Local author uses fiction to reveal truths about mental illness

VANCOUVER (NEWS 1130) — Charles Demers hopes if the reader comes away with one thing from his latest book, it’s this: “to think twice about this feeling that so many of us have that the Internet has made experts of everyone.”

This issue of amateur experts and snap judgements figures prominently in Primary Obsessions, his latest novel.

LISTEN: Primary Obsessions 

Primary Obsessions is the first of three books built around the character of Dr. Annick Boudreau, a fictional psychologist based in part on his own therapist. Boudreau is pressed into action once Sanjay Desai, a young man in her care, is wrongfully accused of murder. Demers says given popular misconceptions about psychotherapy; it was important for him to get the details just right.

“You know, you can spend 15 years with a psychologist and that doesn’t make you a psychologist, just like you can eat in a restaurant for 15 years and that doesn’t make you a Red Seal chef,” he explains.

“You don’t get to see how everything gets made necessarily, you just have a pretty good idea of what the process looks like from the front-facing perspective.”

Demers hopes the reader is also left with a greater understanding of mental health and, specifically Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder.

“OCD isn’t just about really needing your place to be clean. I hope they walk away with a bit of a sense of the fact that reading a Wikipedia entry doesn’t make you an expert on something,” says Demers.

“I hope, mostly, that they just walk away having had a good read and, hopefully, wanting to read another book with the same hero.” In fact, he’s already at work on the second book in the series. It will be called Suicidal Tendencies.

Today on @NEWS1130: A local stand-up comic turned author returns with a murder-mystery. This week on #1130bookshelf, Charles Demers talks about his new book, the psychological thriller "Primary Obsessions," available from @DMPublishers. pic.twitter.com/6EGkfOKmOd

— John Ackermann ???? (@jackermann) September 20, 2020

Demers is also quick to admit that not everyone who picks up the book will have affordable access to therapy. He hopes that can change.

“That’s therapy that I consider to have saved my life. So, for me, I’m really hoping that we can get to a place where there’s provincial, just universal, coverage, for psychological counselling,” he says.

“So, this thing that once, I thought, was going to control, you know, my entire life is now this very, very small and manageable thing.”

One of the charms of Primary Obsessions besides its quick action and snappy dialogue is where it is set. Demers writes detailed and often humorous passages about some well-known Vancouver landmarks.

Take his description of the Dominion Building, for example:

…the red and yellow Dominion Building, a historic piece of ketchup-and-mustard Edwardian architecture that had once been the tallest building in the British Empire, and whose overhang now kept pot smokers dry on rain days.

“It was fun to get to just, in some ways, take the critical glasses off and just get to write, sort of a goopy, mushy, romantically about my city,” he says.

Demers says he wanted to emulate some of the mysteries that inspired him. “When I’m reading an Inspector Montalbano book, I expect detail of Sicilian life, I’m going to be eating the food, I’m going to experience the beach. That’s part and parcel of what’s going on,” he explains.

“Part of what you are buying in the price of a book is, you are buying a guided tour or ticket to the city that that mystery is set in.”

RELATED: Five things you’ll learn about Charlie Demers if you read his new book

Primary Obsessions is published by Douglas and McIntyre.

Charles Demers will be interviewed about Primary Obsessions by local historian Aaron Chapman as part of the Word Vancouver 2020 festival at 8:00 p.m. on September 20th. Register online at wordvancouver.ca