Mm-hmm.

They used to do a podcast, they still do, called Print Is Dead, which was not ironic, even though the title's supposed to be, and they were ...

You know, they really do cover.

They had interviews with the stars of the magazine world from, you know, the Town Car days, as we used to say, the '80s and '90s and early 2000s, you know, before the internet screwed everything up.

And, and I was the, the producer of the show.

I'm old friends with him.

He's an art director, actually, a magazine art director, and still a very good one and has a thriving business.

Mm-hmm

Why did you decide to set the story here?

Well, so I have to go back to my last novel, Waiting For The Man, which in its first few drafts was set in Montreal, and then as the story took over, it didn't become a story that could be set in Montreal, or the themes that I was exploring need to be... forced the book to be set somewhere else.

Let's just put it that way.

One of the characters I ended up writing in that book came from Montreal, and that was my sop to the city and my sort of like my mea culpa, you know? This novel wasn't necessarily a Montreal novel, but the more I went into the backstory of the family, the more it became a Montreal novel, and it became a novel about the Montreal I grew up in.

It wasn't the novel of Montreal, of the Plateau or, you know, downtown or even St. Henry, like parts of Montreal that have been really well done.

It was about the West End.

You know, I grew up in Côte-Saint-Luc.

Agreed