Two Novellas Come Together in Nora Gold's In Sickness and In Health / Yom Kippur in a Gym

Sometimes the stories we tell demand unique forms and approaches, and this is certainly the case with In Sickness and In Health/Yom Kippur in a Gym (Guernica Editions) by Nora Gold. This book isn't just one story, but two novellas that are uniquely their own, and yet come together in a special flip-book format to augment each other. 

The first part of the book is the novella In Sickness and In Health -  inspired by the author's real experiences with illness - which tells the story of 45 year old Lily, who had epilepsy as a child and longed to have what she would consider a "normal" life. Now as an adult, with family, friends, an artistic career, and a loving husband in tow, she is filled with worry that some cartoons that she has drawn will reveal the secrets of her past, and disrupt her "normal" life and marriage.

The second part of this book is the novella Yom Kippur in a Gym, in which five strangers come together for a Yom Kippur service at a local JCC, all while struggling with their own personal crises. They all have their own troubles and tribulations, but keep them close until a medical emergency throws these characters together and changes their lives. 

We're excited to share this Long Story interview with the author, in which she discussions the origins of both novellas, what she learned throughout the creative process, and how these individual stories came together in this one book.

Open Book:

How did you choose the setting/s of your novellas? What connection, if any, did you have to these settings when you began writing?

Nora Gold:

I chose to set the beginning of In Sickness and In Health in a bedroom, and more specifically in the bed of the main character, Lily. This novella is (among other things) about illness, and how one of the effects of illness is that it restricts you physically, limiting the space where you live. When I began to write In Sickness and In Health, I’d recently been sick in bed, so it was still vivid for me how a bed can be a haven, a place of relaxation and safety, but also, when you’re sick, a kind of prison.

Later in the story, Lily is well and returns to her job, so I set some scenes in her college, and also in a store by a lake where she stops on the way home, but then the setting of this novella returns to where it started: in her home. Because ultimately this is a story about the intimate spaces in life, and in Lily’s case, these spaces are her body (which sometimes supports her and sometimes fails her) and her marriage (which sometimes fails her and at other times supports).

With Yom Kippur in a Gym, the setting is made explicit in the title: this story takes place in a gym. When I started this novella, this setting was familiar to me because for over a dozen years I’d been attending Yom Kippur services in a gym, the one in the Miles Nadal Jewish Community Centre at the corner of Bloor and Spadina in Toronto. During those years, I got to know this gym very well, and despite its size, it became for me an intimate space, perhaps because of the personal/spiritual nature of the time I spent there, and the fact that I never inhabited this space at any other time or for any other purpose (for instance, for a workout). Consequently, this place retained for me a special, almost sacred, character. Another important aspect of this setting is that, during those Yom Kippur services, I was constantly surrounded by people, many of whom I didn’t know. I often found myself looking at these strangers and wondering who they were and what they were thinking about. Especially during the last hour of Yom Kippur, the time when, according to tradition, one’s fate is inscribed for the coming year. So this setting, in a way, gave birth to this novella.

Almost everything that happens in Yom Kippur in a Gym takes place inside that gym. But at the very end, when services are over, the five characters leave the gym together and walk through the community centre and out its front door. They pause on the front stoop and look up at the stars, and there is a sense that at this moment they are re-entering the world – a new and fresh world – after their intense, almost claustrophobic, day of prayer. And this emotional/psychological shift is reflected in, and reinforced by, the new setting.

OB:

Did the endings of your novellas change at all through your drafts? If so, how?

NG:

The endings of these novellas did not change, but in both cases I did not know the ending until very late in the game, which is unusual for me. With In Sickness and In Health, I went through every moment of Lily’s life with her, living it alongside her, and all the possible endings to her story were up in the air like a deck of cards flying around haphazardly in the wind, until suddenly one ending fluttered down and landed where it did.

For Yom Kippur in a Gym, I knew fairly early on what kind of ending I wanted. Not necessarily a “happy” ending, but one where there was some hope, or redemption, or anyway some hope for redemption – some way out, or forward – for these five struggling characters, but I couldn’t picture what form this ending would take. Then I remembered the tradition of breaking the Yom Kippur fast together with other people, and immediately the ending became clear.

OB:

Did you find yourself having a “favourite” amongst your characters? If so, who was it and why?

NG:

This question isn’t relevant to In Sickness and In Health because this novella has only one main character, but with Yom Kippur in a Gym, each of the five characters was my favourite at one point or another. Generally, whoever I was writing about was my favourite at that time. That said, Rachel, with her sense of humour and single-minded focus on food, was sometimes for me a refreshing change from the intensity and interiority of the other four characters. But really I love them all.

OB:

Did you do any specific research for this book? Tell us a bit about that process.

NG:

In Sickness and In Health did not require any research. For Yom Kippur in a Gym I had to check some of the prayers to make sure I was quoting them correctly. I also spent time searching for prayers that would resonate with the specifics of my characters’ particular struggles or frames of mind. And it was remarkable how often there were phrases, words, or themes in the prayers that matched perfectly with what my characters needed, or were thinking about.

OB:

What was the strangest or most memorable moment or experience during the writing process for you?

NG:

Probably the strangest moment was when, right in the middle of writing Yom Kippur in a Gym, I attended Yom Kippur services in the “real life” gym, and discovered it was significantly smaller than I had remembered and described in my novella. For instance, I’d pictured the aisle down the middle as quite broad, whereas here it was very narrow, and this gym overall had a crowded, squished feeling. I was so sure that something had been changed since the previous year that I raised this with the woman in charge of setup, but she insisted that nothing had been altered. I asked if there were more people attending this year than previously, which would explain the jam-packed space, but she said no, there were exactly the same number of people as before.

It gave me a real jolt, this clash between “the real world” and my novella. It was so surreal, in fact, that for a substantial part of that Yom Kippur I felt the gym in my novella was the real one, and this other gym just an (inaccurate) imitation.

OB:

What if, anything, did you learn from writing this book?

NG:

From writing In Sickness and In Health, I gained a new perspective on the health challenges I’ve experienced in my life. I learned from this novella, and from Lily, that past or present medical problems that loom large when kept secret may turn out to be relatively minor once shared with others.

From Yom Kippur in a Gym I learned that I see Yom Kippur as having a near-magical power to significantly transform individuals and their lives. I didn’t know until completing this novella that I believed this, or anyway not so clearly. Consistent with this view of Yom Kippur – the day itself – as an active force, in this novella Yom Kippur is a character in its own right, one that is just as important as any of the five other characters.

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Dr. Nora Gold is a prize-winning author, the editor of a prestigious literary journal jewishfiction.net, and a former professor, social worker, and activist. Her most recent book, the novel The Dead Man, was internationally praised, received a Translation Grant from Canada Council for the Arts, and was published in Hebrew. Her previous novel, Fields of Exile, won a Canadian Jewish Literary Award. Marrow and Other Stories won a Canadian Jewish Book Award and praise from Alice Munro.