Heather O'Neill and daughter Arizona team up to make the Montreal Metro feel magical — read an excerpt now

CBC

14-02-2025

Canada Reads - winning author Heather O'Neill normally writes her books "all at once, dreamily," she told CBC Books in an email.
So when she was approached to write a serialized novel in the pages of the Montreal Gazette, she was "vaguely worried" about not being able to take breaks.
"But then, when have I ever stopped writing? I'm not married so no one was going to divorce me half way through. Haha," she wrote.
"I wrote chapters on trains in Ireland and one in a hotel in Lebanon. That panic on Wednesday evenings, was real. I would be at a table at the back of a wedding, with the dancers winding down and flowers on the floor, scribbling my next chapter."
These chapters will now be collected and published in a book called Valentine in Montreal with illustrations by Heather's daughter, Arizona O'Neill.
Valentine in Montreal tells the story of Valentine, a lonely orphan working in a depanneur in a Montreal metro station, who follows her mysterious doppelgänger and finds herself experiencing the city — and its underground — in new ways.
"Growing up, I loved public transport and everyone I saw and met on it," said Heather. "My apartment was so noisy and violent that I would escape and go to the metro. I would often take a paperback and ride the metro around reading. I wanted to capture the loneliness and sweetness I felt emerging from the metro into an adult life."
For the illustrations, Arizona wanted Valentine in Montreal to feel like a fairytale.
"I wanted to emulate classic children's books from the 1800s, while incorporating my own style," she wrote.
"When it came to deciding what to illustrate, I simply went through the text and pulled out all the magical moments I found inspiring, which was a joy since Heather's writing is always filled with the most beautiful metaphors, an illustrator's dream."
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Heather O'Neill is a novelist, short story writer and essayist from Montreal. She won Canada Reads 2024, championing The Future by Catherine Leroux, translated by Susan Ouriou. O'Neill is the first person to win Canada Reads as both an author and a contender. Her debut novel Lullabies for Little Criminals won Canada Reads 2007 when it was defended by musician John K. Samson. Her other books include The Girl Who Was Saturday Night, Daydreams of Angels, When We Lost our Heads and The Lonely Hearts Hotel.
Arizona O'Neill is a Montreal-based writer and illustrator. She has published the illustrated book Est-ce qu'un artiste peut être heureux? and illustrated for books like Hoop Muses by Kate Fagan and Seimone Augustus.
Valentine in Montreal will be out on July 15, 2025. You can read an excerpt below.
My name is Valentine. I am 23 years old and I work at a little store at Berri-UQAM metro. I am very ordinary looking and Barney, who works the same shift as me at the store, says I do not know how to dress. I have been working there for four years, and I have never missed a day. This is why sometimes I seem familiar to people, even though they can't place me.
My parents died in a car crash when I was a baby. My grandmother said it was very common for children to die of the same ailments their parents suffered from when they got older. So it was very likely that I too would somehow be killed by a car. It was in my genes.
This was her reason for not letting me out of the building to go onto the street. My grandmother was a very sedentary woman. When she stood up, it was as though she were on the deck of a moving ship. My grandmother stayed inside because she remembered an outside world that didn't exist anymore. She had lived during time when there weren't any metros running underneath her feet. She used to go out dancing all the time and took the bus. There were large dancehalls everyone would crowd into. It was a beautiful time.
This is why sometimes I seem familiar to people, even though they can't place me.
We lived in a big building downtown. You could get into a tunnel filled with stores and the metro without going outside. So even though I wasn't allowed outside, I was allowed to walk underground. I would go into the depanneur to pick up food and cigarettes and a copy of the newspaper.
My earliest memories were getting newspapers for my grandmother. There were newspapers everywhere in our apartment. My grandmother would clip out articles and put the clippings in different piles. She never looked at the piles again. But they seemed important just the same.
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Once she cut out an article about a statue of a Virgin Mary that was crying in Laval of all places. She said she was cutting it not because a statue that was crying, but because it had happened in Laval that amused her. "The Lord has decided to come to Laval!" she couldn't stop snickering.
*
My room was not really my own room. Because I had to share it with so much garbage: newspapers and magazines and old boxes of cereal and broken lamps and fans. I had to make place for the garbage, more than the garbage ever made place for me. I thought the garbage appeared the way mushrooms did in the forest, or flowers.
I thought the garbage appeared the way mushrooms did in the forest, or flowers.
I had a mattress in my room that was once on the floor. But the garbage underneath the bed began to grow and grow. And the mattress rose up on it. And it was very close to the ceiling. I know because I was able to draw on it. I drew some stars in pencil.
*
My grandmother would yell at me that I was attracting the concierge's attention too much. There was one year that I dressed up for Halloween as Zorro. I wore the black mask and cape almost every day for a month afterwards. I liked the feeling of doing handstands. But there was no wall in the apartment to do them against, so I would do them in the corridor.
Keeping me out of the building's corridors was one of the reasons she let me ride the metro. I would pack myself a lunch and bring along a briefcase filled with magazines. It was nice to have somewhere to go during the day. I liked to ride around on the metro. It made me feel as though I was traveling across the whole city. I would see all the different people come in and out of the train doors.
I liked to ride around on the metro. It made me feel as though I was traveling across the whole city.
I used to believe there were trolls that lived in the subway tunnels. I would kneel on the seat with my nose pressed against the window trying to catch them moving about. Tiny men with long beards and tuques that children had lost on their way to school.
I was wary of taking the yellow line at first because it went underneath the river. This seemed dangerous to me. I thought I would look out the metro windows and see marine animals. I wanted to see a school of belugas. They would look like a magic spell had been cast on a group of urinals. And there might be an octopus moving its arms around like an operator at a switch board. But it felt just like an ordinary metro ride in the end.
I sometimes like a crowded subway. We are all squished together like a strange creature with fifty hearts. It was so nice to be tucked in with all those bodies. Just like I belonged. My grandmother barely touched me.