www.ukula.com > montreal > library Golda Fried: Staying True to Life's Surprises Golda Fried is pictured reading at Conundrum Press' Tenth Anniversary Celebration at The Mainline Theatre, Montreal. Fried features among over thirty writers and artists to contribute to a new anthology entitled The Portable Conundrum. On October 17, 2005, Golda Fried stepped out of the college class she was teaching in Greensboro, North Carolina, to discover nine messages waiting on her cell phone. “It was weird because no one ever calls me – I was worried someone had died,” she recalls a year later. Fortunately, her morbid fear was short lived, as moments later her phone rang. It was her mother on the other end. She was on her tenth attempt to announce that Fried’s novel, Nellcott Is My Darling, had been nominated as a finalist for the Governor General’s Award—one of Canada’s most prestigious literary prizes. To Fried the event was so unexpected it seemed absurd. “I had no idea. Even my publisher had no idea.” Nellcott reads as a weave of unexpected anecdotes from the perspective of its main character, Alice, an often-startled, 19-year-old university student. Fried forgoes a heavily structured plot in order to be true to life and to Alice’s quirky voice. Fried rejects the notion that each passage of a novel must serve to drive the narrative forward. As a result, Alice’s personality and her disjointed romance with cynical boyfriend, Nellcott, are built piece by piece, without long descriptive passages. The reader is thus given a sense of Alice’s wide-eyed discovery. During a squabble between the couple, for example, a description of Alice’s thoughts interrupts the dialogue, “A pigeon flew into a sordid cloud and her hair was violent on her face and if she had been chewing gum, it would have gotten caught in her hair.” Such interjections digress from the action, but add to the atmosphere. As when she learned of her Governor General’s nomination, Fried feels real life is much more a series of unexpected events than a coordinated plot. - by MARC APPOLLONIO Website © Golda Fried. / All rights reserved.