Twenty years after the publication of his acclaimed short story collection Cities of Weather, Berlin-based author Matthew Fox returned to Montreal this past holiday season during a Canadian book signing tour for his new novel This Is It.
A multi-generational family drama, This Is It (Enfield & Wizenty) is a sweeping family epic intertwined with a love story whose main character Gio abandons his cancer-stricken boyfriend only to find himself in New York City during 9/11. This “novel-in-stories” explores shame, cowardice and redemption as Gio attempts to unravel a family mystery. Fox grew up in Windsor and Toronto, Ontario, before moving to Montreal where he came of age in the 1990s, graduated from Concordia University and was an editor at Maisonneuve magazine. Matthew and I recently sat down for a candid Q&A.
What compelled you to write This Is It?
Matthew Fox : My career has been in journalism and marketing but I’ve always considered myself a writer. If I don’t have a writing project on the go, life has no meaning, you know? I always wanted to be a fiction writer but when Cities of Weather came out I quickly learned you can’t live on the money you make as a Canadian fiction writer. So I’ve had these other careers, first in journalism and now in marketing. I do my writing on the weekends mostly.
I was compelled to write This Is it because I have a huge family, we have a lot of stories that we tell over and over again. There’s a lot of mythology about why we are the way we are, and just hearing all of those stories from different people, everybody has their own agenda. Everybody has their own way they remember it. To me, that has always been very compelling. So I wanted to write something that was structured that way.
Your “novel-in-stories” straddles two different genres.
MATTHEW FOX : I imagined it like Russian dolls, when one story would go into another. That’s how I started. I thought the short-story structure built on my strengths, something I was already very good at. So it was always going to be like a novel-in-stories.
This Is It deals with shame and cowardice.
MATTHEW FOX : the reason why I wanted to tackle those themes is because I always want to see whether or not I can create something compelling out of something unlikable.
Montreal is one of the settings from This Is It.
MATTHEW FOX : The book starts and ends in Montreal, a city that is a hugely important place to me. I lived there for 10 years, and I was just back visiting a few weeks ago, and it snowed, and I was completely transported back to what it’s like to live there. It was the first place I lived away from home. I moved there when I was 19. So for me, Montreal meant freedom. It meant coming out of the closet. It meant living the life that I wanted to and making my own decisions. When I was growing up my parents sent me to an all-French school, so I grew up speaking French at school and English at home, and I always wanted to live in a French environment. So I kind of swapped it when I moved to Montreal, where I lived in a French city but went to school in English.
Montreal was a wonderful place to live in the 1990s.
MATTHEW FOX : I have an unpublished novel titled He’s an Emergency entirely about Montreal in the 90s. Post-referendum Montreal. Maybe one day someone will want to publish it.
Montreal during that time was unbelievably cheap, had an unbelievably young rave scene. What a time to be alive!

You worked at Maisonneuve magazine in Montreal as an associate, fiction and online editor from 2003 to 2006 before you joined the staff of Toronto Life magazine as online editor from 2007 to 2014. Your time there coincided with the end of an era in the media biz.
MATTHEW FOX : It was a crazy time, actually, because it was right before everything got digitized in a serious way, before everybody’s habits shifted online. It was a weird time to be going into media. I figured if I had started even a few years before, I would have had a completely different career. But because I did have that sort of base in digital expertise for media brands, it ended out delivering me a career in content marketing, which is not really as glamorous, but it definitely pays more.
What was it like growing up a queer kid in your hometown?
MATTHEW FOX : My family moved from Windsor to Toronto when I was 10 and I could not have been more excited. You know, looking back on it, as a kid I just was so drawn to the big city and the freedom it gave me. That drive for independence is something that queer people really look for throughout their lives. It’s the constant need to be able to define your own life and to live it the way you want to, even when we’re kids. Then when I moved to Montreal, that was one of the greatest days of my life because I was able to live more freely out of the closet.
What was it like for you growing up gay in an Italian-Canadian family and coming of age in the 1990s?
MATTHEW FOX : I thank my family for always keeping us all together. But it also came with other elements, like the Catholic Church. So much of my problems around being gay and coming out of the closet were tied up in the church. Even after I got over that, I knew that was going to be a big thing for my family. They turned out to be largely great, especially over the long run, but in the short run it was very difficult, because this is just not something that Italian families really talked about that much. I also was very, very fortunate to have a gay sister, and we talked about it privately before one of us came out. She came out first, and that was a massive big deal. I came out to my parents when I was 20 but I had fooled around with boys as early as 16.
You have lived in Montreal, Toronto, London, New York and now Berlin for many years. How fortunate do you consider yourself as a gay man to have lived in these gay capitals?
MATTHEW FOX : Incredibly fortunate. I also think it wouldn’t have happened if I wasn’t gay. You know, there’s a leitmotif to this interview: it’s about me moving to places where I felt increasingly more independent and increasingly more myself. And I’ve really trusted my instincts on that over the years. Once I came to Berlin, I was really fixated on moving here permanently and made it happen. It’s not only that I’m fortunate to have done it, but I also don’t think it would have happened if I wasn’t a queer person.
Since I interviewed you a decade ago, a lot has happened with identity politics in the queer community. So I’d like to ask you this same question again: do you consider yourself a gay writer or a writer who happens to be gay?
MATTHEW FOX : Same answer. I would say I’m a gay writer. The stories are gay. And I’m glad other people appreciate them. In fact, I would say I now identify more as queer than gay. I really identify with other people who are marginalized because of their sexual identity, for sexually-based prejudices, and I think we’re all in it together. So I definitely identify as a queer writer. But within that category, I am gay.
INFOS | This Is It by Matthew Fox (Enfield & Wizenty, an imprint of Great Plains Publications).
For more, visit https://www.matthew-fox.com.