And he’d probably slam me on the shoulder or bro-hug me until I looked as happy and pumped-to-be-alive as he did. There is a part of me that wishes I was as much a positive-thinker as Zep. The world would seem a little simpler and easier to navigate if I was as sure as he is that everything was going to turn out fine.

Your novel deals extensively with the issues of trauma—more specifically, post-traumatic stress disorder. How extensive was your research for this aspect of the book? How difficult was it to engage with and write the series of traumatic flashbacks?

I did quite a bit of reading on the subject of PTSD, and I spoke with women who had experienced terrible things in their lives and learned from them some of the lingering effects, which then dovetailed with my research into brain chemistry as a whole. As I wrote the novel, I knew that something terrible had happened to Hope, and I did what I could to prepare the reader, and myself, for those scenes. Several of the 17 items on the official PTSD checklist are woven into Hope’s experience in the novel, so we know she is a survivor of something bad.

I frankly dreaded having to write what had happened to her, and I experienced a lot of anxiety in the days of writing the lead-up to her memory of that event. I wrote the event itself carefully. We had to see and experience the horror of it, but I didn’t want to sensationalize it. It helped greatly that I was watching it happen through Hope’s recollection, and Hope had found a way to step back from those events. She looked at them dispassionately, almost clinically, like the scientist she is. That helped me get through it, and I hoped it would help the reader as well.

Love is, of course, one of the key themes of the book. You pose the question of whether love is merely a neuro-chemical reaction that can be induced intentionally and unconsciously, or whether it is something in fact more mysterious and profound. I love how you weave through both sides of this debate. Did your own personal understanding of love change through writing the book?

I guess I used to think that love was entirely magical—an unpredictable and unquantifiable voodoo, in a way. I think now that it’s probably more quantifiable than I’d believed, at least in terms of what chemicals create the feelings of interest and infatuation and excitement and obsession that we feel when we’re falling in love. Love itself is more knowable in that way. But the act of falling in love, rather than the sensation of it—the reasons behind why this person and not that person—is still largely unknowable, and therefore is a kind of magic.

Losing my marriage taught me a lot about love too, and the limits of what it can do. I no longer believe, as the Beatles used to sing, that “all you need is love.” It’s only the beginning.

What’s a question no one has asked about your book yet, and you wish they would ask?

No one has asked me: “Why is Zep an ex-baseball player?”

It’s an important question, because nothing in a novel should be an accident. A writer’s answer to why a character is or does anything, including why he has a certain kind of job, should never be “I dunno, it just seemed like a good idea.” No!

Zep is an ex-baseball player because I wanted him to be physical, and overtly responsive, in his approach to the world, a quick-trigger kind of person, rather than thoughtful or analytical. He had to be impulsive and action-oriented, someone who made things happen, because his impulse to fix his life is what sparks the story. For the reader’s sake, he had to be a layperson who wasn’t schooled in neuroscience, in order provide some contrast to Hope. And for the story’s sake he had to be something Hope had to deal with that was outside her comfort zone.

All of that suggested that he needed to be an athlete of some kind. I wanted him to be an ex-athlete because I wanted him to be enfeebled in some way, a has-been, someone past his prime, who had less going for him than he used to have, which would make his need to recapture his wife’s love more plausible and poignant.

And I wanted him to be specifically an ex-baseball player because I love the sport and I understand its nuances better than those of other sports. I have a sense of the emotions one feels at certain points in a game or a season, because I’ve watched it so closely for so many years. So I could find ways for Zep to express himself by having him compare situations to certain events in a game. The other key attribute of baseball, for this story, is that it’s a sport with very distinct signals and levels of success and failure. You’re a major leaguer, or you’re sent down to the minors. You can get a hit or a home run, or you can strike out. Baseball is the only sport that charts a player’s errors—here’s how many times you failed miserably, for all to see. So it opened a door to exploring Zep’s failures as a man.

I actually based the character of Zep on a real ex-baseball player, Lenny Dykstra, the former third-baseman (and likely steroid user) for the Philadelphia Phillies. If you look at pictures of Dykstra as a ball player, that’s very close to how I imagined Zep as I was writing him.