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WORK TITLE: THE MOTHER ACT
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WEBSITE: https://www.heidireimer.com
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COUNTRY: Canada
NATIONALITY: Canadian
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PERSONAL
Married: Richard; children: two daughters.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer and writing coach.
WRITINGS
Contributor to anthologies such as The M Word: Conversations about Motherhood, edited by Kerry Clare, and Body & Soul: Stories for Skeptics and Seekers, edited by Susan Scott. Contributor to numerous periodicals such as Chatelaine, The New Quarterly, and Literary Mama.
SIDELIGHTS
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Heidi Reimer grew up wanting to be a writer, but she had been told that women were supposed to be housewives and mothers. Her young adult years helped her overcome those beliefs. She eventually married and had two daughters, but she struggled with the responsibilities of motherhood and yet still wanting to be a writer. At one point, she imagined what it would be like to walk out the door and leave her family behind to pursue a career in writing. Instead, she decided to write a novel based on a character who does just that. Along with being a writer, Reimer has also started a writing coaching program at the Sarah Selecky Writing School.
The Mother Act, Reimer’s debut novel, is about an actress named Sadie, who never wanted to be a mother, and Jude, the daughter she left behind. Sadie has become an actress and a controversial feminist, and Jude has grown up to become an actress as well. One night Jude goes to see her mother’s one-woman show about motherhood, a sequel to her famous The Mother Act. The novel alternates between the two characters, showing how each woman and their story are more complex than the other one realizes.
“An affecting story about love, abandonment, and the murky middle between them,” wrote a reviewer in Kirkus Reviews. They appreciated the book’s theater references, but they found Jude’s story more “gripping” than Sadie’s. They predicted, however, that “all readers will get lost in Reimer’s gift for writing heart-wrenching multidimensional relationships.” Sarah Myers, writing in Booklist, agreed, describing the book as a “poignant reflection on the challenges women face in balancing ambition and family.”
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BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, March 15, 2024, Sarah Myers, review of The Mother Act, p. 40.
Kirkus Reviews, March 15, 2024, review of The Mother Act.
ONLINE
Heidi Reimer website, https://www.heidireimer.com/ (April 16, 2024).
Literary Mama, https://literarymama.com (April 28, 2014), author blog.
I’m Heidi Reimer.
I’m a novelist, essayist, and writing coach.
I help stuck writers stop dreading the blank page and start writing their novels with flow and ease.
I’m Heidi Reimer. I’m a novelist, essayist & creative writing coach.
I love smart, propulsive stories with complicated characters and deep exploration of the female experience. My debut novel, The Mother Act, is coming from Penguin Random House in April 2024.
Photo credit: JEMMAN Photography
Heidi Reimer is a novelist and writing coach. Her debut novel, The Mother Act, is coming from Penguin Random House in April 2024. Her writing interrogates the lives of women, usually those bent on breaking free of what they’re given to create what they yearn for. Her front row seat to The Mother Act’s theatrical world began two decades ago when she met and married an actor, and her immersion in motherhood began when she adopted a toddler and discovered she was pregnant on the same day. She has published in Chatelaine, The New Quarterly, Literary Mama, and the anthologies The M Word: Conversations About Motherhood and Body & Soul: Stories for Skeptics and Seekers.
THE LONG VERSION: Heidi Reimer’s mission is to create immersive stories that make women feel expanded, deeply engaged, and more meaningfully connected to their truest identity and deepest desires.
The complexity and depth of mother-daughter relationships, the psychological legacies of childhood, the struggle to break free of what we’re given to create what we yearn for…all these are themes of her life and, inevitably, her work.
Heidi Reimer’s debut novel, The Mother Act (coming April 2024), is a mother-daughter story that unfolds on the opening night of a one-woman show. The performer is a controversial feminist figure and outspoken critic of societal expectations of motherhood. Her estranged 24-year-old daughter is in the audience, watching her mother account for the choices that shaped her life. The biggest of these? Prioritizing her own ambition, personal needs, and creative fulfillment when she abandoned her as a toddler.
Heidi’s desire to be a novelist began in childhood, when she first realized at the age of eight that immersion in a novel was the very best thing in the world. But almost all her models of womanhood were stay-at-home mothers, and the message that women were meant to devote themselves to children, not careers, was pervasive and overt. Throughout her teenage years she answered the question “what do you want to be when you grow up?” with “writer, wife, and mother”: a writer because that was what she wanted, a wife and mother because she was female and that’s what God made females for.
Circa age 17. God’s handmaiden. Possible future as a country living magazine cover model.
But she was the oldest of six, and she knew how all-consuming a passel of kids could be. In her early twenties, Heidi’s mantra became “Marriage and motherhood are the enemy of my dreams.” She apprenticed with a novelist. She wrote drafts and drafts of short stories and essays and novels and partial novels, travelled a bunch, supported herself as a waitress and office admin and bookseller and personal assistant.
Slowly, painfully, she began the long process of deconstructing the wounds of patriarchal indoctrination and letting go of beliefs that had confined and defined her.
She met women who blew her mind with their freedom and authenticity. She read a lot of books. She kept attempting to write, defeated regularly by her own self-doubt, perfectionism, and fear that she didn’t have what it took.
Circa age 21. Among the messages on the bulletin board is the word SINGLE-MINDED.
Opening night of the 2003 Stratford Festival Season.
On a firefly-lit night in the mountains of West Virginia, she attended a performance of Much Ado About Nothing. Playing Benedick was a dark, mysterious, older (but how much older??) Englishman. They met after the show, and Heidi was drawn to his quiet depth and his dedication to his artistic calling. Over the next nine months, as Heidi moved to Toronto to give up on being a writer and try to become an editor instead, as Richard toured Shakespeare throughout the US, they wrote each other long, in-depth emails about their lives and dreams. She’d already fallen in love with him by the time she flew to New York City to see him in A Midsummer Night’s Dream and meet him for the second time, almost one year after the first. She’d also started writing again.
They spent the next six years shuttling between NYC (his home base) and Toronto (Heidi’s), and thus began both her immersion in the theatre world that permeates The Mother Act and her relinquishment of her antipathy to marriage.
In her late 20s, a decade older than her classmates, she started university to study English. In a women’s studies class, she called herself a feminist for the first time. She wrote it down: “I am a feminist.” The heavens did not smite her.
When she did finally choose to become a mother (it’s a long story and a pretty good one, which can be read here), it was with careful thought and a hefty dose of fear about how she could do it without losing herself. She felt invalidated by the general societal approval of her choice to mother, beleaguered by the disproportionate burden of labor placed on her versus her husband, and offended by the glib assumptions about one of the most complex experiences of her life. The saccharine over-simplification of Mother’s Day cards made her want to scream.
She loved her two daughters (who, it must be emphasized, were and are incredible humans).
She wanted them to have a nurturing and secure upbringing.
She wanted to support them into becoming fully-realized girls and women.
And there were many days when she felt like devoting herself to providing that for them had sabotaged her own self-realization.
And so it was on one particularly challenging day in early motherhood that The Mother Act was born. Heidi was then a stay-at-home mother, rising before dawn to work on a novel, frequently on her own with a baby and a toddler while her husband supported them with acting gigs out of town. In one piercing moment on this one day, she felt how thoroughly this mothering life was (it felt) killing everything she’d worked so hard to create and become. She pictured herself walking out the door, starting over as a solo, unfettered person, and never coming back.
The catch, of course, was that she didn’t want for her daughters the life she imagined would result if she were to follow through. So instead of walking out, she started feverishly taking notes for a new novel in which a mother does act out that escape fantasy—and a daughter lives with the fallout.
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Bringing The Mother Act to completion and then publication was a process riddled with obstacles, joy, purpose and tears. For a period of two years she abandoned the book due to what she thought was the unviability of the structure (taking place all on one night, but spanning decades—hard!). During a dark month of the soul in 2020 (but who didn’t have one of those in 2020?), she looked head-on at the question of whether she could be delusional and/or was one of those writers for whom it was just not going to happen. She had an excellent therapist helping her through this crisis, and for a while she seriously considered quitting writing and training to become a therapist. She came through it more certain than ever of the worth of her work, sourcing her value from within herself in a new and deeper way.
It was, in fact, fifteen minutes after weeping in a therapy session about her inability to get a novel published that she found out an editor at Random House Canada was interested in The Mother Act. From that moment, decades of quietly, invisibly trying and failing and yearning and learning to write began to grow into something bigger.
Today, the baby and the toddler are teenagers. The deep, dark older actor has become an actor-director, spending six years as the artistic director of a summer Shakespeare Festival on the banks of the St. Lawrence River (which gave Heidi even more theatrical material). Heidi Reimer writes in a sweet little studio by that river, at which no one ever interrupts her.
As the creator of the Novel Alchemy group coaching program at Sarah Selecky Writing School, Heidi Reimer also helps other writers identify and work through their own self-doubt, fear, and creative blocks so they can write a fast, raw draft of a novel.
She gives manuscript evaluations too, so that training as an editor is not going to waste.
She never did become a therapist, but the writers she works with frequently tell her their coaching sessions feel like therapy.
She still identifies as a feminist.
Heidi Reimer is a novelist and writing coach. Her debut novel, The Mother Act, follows the complicated relationship between an actress who refuses to abandon her career and the daughter she chooses to abandon instead. Heidi’s front row seat to the theatrical world of The Mother Act began two decades ago when she met and married an actor, and her immersion in motherhood began when she adopted a toddler and discovered she was pregnant on the same day. She has published in Chatelaine, The New Quarterly, Literary Mama, and the anthologies The M Word: Conversations about Motherhood and Body & Soul: Stories for Skeptics and Seekers. Her Substack newsletter is The Visibility Letters. More at www.heidireimer.com. Her Substack newsletter is The Visibility Letters. More at www.heidireimer.com.
April 28, 2014 | Blog | 2 Comments
After Page One: Why I Write
By Heidi Reimer
A guest post to motivate, encourage, and inspire
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Writing for My Daughters
My children need me to write. It is imperative, for the well-being and security of my children, that I write.
This was my thought as I left the house and stalked down the street in tears, having uttered the words, “I don’t want this life.” Having left my children alone, left them behind.
Last week, I began the second leg of a four-month solo parenting stint. I’m between books, first novel completed and languishing in a weigh station on the path to publication, second novel embryonic, barely living, in my head and in my notebook. I’m waiting. Stalled. In limbo. For my partner to return, for my own life and writing and career to begin advancing with direction and momentum.
Mothering—especially full-time, solo mothering—is a handy excuse for the low-grade depression and inertia I’ve been in. For the new book that is not progressing, for my inability to haul myself from bed before dawn as I did through months of finishing the previous book, for the sense of purposelessness that drags me down some days amid the domestic minutiae and the unrelenting need-meeting.
It is so hard to begin a new novel. There’s so little to latch on to, to run with, to shove yourself off from. It’s so ethereal — look sideways at it, and poof, there’s nothing there at all.
The truth is I’m floundering between projects. I haven’t found my footing in the new one, and I haven’t made it a priority, consistently, to sit down at the page until I find it. The new book is uncomfortable and bewildering. My bed is soft and warm, and I am so tired.
I cried, “I don’t want this life.” And then I walked out of the house, away from the full kitchen sink and the toy-strewn floor and the “I’m hungry!” and the “She’s not being nice to me,” down the street in tears.
Four-year-old Aphra followed me, rubber-booted. “Should we go for a little walk together, Mommy?” So sweet and gentle, her hand pressing into mine.
And this is when I realized: it is imperative that I start writing again, in a focused, non-negotiable way. Not for the book itself, though it is for that. Not even for my own self-preservation, though it is for that. But today, it is primarily for my daughters, so they can have a mother who is fulfilled and happy, who is delighted to be with them because first she has been with her writing. Who does not say, in their presence, that the life she’s living with them is a life she doesn’t want.
I must make my way out of the weeds of the in-between, forward.
Today when I left the house, I first arranged a beloved babysitter. I walked out into the dawn to a café with my notebook, and I wrote.
Reimer, Heidi THE MOTHER ACT Dutton (Fiction None) $28.00 4, 30 ISBN: 9780593473726
Complicated family dynamics take center stage in this coming-of-age story set in the theater world.
When teenage Jude Jones-Linnen stumbles on a copy of The Mother Act--a play written by her mother, Sadie Jones--Jude's feelings crystalize: Sadie, who'd abandoned her when she was 2, had never loved her. It would be hard not to jump to this conclusion. The play, which Sadie has performed to critical acclaim, includes such lines as this: "I hate my child and what her existence has done to my relationship, my life, me." But for Sadie, the situation is not so black and white. In alternating chapters, we get her story, learning how she thought motherhood stripped her of her dreams and sense of self--but that doesn't mean she hates her child. Jude navigates life as a child actress traveling with her father's Shakespearean theater troupe while enduring the occasional stressful visit from her mother. As Jude moves into young adulthood and explores the world of film, she must deal with her ever-strained relationship with her mother, especially now that Sadie is performing a sequel to The Mother Act. Sadie's brand of feminism wears thin pretty quickly (we get it--you think Shakespeare is a misogynist), and the story of her life is not nearly as gripping as Jude's. That being said, readers who are in the acting world will rejoice at Reimer's hyperspecific theater references (no notes on opening night!), and all readers will get lost in Reimer's gift for writing heart-wrenching, multidimensional relationships.
An affecting story about love, abandonment, and the murky middle between them.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2024 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
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"Reimer, Heidi: THE MOTHER ACT." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Mar. 2024, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A786185737/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=f3fe49e0. Accessed 4 Apr. 2024.
The Mother Act. By Heidi Reimer. Apr. 2024. 400p. Dutton, $28 (9780593473726); e-book (9780593473733)
Reimer's debut plunges readers into the intricacies of motherhood, sacrifice, and identity. Set in the theater world, the story follows Sadie and Jude, a mother and daughter grappling with the consequences of their choices. Their tumultuous relationship asks, how much is a woman expected to give up when she becomes a mother? Sadie's one-woman show exposes the raw truths of her experiences as a mother; Jude, meanwhile, struggles with years of feeling abandoned and resentful. The tension between them is palpable as they navigate their shared history and conflicting desires. Damian, Sadie's spouse and Jude's father, adds another layer of complexity to the narrative, his desire for fatherhood contrasting sharply with Sadie's reluctance to be a mother. As the story unfolds, readers are left wondering if there is a chance for redemption for Sadie, and if Jude will come to understand the difficult decisions her mother faced. Ultimately, The Mother Act is a poignant reflection on the challenges women face in balancing ambition and family in a world that often demands they choose between the two. --Sarah Myers
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2023 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
Myers, Sarah. "The Mother Act." Booklist, vol. 120, no. 14, 15 Mar. 2023, p. 40. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A788124910/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=b1c8a862. Accessed 4 Apr. 2024.