I was born in July 1962 in small-town Chatham, Ontario, a rural community near the border to Detroit, Michigan, where I spent the first eighteen years of my life, a landscape that would become the backdrop for my first three novels. From early on I was inspired by Chatham’s unique history as a hunting ground for the neutral Indians, as a battleground for the War of 1812, as a terminus on the Underground Railroad where slaves from the southern United States sought freedom, and as a hotspot for bootlegging during prohibition. The history of my hometown plays a character in my first book, Rush Home Road, as the protagonist, Addy Shadd, is a descendant of fugitive slaves who settled in a fictional community called Rusholme, inspired by the village of Buxton, Ontario. In my second novel, The Girls, the memoirs of conjoined twins, one of the sisters is obsessed with collecting the native artifacts turned up by the farmer’s plow each spring. The landscape called to me once again as I wrote my third novel, The Wife’s Tale, the story of Mary Gooch, who leaves her safe existence in ‘Leaford’ when her husband disappears on the eve of their silver anniversary.

My father worked at a factory that made trucks. My mother stayed at home and cared for me and my brothers, one a year younger than me, one a year older, all of us born in July. When I was a child the world was safer, or so we thought, and we children could walk down the street to call on our friends, journey through the cornfields to ride our bikes on a hilly path by the creek or to the other side of town, if we were feeling brave. When the streetlights came on at night it was time to go home. We were free to explore, to wander, and to wonder.

I attended St. Ursula Catholic School from kindergarten to eighth grade. My friends were mostly Italian and Portuguese and I loved their homes with the sides of beef and pork curing in meat lockers, and cloves of garlic dripping from ceilings, and the curious second ovens that they all seemed to keep in their basements. Their fathers worked in the automotive industry, too. Their mothers worked in the vast country fields picking strawberries, asparagus, tomatoes, tobacco, cherries, apples. We children went along sometimes, but I seldom picked more than I ate, especially during strawberry season. That place and time, those fields, are imprinted on my memory, along with the sense of being watched over.  I was strongly influenced by my religious upbringing, and at one point considered becoming a nun, but when our parish refused to baptize my bi-racial cousins I stopped going to church altogether.

I worked part-time in a drugstore during my five-year term at Chatham Collegiate Institute, and during the summer, as a waitress at a bakery/coffee shop that inspired ‘The Oakwood Bakery’, which appears in all three novels. The bakery was also the setting for my first screenplay “South of Wawa,” the story of two donut shop waitresses trying to get to a Dan Hill concert. English was my favorite school subject, and in ninth grade I discovered Alice Munro. She wrote about people I recognized. She lived not far from my hometown. But given my background and circumstances, the idea that I could be a writer seemed impractical.

After high school I attended St. Clair College in Windsor to study advertising and business. My plan was to become a copy writer, to marry my passion for writing with a practical approach to making a living. My college education was of a social rather than academic nature, and I’m happy to say that I still have good friends from that dizzy time. Most importantly, it was through a college friend that I met my future husband who inspired me, and inspires me still, to write fiction.

I met my husband of twenty-five years, Milan Cheylov, when he was a young actor. He’d recently returned to Toronto from acting school in New York and I was new in town, working in the classified advertising department of The Globe and Mail. We met by coincidence at Bennie’s, an old deli near Yonge and Bloor Street. We talked about books and he asked what I was reading. I pulled a tattered, decade-old copy of Mordechai Richler’s “Cocksure” from my purse. Milan grinned, reached into his duffel bag and pulled out the same novel. Milan was everything I wanted to be, confident and brash and ambitious, but above all, an artist. We found a tiny bachelor apartment in old Cabbagetown, which was at that time equal parts derelict and gentrified, and began our adventure together. When I told Milan that I wanted to be a writer, he encouraged me to quit my job and write. I took on a waitress job to support myself while I sat at my old Smith Corona and tapped out short stories, the first of which, a love story between an obese, mentally challenged woman and an old man, was published in The Wascana Review. Seeing that first short story published was, for both Milan and I, the sweetest victory.

After writing a dozen more short stories, none of which were published, but for which I received just enough encouragement from editors, I decided to try my hand at dramatic writing. Milan suggested I take a few acting classes to better understand the actor’s process and I found myself bitten by the bug. We moved to an apartment over a grocery store in Kensington Market where I spent two character-building years as an actor, appearing in several plays and a few television shows. My most memorable moment was playing a scene opposite Al Pacino and John Goodman in “Sea of Love.” My part was cut out of the movie, but the week I spent on set helped pay our rent that summer.  My lowest point was appearing in a children’s play, dressed in a squirrel suit, being upstaged by a fly in a window. I quit acting and turned back to writing – this time a screenplay – “South of Wawa.”

I drew on my experience as an actor to write that screenplay, playing the roles as I wrote the dialogue. I drew on nostalgia to find the time and place – a small-town donut shop and a cast of eccentric characters driven by an unlikely duo, one young woman looking for a way in, the other desperate to find a way out. The movie, starring Rebecca Jenkins and Catherine Fitch, was produced in 1992. One reviewer compared the screenplay to Chekov while another wondered if the screenwriter had been dropped on her head at birth.

Milan’s ambitions had shifted. He wanted to move to the other side of the camera to direct. So we took the money from “South of Wawa” to finance Milan’s first and second short films. On the strength of those films, Milan was hired to direct his first television show, with a blitz of offers to follow. After eight crazy years in Kensington Market, with its booming reggae and fantastic diversity, fascinating characters, fresh fish and exotic fruit, we moved to an apartment at Queen and Spadina. For a time I thought I wanted to direct, too, and made two short films myself. Then I wrote an original film script called “Jesus Freaks” that I wanted to see to completion.  I craved a direct connection to the audience and longed to tell the story my way. I spent the better part of five years editing and revising that screenplay, meeting with potential partners, financiers, making trips to LA and New York for casting, domino deals that tumbled, house-of-cards deals that collapsed. When the financing fell through for the third time, I knew it was time to let it go.

Milan suggested I take a break from the film world to write the novel I’d been dreaming of aloud for so many years. I knew the characters and felt the arc of the story in a way that seemed more remembered than created. We moved to a rented house in Little Italy, and with Milan working long hours on film sets, I sat down to write the first chapters to Rush Home Road, the story of an old black woman who lives in a trailer park near Chatham, and the little mixed-race girl she takes in to change the course of both of their lives. Soon after I began writing we discovered we were expecting our first child. Thrilled by the news, Milan and I went back to our respective jobs, with him leading film sets and me, alone, in my third-floor office/bedroom, writing my story, the details of which I’d shared with no one. I worked long hours then, taking walks alone in the evenings. I was a pregnant hermit. I realized at some point that not only was I not playing Mozart for my baby in utero, the only sound he could hear was the tapping of the my computer keys. Certain that this would breed neurosis, I began to compose the novel out loud.

I finished the first draft of Rush Home Road in the weeks before my son was born. Milan read it and we discussed the story in detail as I labored in the delivery room. I was joyful, but exhausted. Milan was often out of town for work and those first months passed in a blur. I made a few revisions to the novel and sent the pages out, but its specter was eclipsed by the day-to-day demands of new motherhood. When the call from literary agent Denise Bukowski came offering representation, it felt like a dream, something that might happen to that other Lori, the one who didn’t have a baby on her hip. The calls that followed – there was a flurry of interest from publishers in New York, an offer to be one of the "New Faces of Fiction" for Knopf Canada, foreign sales – came as I was changing my son’s diaper, playing blocks on the floor. I signed one of the deals on his first birthday. My journey as an author is bound to my journey of motherhood.

We bought our first home, a fixer-upper Victorian in the Queen West district. In the midst of renovations we discovered we were expecting again. Our daughter was born just weeks after Rush Home Road was launched. I had the distinction of being the pregnant author on tour that year, and after the baby was born, I brought my newborn and toddler and my parents along with me to book events. When someone asked my then three-year-old son what my job was, he answered, “Mamma signs books.”

At that time, I’d been working on my second novel, one which I would abandon, when in my daily life I became preoccupied with my physical relationship to my children, whom I never left, and with whom I was often alone. I joke that I had a child on my breast, my hip, or my lap for four years. That pondering of my bond with my children, along with my passion for the outsider and an interest in the extreme, lead to my second novel, The Girls, about conjoined twins Rose and Ruby.

Shortly after The Girls was launched, my husband and I made the difficult decision to leave Canada, the city we’d lived in for twenty-five years, our family in south western Ontario, all of our friends, for Milan’s career opportunities in the television industry in L.A. Even before we’d made the decision to move I’d heard Mary Gooch calling from the sidelines – a woman in her forties who undergoes a dramatic transformation.

We rented a modest house in a suburb in the west San Fernando Valley where the people were friendly, but strangers. I kept getting lost, and losing things. We arrived in the summer with the temperatures in the triple digits and spent days at the ocean, a short distance from our home. I drove the curving roads of the Santa Monica Mountains thinking of the thousands of conversations I’ve had with women about loneliness, self acceptance, marriage, husbands, body image, food, denial, betrayal and more recently, encroaching middle-age. I thought about what it means to be a stranger, and how one can be transformed by circumstance, and as I found my own tribe of friends and settled into the new rhythm of a different life, the story of Mary Gooch unfolded.

Milan and I live with our children in a rural canyon in the Santa Monica Mountains with coyotes and bobcats and rattlesnakes. From my office above the garage I can see a horse ranch across the road and beyond that, the tawny hills and clear blue sky. I’m currently at work on my next book.