The Borrowed Life of Frederick Fife: A Novel
The Borrowed Life of Frederick Fife: A Novel
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Anna Johnston on The Borrowed Life of Frederick Fife: A Novel
In her own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why she wrote it
A bluffer’s dilemma and a grandfather’s nameThe novel’s central premise grew from a specific incompatibility: Johnston had a character whose most defining quality made the plot she needed almost impossible. Her grandfather Fred, her self-described best friend, was so constitutionally honest that she had to imagine an extreme situation before any deception could feel believable from him.
He had countless strengths, but his poker face wasn’t one of them! He was so honest that he even found it hard to play a card game that required bluffing. Plot stems from conflict, so I contemplated what would happen if you placed such a man in a situation where he was desperate enough to deceive (if he believed he wasn’t hurting anyone).
When her grandfather’s dementia eventually stripped him of the ability to write poetry and letters for her grandmother Dawn, Johnston did not step back. She stepped in, becoming what she describes as his pen, so that his form of love could continue even after his own words were gone. That act of proxy authorship sits at the novel’s emotional center.
Pa was a wordsmith and an inspiration to me as a writer. Right up until his early 80s, he wrote poetry and letters for my gorgeous grandmother, Dawn. When dementia took away that ability, I became his pen and helped him write to her, so he could continue loving her in the way I knew he wanted to.
deborahkalbbooks.blogspot.com, “Book Q&As with Deborah Kalb: Q&A with Anna Johnston”Beyond the personal, Johnston was responding to a measurable absence. Only about two to three percent of literary protagonists are eighty or older, she noted in her She Writes column, and those few tend to be caricatures rather than people with interior lives worth following. She wanted to close that gap with a character who could carry the full moral weight of a hero.
I wanted to create not just an elderly character but an elderly hero who inspires hope and shows that, unlike eyesight, worth does not diminish with age.
That phrase, worth does not diminish with age, functions as both the novel’s argument and its structural bet: that a reader will follow an eighty-year-old through a full arc of change and come out on the other side convinced.
How she wrote it
Pantsing the plot, weeping at the screenJohnston mapped the main structural beats before she started, but everything between them was discovered in the writing rather than planned in advance. The term she uses to describe this approach is borrowed from writing-community shorthand: a ‘pantser’ works without a detailed outline, trusting the story to reveal itself.
I’m a wanna-be plotter but primarily a ‘pantser’ flying by the seat of my pants and discovering the plot as I go.
Where many writers use word counts or page targets to measure whether a session worked, Johnston uses a different instrument entirely. Her emotional response to what she has just written tells her whether the scene is alive or inert, and she treats that response as data.
I feel deeply for my characters and can often be found weeping at my computer or in fits of giggles over something that happens to them... I don’t feel I could write without this emotional attachment and it’s the best gauge I have of whether something is working.
The tonal balance of the book was a deliberate problem to solve. Johnston had read novels in the same space that kept things light and others that went deep into grief but lost any warmth. She wanted neither and spent time working out how to hold both registers at once. Her answer took the form of a practical metaphor about what makes hard things palatable.
They say, ‘When life gives you lemons, make lemonade.’ To make lemonade, you need sugar and for me, humor is the sugar that makes the unbearable, bearable.
Johnston found her publisher through an event run by the Australian Society of Authors called Virtual Literary Speed Dating, where writers get three minutes on Zoom to pitch to publishers and agents. Her description of it treats the format as romantic comedy rather than industry transaction, and the stakes were real: that single conversation led to a two-book deal, with international contracts following from HarperCollins in the US and Nemira in Romania.
But rather than a man who likes piña coladas and walks on the beach, my ‘date’ was with one of the lovely editors at Penguin Random House Australia.
The personal thread
The love that needed no researchJohnston’s Goodreads blog post draws a precise line between what is invented in the novel and what is not. The plot, the setting, and the characters are fiction; the emotional texture of the marriage at the book’s center is not. She is specific about where that texture comes from.
The plot, setting and characters in the novel are fictional. But the love? That’s entirely real.
In the same post, she names the source of that certainty. Johnston’s husband Josh provided something no amount of archival research or craft technique could substitute: a lived model of what it feels like to be cherished. The passage collapses the distance between the book’s fictional Fred and the two real people she was drawing on.
I married Josh, my very own Fred. There were many things I needed to research to write this book, but the feeling of being cherished wasn’t one of them.
What she wants us to sit with
The pen as the only wand she hasJohnston has a concrete ask of readers after they finish, and it has spilled out of the book into a social media hashtag, #spreadthefred, that she and her readers use to track small acts of kindness. The hope is not abstract.
More than anything, I hope that The Borrowed Life of Frederick Fife inspires kindness–something I think we could all use a little more of.
deborahkalbbooks.blogspot.com, “Book Q&As with Deborah Kalb: Q&A with Anna Johnston”Her She Writes column makes a craft argument that doubles as a challenge to publishing convention. The same journey of growth and change that drives a coming-of-age arc, she argues, carries different and arguably greater weight when the character has already lived a full life and is choosing to change anyway.
From a writer’s perspective, the journey of an eighty-year-old learning, changing, and growing can offer an even more profound character arc than that of a young adult undergoing similar changes.
Johnston is a mother, and the representation question is not theoretical for her. She wants her daughters to grow up without the fear of aging that she sees as culturally ambient, and she is clear-eyed about the limits of what one novelist can do about it. What she has is specific and she uses it.
I don’t have a magic wand to vanquish negative views on aging, so I use the next best thing: my pen.