Author Emma Knight poses for a portrait in front of stacks of her novel, The Life Cycle of the Common Octopus, at Indigo Books in Toronto, on Jan. 31.Galit Rodan/The Globe and Mail
For millennial women raised on the trailblazing feminism of boomers and the brash counterculture ethos of Gen Xers, the transition to adulthood has sometimes presented a rude awakening. A ruthless economy has necessitated an always-on work ethic, emotional hangovers from childhood divorces have rendered domestic partnerships fraught and the struggle to balance professional ambitions with the demands of a new, hyper-involved parenting style have contributed to a pervasive ambivalence toward family life. Toronto novelist Emma Knight’s hit fiction debut, The Life Cycle of the Common Octopus, interrogates these ambient tensions with sensitivity, skill and heart – making it the quintessential coming-of-age tale for a generation.
“It’s a strange moment,” Knight tells The Globe, over coffee at an Annex café in Toronto. “It’s constantly changing,” she says. “The norms are changing; the expectations are changing.”
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Knight’s page-turner, set in Scotland in the mid-2000s, is part detective story, part romance, part novel of manners and part cozy fiction. The book’s Toronto protagonist, Penelope Elliot Winters, known to friends as Pen, heads off to the University of Edinburgh, entering her early adulthood weighed down by the pain of her parents’ divorce – and on a mission to make sense of it. Upon arriving in the U.K., Pen reaches out to her father’s former friend, the famed novelist Lord Elliot Lennox, whom she’s named after. “My desire to reach you has overridden my Canadian obedience, and I am writing care of your literary agent, against the reasonable advice of both receptionists at your publisher’s,” she writes. To Pen’s amazement, he replies, inviting her to visit for a weekend, kicking off a mystery that unravels largely at the Lennox’s sprawling Scottish estate, where Pen becomes enamoured with their close and loving (if flawed) family, and especially their handsome, polo-playing son Sasha. As she uncovers the details of her parents’ failed union, Pen confronts the central questions of modern womanhood – from marriage and motherhood to career and friendship – and navigates a pull between self-reliance and belonging.
The seeds of the story, in fact, date back to Knight’s own coming-of-age adventure almost two decades ago, also at the University of Edinburgh, which at the time took her by surprise. “It was a real deviation from my plan,” she tells The Globe. Having grown up in the Hillcrest neighbourhood of Toronto in a literary household, the daughter of a poet/psychoanalyst and a journalist, Knight was preparing to do her undergrad in New York, where her father was then living after her parents’ divorce, when life intervened. She was essentially “bags packed, ready to go” when a friend who’d studied at Edinburgh planted the idea of going abroad instead.
Knight immediately understood that “the city [of New York] and the comfort of having a parent there – all of that would have been enveloping and would have allowed me to possibly avoid some of the growing up that I would do if I went further afield.” So, she opted for “greater independence, to be put to the test,” and boarded a flight for the U.K. It was a heady time. Forging close friendships, taking trips to the Scottish countryside and attending the Skye Ball on the Isle of Skye all left a lasting mark.
Knight eventually relocated to Paris, where she worked as an international assistant for The New York Times News Service and the World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers. She would have stayed on indefinitely, had she not been in love with her boyfriend, the Canadian filmmaker entrepreneur Anthony Green, who’d been working on a project with the Rolling Stones. After seven years of long distance, Knight says, “something had to give” – and so she relocated to Los Angeles to be with him. The pair soon returned to Toronto to help found an organic beverage business with friends that went on to become the award-winning Greenhouse Juice Co. (which now boasts distribution to more than 2,500 retailers in the Canada and the United States). They wed when Knight was six months pregnant with their first daughter, Esmé, in a living room ceremony with just 20 guests. “I was not super optimistic about the whole institution of marriage, as a younger person, and I did grow up thinking I wasn’t going to do it,” Knight says. “It took me finding someone who had very different ideas about all of this.”
“It was still kind of an anti-wedding wedding,” she adds, given its size. “But we did have that moment, and the ritual of it was so beautiful.”
The juice startup consumed every waking moment for both her and Green, and its success eventually led to The Greenhouse Cookbook, a national bestseller, and a subsequent book of essays and recipes for new mothers, How to Eat with One Hand, that, Knight says, reawakened the part of her that had always wanted to write. During her pregnancy with her second daughter, Frida, she began hearing the voices of her novel’s characters. Complications from childbirth landed her briefly in the hospital, and the crisis, which she later documented in The Globe and Mail, jolted her awake to the fleeting nature of life. She decided to go for it. Committing to write the novel was intimidating, she says, but the writing process reminded her of a time when she felt truly herself. “I didn’t know that Edinburgh was as alive in my mind as it was,” she reflects.
Knight’s debut novel, set in Scotland in the mid-2000s, is part detective story, part romance, part novel of manners, and part cozy fiction.Galit Rodan/The Globe and Mail
With her husband’s support, Knight began slowly backing away from daily operations at Greenhouse, writing her novel at night or in snatches while doing art with her small children. Later, she progressed to longer stretches in a coffee shop with a Wednesday writing group that included the Canadian filmmaker Sarah Polley.
The title of Knight’s debut springs not from the world of literature but the world of biology: When female octopuses lay their eggs, they dedicate all their energy to protecting this offspring, forgoing the search for food and ultimately wasting away. Knight’s writing is infused with a drive to avoid such a fate, while still embracing the beauty and wonder of the maternal instinct underlying it. It’s a sentiment that many millennial women are currently coming to, and so it should come as little surprise that the book has resonated so widely. Indeed, The Life Cycle of the Common Octopus is a bestseller, and it recently landed Knight on the Today show, where she was interviewed by Jenna Bush Hager, who selected the title for her high-profile book club.
“I’m trying to arrive at an expansiveness [about motherhood],” Knight says. “I say ‘trying to,’ because it’s hard to apply that expansiveness to oneself. One can be very benevolent about other people and their lives, but it’s hard not to chastise yourself when you feel like you’re not giving [enough]. The amount of energy and attention and care that you have in any given day – and how you divide that – is complicated.” She adds: “There is a constant making peace with how you balance your own drives with the goals you have for the parent you want to be.”
Tara Henley is the author of the national bestseller Lean Out: A Meditation on the Madness of Modern Life, and host of the Lean Out podcast.
