The Quintland Sisters(102)
Million Dollar Babies, TV miniseries, produced by CBC Television and CBS Television (1994).
Nodelman, Perry, Dear Canada: Not a Nickel to Spare; The Great Depression Diary of Sally Cohen, Toronto, Ontario, 1932 (Scholastic Canada, 2007).
Soucy, Jean-Yves, Annette Dionne, Cécile Dionne, and Yvonne Dionne, Family Secrets: The Dionne Quintuplets’ Autobiography. Translated by Kathe Roth (Berkley Books, 1997).
Tesher, Ellie, The Dionnes (Doubleday Canada, 1999).
The “Act for the Protection of the Dionne Quintuplets” was redacted slightly for use in this novel. The full Act is available online.
More time than I care to admit was spent devouring the lavish news coverage of the Dionne quintuplets between 1934 and 1939 (and beyond). Almost every day for those first five years, the international press dished out Dionne details on everything from tonsils to turkeys, and the adoring public lapped it up. Decades later, so did I.
All newspaper articles are used with permission.
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About the Author
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Meet Shelley Wood
About the Book
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Author Q&A
Reading Group Guide Questions
About the Author
Meet Shelley Wood
SHELLEY WOOD is a writer, journalist, and editor. Her work has appeared in the New Quarterly, Room, the Antigonish Review, Bath Flash Fiction, and the Globe and Mail. She has won the Frank McCourt prize for creative nonfiction, Free Fall Magazine’s short prose contest, Causeway Lit’s creative nonfiction prize, and the Tethered by Letters F(r)iction award. Born and raised in Vancouver, she has lived in Montreal, Cape Town, and the Middle East, and now has a home, a man, and a dog in British Columbia, Canada.
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About the Book
Author Q&A
Q: What drew you to this story?
A: In my local library, I stumbled across a book called 100 Photos That Changed Canada, which included a picture of five identical toddlers. I recognized most of the other topics in the book, but these girls? I’d never heard of them. The more I looked into it, the crazier it seemed that I had never known their story. I’ve since learned that there have been mega-fans over the years: people who have followed the Dionne quintuplets since birth, who’ve kept scrapbooks, collected and traded memorabilia, and, more recently, have Pinterest boards or Facebook groups. A half-dozen books have been written about them over the last fifty years, including several autobiographies coauthored by the quintuplets. At the time I started researching The Quintland Sisters, however, nothing had been published since the late 1990s. The two surviving quintuplets live private lives and very seldom speak with the press. Moreover, the generation that for decades had followed every tidbit of news about the quintuplets has largely passed away, and this story, I feared, was in danger of vanishing with them.
Q: Yet you chose to write a novel rather than a nonfiction account. Why?
A: Partly I chose fiction because others have already covered this topic more journalistically. In particular, Ellie Tesher’s and Pierre Berton’s books are probably the most rigorous and impartial, closely documenting the sad twists in the lives of the famous girls, including during the many decades after they left the nursery. Nonfiction lovers can still track those books down.
Novels, on the other hand, reach a different type of reader, so that was one of my chief motives. I also liked the idea of writing about a period that can’t be pinned down by facts—even the newspaper accounts of the day swerved closer to propaganda than objective record. By writing about the first five years of their lives, I was able to zoom in on a period that the two surviving quintuplets would scarcely remember. Also, all of the other eyewitnesses to these early years have long since died. This allowed me to create a fictional character, Emma Trimpany, who could stand in for the reader—an insider, someone who could observe and grow alongside the babies themselves, someone who could wrestle with the issues, but, most of all, someone who would love these children as children, nothing more.
Q: Do you feel there are heroes and villains in the story of the Dionne quintuplets? Or is this a situation of everyone doing what they think was best at the time?
A: Among the fictional characters in my novel, as well as the real-life figures of the day, there were those who acted for the good of the Dionne quintuplets and others who may have acted with more nefarious intent. What’s more, motives changed as the years went by. Without a doubt, the Dionne story represents yet another instance of the Canadian government electing to take children away from parents deemed unsuitable and later failing to take responsibility for the safety and well-being of those children.
My hope is that people reading my novel who already had an opinion as to who was “good” and who was “bad” might see things somewhat differently through the course of the story. For those who knew nothing about the Dionne babies before picking up this book, I will have done my job if they, like Emma herself, are left with more questions than answers and struggle to understand how things could have been done differently to give the children a normal, happy life.
Q: You visited the site of the former nursery and the Dionne property while writing this book. What does Quintland look like today?