"Other People's Secrets"

Meredith Hambrock is a Canadian fiction and television writer who lives in Vancouver, BC. Her short fiction has appeared in several magazines including Maisonneuve and Descant. She’s been a finalist for the CBC Short Story Prize and most recently wrote for the sitcom Corner Gas Animated.

Hambrock applied the Page 69 Test to her new novel, Other People's Secrets, and reported the following:

From page 69:

Everyone stays in their seats, the shock spreading through the room. A new concept, new uniforms, new jobs. Baby looks over at DJ Overalls and knows she can’t do it—she won’t. DJ Overalls wears the overalls, everyone knows why, everyone understands. DJ avoids Baby’s eyes. It’s like abuse, almost; it feels like abuse, Amelia, dancing around DJ, unknowing of the history, the past, the people, real people, individuals standing in front of her, Amelia with her sustainable cotton, her white sustainable cotton and the gray logo, crowing about studies.

“It’s just a uniform,” Amelia says, her voice strong and dismissive of all that they’re going through right now. “Here.” She starts pulling them out and putting them into people’s hands, and they take them and stand up.

Other People’s Secrets is about change. It’s about a group of employees who care deeply about their workplace, somewhere they’ve lived and worked their whole lives – a crumbling, moulding, resort at the edge of a beautiful lake. But when the resort gets purchased by a new owner who is intent on turning it into a hipster nightmare and the drug dealer they help put in prison is suddenly out, their summer is thrown into chaos.

They eventually decide to fight the new owner, to struggle against her vision for a new resort while searching for a rumoured sunken treasure they hope will change their fate.

I’m so fascinated by the Page 69 Test because for my book, it absolutely worked. My book is about a group of employees who care for one another fiercely and on page 69 we get to see this in action. Led by Baby, the hero, we see them discussing the new uniforms that their new owner/manager is forcing them to try, while they reel from other changes she’s announced that will alter their resort forever.

There’s an emotional connection to the uniforms – not only do they demonstrate their new manager's ignorance of the work they do (the uniforms are white which, when you’re a bartender/housekeeper/landscaper you know is just so entirely impractical) but an erasure of their own identities, echoing a feeling that they no longer deserve to exist, here, at the edge of this lake. That this lake now wholly belongs to the rich cottagers who arrive every summer.

Page 69 marks a real turning point in this book, Baby has struggled to get her friends onboard to fight against this new owner, and the introduction of uniforms and all that symbolizes, manages to galvanize their support. Baby’s going to find the sunken treasure, they’re going to make things difficult for this owner, and they’re going to fight for their town and all it represents.

A larger focus of this novel is the question of who gets to live where and why. What happens when you fight for a place and a group of people you love? I hope if anyone checked out page 69 they could see how deeply these people care about one another and hopefully become invested in their fight to save their home.

Visit Meredith Hambrock's website.

--Marshal Zeringue