Growing up, being an author was a pipe dream for Newmarket’s Brianne Sommerville.
She always had a creative side that involved doing plays with the children at her mother’s at-home daycare, and when she got to high school, there was a creative writing course that sparked her love of fiction.
In Grade 12, she even began writing a novel before her computer crashed and she lost everything — luckily she says it wasn’t very good. But her love of reading and writing led her to Queen’s University where she studied English literature.
She began doing a lot of spoken word poetry and attending open mic nights and she wrote a play that was produced by the school.
After graduation, she ended up going into communications and got away from creative writing as she pursued her professional career. However, in 2018, when she went on maternity leave and was longing to flex her creative muscle. At the same time, she was struggling with postpartum anxiety.
Sommerville found solace in journaling, which inspired some of the early chapters of her new novel coming out on March 5, IF I LOSE HER.
“That was when I really developed the story of the main character,” she said.
While she started the novel during her first maternity leave, she didn’t finish it until her second maternity leave was ending in 2021.
After her first maternity leave, she had about a third of the novel done when she went back to work, but as she got busy with work, she got away from working on the book.
“It was a fun project I had, but it wasn’t a priority and I didn’t have time for it,” Sommerville said. “When I went on my second maternity leave, I found the time to finish a lot of it.”
During that second maternity leave, she was also convinced that IF I LOSE HER could really be published. Sommerville was taking a writing course at the University of Toronto and shared her first chapter of her novel with the class and everyone really liked it.
She said it’s easy to think you can write a novel, but to think it could be published and be in bookstores is a major motivator and that confirmation from her class pushed Sommerville to finish it.
“I made it my mission to get it done,” she said.
From there it was a long process as Sommerville learned about the business of getting a book published. She did research, listened to podcasts about how to go about writing a query letter for an agent or publisher.
She ended up finding a critique group of six other women who are authors in Canada, Australia, and the U.S.
“They helped me fine-tune my work and from there I ended up querying my publisher, who actually does accept unsolicited manuscripts,” she said.
With Toronto-based Rising Action Publishing Co. behind her, it all started coming together.
After beginning IF I LOSE HER in 2018, fishing it in 2021, and signing with Rising Action Publishing Co. in 2022, Sommerville’s novel is less than a month away from becoming available.
She said while the process was daunting at times, it was such an accomplishment to just finally finish writing the novel, and now to see it hitting stores in the coming weeks, it’s an indescribable feeling.
“I’m very excited, it’s nerve-racking to check reviews,” Sommerville said. “One of the most surreal moments was when I contacted Chapters in Newmarket because that was the bookstore I went to as a kid, and when they said they’d love to have my book, it was crazy.”
IF I LOSE HER is classified as a thriller or a domestic suspense, and Sommerville says that for readers who enjoyed Stacy Willingham’s All the Dangerous Things or Newmarket’s own Ashley Audrain’s The Push, this is in a similar vein and one of the tropes she used was having an unreliable narrator.
Sommerville says the novel follows a first-time mother who’s struggling with adapting to motherhood, but it’s not until a near fatal moment involving her daughter that she attracts the attention of child services and receives the diagnosis of postpartum depression.
“The topics you’ll find are gaslighting, postpartum anxiety and depression, and there’s suburban drama,” she said. “It covers serious themes and it’s based on my own experience, so it should feel authentic and raw.”
Sommerville’s debut novel, IF I LOSE HER, hits stores March 5 and she’ll be doing book signings at Chapters in Newmarket on March 17 from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. and at Indigo in Hillcrest Mall in Richmond Hill on March 23 from 1 to 4 p.m.
Learn more about the novel here.
