Maia Caron is a Vancouver Island-based Indigenous writer and author of Song of Batoche, a historical novel that was a CBC must-read book for 2018. The Toronto Star described the novel as a “tale of love, betrayal and obsession,” and Shelagh Rogers of The Last Chapter said it was an “ambitious, broad, sweeping, historical mystery.”
The Last Secret is a sweeping, dazzling, dual-timeline historical novel centering on two unforgettable women—a Ukrainian resistance fighter in 1944 Ukraine and a reclusive artist on Salt Spring Island in 1972—and their inextricable link to each other decades apart. About the book, Ben Ziegler wrote: “I loved The Last Secret. This historical fiction is a fascinating page-turner. It contains terrific characters and dialogue, a thriller of a plot, and resonates loudly with today’s turbulent times.”
Interviewed by Ben Ziegler
Ben Ziegler (BZ): Some of the main characters featured in your novel wrestle with past, unresolved trauma. Their thoughts and actions remain shaped by events that happened in the distant past. Yet, for those characters, past events still hold major sway. Can you say a few words about how past trauma can impact one’s private thoughts?
Maia Caron (MC): I think past trauma influences everything we do. When crafting a story, I follow Save the Cat’s method for identifying my character’s “shard of glass.” I find it vital to understand why my characters might make poor decisions in the story. And every shard of glass comes from a trauma, either in childhood or adulthood, a wound the character is usually not consciously aware of because it’s buried, encased in scar tissue. We all have these shards of glass; we build personas around them. This scar tissue dictates our emotional resilience and our capacity for joy. It colours everything we do, every choice we make.
It’s our scars that think, speak, act. But it’s possible for a catalyst to shine through love, through relationship to other or the natural world, and that light might very well heal those scars, even just a little. In the best of stories, the characters who began their journey in the dark are granted a chance to think, speak, and act from their true selves. Past trauma can offer gifts, if we allow ourselves to receive them.
BZ: The Ukrainian battleground during World War II plays a central theme in your book. That chaos contains a dizzying array of armed forces. Whose side you are on can be murky. The fog of war seems ever present. Some of your book’s characters are forced to compromise, to take positions that appear contrary to their personal values, in order to survive, and further their interests. Can you say a bit about the research you did to get a feel for how people survived the fog of war?
MC: I’m a huge fan of historical fiction and the fascinating, inspired-by-real-life stories still coming out of World War II. Although there are two male Ukrainian characters in The Last Secret who are thrown into the chaos of World War II with Germany and the Soviets, I was more interested in the difficult, nuanced choices made by the women. Many Ukrainian women ended up on transports to Germany, where they were forced into slave labour in armaments factories. Those left behind often served in the underground resistance as couriers or medics. Some of their stories have been recently resurrected by academics but reading books like A Woman in Amber and Ein Frau in Berlin made me realize that Eastern European womens’ survival stories, and the choices they were forced to make during wartime, needed to be heard.
BZ: Connecting the battlefields of the Eastern Front with Salt Spring Island provided a dramatic contrast. What was your inspiration for using those two very different times and places as context for connection and story?
MC: I began plotting The Last Secret with Jeanie as the main character. I dreamed of a young woman who had survived a tragic accident and inherited her aunt’s waterfront gulf island house in 1972, living with her cruel caregiver who held a devastating secret over her head. And I imagined Savka, another protagonist, living in Eastern Europe, ensnared in a war zone of a different kind, also hiding a secret, traumatized by life and by love. Two women, so very different, connected across time and space.
Because aren’t all women bonded on a level of embodied memory and experience? Whether we are, like my two characters in The Last Secret, being haunted by fragmented memories on an isolated gulf island in the swinging ’70s, or risking everything in a Ukrainian war zone in 1944, women are joined at the heart.
BZ: A number of characters in your book are prisoners. Some are literally prisoners, apropos to wartime. Others more metaphorically; hostage to their past experiences. How do you see that connection between literal and metaphorical prisoner? What role does choice play in one’s ‘prisoner’ experience?
MC: I think this goes back to the shards of glass. We can become prisoners of our own past experiences, as well as the choices we make from the scar tissue around the wounds caused by those experiences. Like PTSD, that trauma can seem like we are walking in a kind of prison on this earth, a prison of our own making.
BZ: I was fascinated by the caregiver relationship you explore in your book, the relationship between Jeanie and her caregiver(s). I was a caregiver for my parents, and volunteered as a facilitator of family caregiver support groups. Being an effective caregiver starts with looking after yourself first. That said, one can go overboard with self-care. You turned caregiving into a thriller! Where did you source your novel’s caregiving character?
MC: It’s a privilege and an act of love to be someone’s caregiver, so I admire your dedication. I’ve mentioned that my mother was the vigil nurse of a young woman who was badly injured and in the hospital for two years. My mom was an exemplary nurse, but she probably wouldn’t have the emotional bandwidth to care for one young woman at an isolated waterfront estate on Salt Spring Island. I wondered what it would feel like to be a woman like my character, Jeanie, who had survived a horrific accident and was forced to hire a caregiver who she learned, only too late, was hardly the best person for the job. Yet she couldn’t survive without her. Coupled with memories of Bette Davis’s stellar performance as Jane Hudson in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane, I created a caregiver who, as you suggested, was rather too much into her own self-care.
BZ: There are numerous secrets held by characters in your book. How did you arrive at the title of your book, The Last Secret?
MC: The title was inspired by Searching in Secret Ukraine by Wasyl Nimenko, a book I read while doing research. Nimenko’s father had been in the 14th Waffen SS Division, but didn’t talk much about it when his son was growing up. Wasyl went on a journey to learn of his father’s secret past.
The Last Secret seemed like an appropriate title for my story, which is so much about the many secrets that have been kept by those who survived WWII in Ukraine and what happened one night in a Vancouver hospital ward in 1959. I also realized near the end of working with my editor that this story had unconsciously revolved around a long-held secret of my own that mirrored a haunting ordeal that Savka Ivanets, my Ukrainian character experienced during the war. If you want to find out what that is, read The Last Secret!