My dad and I used to eat hotdogs on Saturdays at the Montreal Pool Room on St Laurent Boulevard in the red light district. There was a map of Montreal on the wall. There was a teenage prostitute in a sailor hat at a table reading comics and drinking cola. As I sat on the stool with my legs dangling over the side, my dad would tell me stories from people he knew from the neighbourhood. It was natural that my novels, Lullabies for Little Criminals and The Girl Who Was Saturday Night, would take place in this neighbourhood, with those characters. So many other writers have used Montreal as a backdrop. Here are some that spring to my mind.

I read Gabrielle Roy’s The Tin Flute in high school. It takes place in the down and out St Henri neighbourhood in 1940. We are in the world of peeling wallpaper and unstuck kitchen tiles and jackets that refuse to do anything about the wind. Florentine is a skinny beautiful waitress at a five and dime, experiencing a brief and ultimately tragic bloom. Its depiction of the lives of the lower class in Montreal was said to have laid the groundwork for The Quiet Revolution in Quebec.

Mordecai Richler grew up in the 40s in Mile End. The streets were filled with working class Jewish kids dreaming ways to make it big while their parents yelled and pleaded with them to go make it big. Seinfeld said that a man always dresses in the clothes from the best years of his life. Perhaps that can be said of this corner. The places in Richler’s books are still there. There is Wilensky’s, a tiny sandwich shop with green walls where they serve the same baloney and salami sandwiches. Poppy seeds litter the sidewalk around the bagel shop.

Most people know Leonard Cohen as a songwriter. The image created in his songs in my mind is of a St Laurent bon vivant and miscreant, living in cheap hotel rooms and writing poems in his underpants, a different beautiful and slightly mad girl in bed with him every night. But before he developed this romantic persona, he was a young neurotic Jewish boy in the 50s in the upper class neighbourhood of Westmount. The Favourite Game is his autobiographical novel that documents his coming of age in this neighbourhood as the son of the owner of a garment factory and his days at McGill University. His early desire to be a lady’s man is all laid out here in wonderful prose.

Michel Tremblay’s book The Fat Woman Next Door is Pregnant takes place in the heart of the working class district of the Plateau Mont Royal. It’s the first day of spring and all the women on the rue Fabre are like eight and three-quarters months pregnant. The members of the big Catholic families squeeze past each other in hallways and snore next to each other in bed. Or they walk through Lafontaine Park, with its tiny zoo and its wonderful playground (where I played as a child.) Tremblay used joual in his writing, a working class French spoken in Montreal. He captured the domestic and political concerns of francophones in the second half of the 20th century.

I first came across a copy of Yves Beauchemin’s The Alley Cat in a pile of free books at a cafe. This book was everywhere in Montreal for a time. If you looked under the leg of a table, chances are someone would be using it to level it out. It’s a Dickensian romp running through the streets of Montreal. The story includes a bratty six-year-old named Monsieur Emile who loves beer and a cat named Breakfast.

Montreal is known for its staircases, twisting up the fronts of triplexes and its balconies, making every street filled with noisy peanut galleries. This is why David Fennario called his play Balconville. Dany LaFerrière’s How to Make Love to a Negro Without Getting Tired is the story of a Haitian man and his roommate Bouba who live together in a very, very cheap apartment. The narrator, an aspiring writer, inhabits the slums of Montreal, eats, drinks, has sex and works on a book. (I’ve spent my whole life in apartment buildings, where you can know your neighbours’ moods and love making patterns.)

The Immaculate Conception by Gaétan Soucy takes places in the east end when a church burns down. (There are churches on like every corner in Montreal, from when the Catholic church dominated.) Nelly Arcan’s Whore is a vicious, lyrical, melancholic rant about her experiences as a sex worker in Montreal.

Rawi Hage’s Cockroach is the story of an immigrant who frequents the dive bars of St Laurent Boulevard and changes into a cockroach at times. Hage’s writing has boxing gloves and dances beautifully on its toes, always aggressive and provocative and paranoid. Marie Hélène Poitras wrote a spaghetti Western about the horse buggy riders in Montreal called Griffintown. (How I loved these horses with their big cloppy feet and their ostrich feathers on their heads when I was growing up.)

Then there are writers whose characters need to roam off the island. Wadji Mouawad and Larry Tremblay have characters that go off in search of war-torn pasts and on complicated inner journeys. Vietnam-born Kim Thúy has characters who are trying through absurd circumstances to get to Montreal. Mavis Gallant and Nancy Huston have characters who are expats in Paris. Sean Michaels set his novel in Russia and America. Neil Smith’s characters are all dead and in heaven. And Yann Martel’s character is, of course, a little Indian boy named Pi somewhere in the middle of the ocean on a lifeboat with a tiger named Richard Parker.

Montreal’s bohemian reputation and low rents attracts dreamy young people who want to knit and draw whales with ballpoint pen for living. Many work in the special effects studios or join bands like Arcade Fire. Anna Leventhal and Guillaume Morrisette document the creative and over-educated young inhabitants.

And there is a sense in Montreal that everyone in the city is secretly, at heart, 12 years old. Like I was, sitting in the Hot Dog restaurant with my dad, learning how to tell stories in the voice of the city.

• Heather O’Neill is the author of the novels Lullabies for Little Criminals and The Girl Who Was Saturday Night and the short story collection Daydreams of Angels. She has won CBC’s Canada Reads Competition and the Paragraphe Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction. She has also been a finalist for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, The Governor General Award, and the Orange Prize. She was born in Montreal, where she currently lives. You can follow her on Twitter @lethal_heroine and on Tumblr here.
  

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