B.C. author dips into her family history in new mystery novel

When talented young writer June Grant joins a stenography pool at a prestigious Montreal advertising firm a couple of years after the Second World War to help support her once-prosperous family, she can't imagine having the kind of life her parents want.

Or, for that matter, the life her sister Daisy has — one with a well-off husband and two kids who carry themselves more like adults than children.

But it turns out Daisy might not be the picture-perfect housewife she seems.

As June makes her own waves in the advertising world, she starts digging into the hidden side of her sister's life. What she discovers turns her perception of her sister upside down, while challenging her own inner conflict about chasing her dreams versus living up to expectations.

These are the building blocks of Deryn Collier's new novel, A Real Somebody. It's a tale loosely based on the life of Collier's late aunt, June Grant, who was a popular essayist on CBC Radio's The Sunday Edition in the early 2000s.

For Collier, who lives in Nelson, B.C., writing a book based on her aunt seemed like a natural thing to do.

"Even when she was in her late 70s, she had this wonder at the world, and she was curious about everything … And so to me she felt like she would make such a great character," Collier told Margaret Gallagher, host of CBC's North by Northwest.

"And then when she passed away in 2014 [at the age of 88], her personal archives … landed in my lap. And so I had this treasure trove of things that she had written — photos, correspondence, her advertising portfolio — because she did become a copywriter in a Montreal ad agency. And so I had all this material, and since what I do is write mystery stories, the two kind of came together."

The result is a book that has shades of fictional teen sleuth Nancy Drew if she were to meet Peggy Olson from the television series Mad Men. In the show, Olson starts out as a secretary, becomes a copywriter, and eventually rises to the role of copy chief.

In A Real Somebody, Collier aims to bring post-war Montreal to life. The author moved there as a young teenager and stayed through her high school and university years. 

"I know the city really well," Collier said. "So it was a lot of imagination, paired with research, paired with my own teenage memories of the city."

Even the title of the book has an intimacy to it. It came from a list Collier found in her aunt's papers — a list in which Grant seemed to be trying to nail down her own identity. 

"And the very top bullet was 'A real somebody,'" Collier said. "So I found that I use that list as the basis for her character and then, over time, that became the title that stuck."

The book was released in July.