Daily Life

A mashed-up novel about a true-life murder trial and a writer’s fictionalized days, with families both in life and in art struggling to make it through.

Daily Life is a mash-up of fiction and non-fiction, an online experiment that writer Lesley Krueger wrote over the course of a year, a series of blogs that proved increasingly popular. At the end of the year, she collected them as an e-book, available here.

The blogs got underway when Lesley was called for jury duty in a gangland murder trial.

Spoiler alert: the defence accepted Lesley as a juror but the Crown said no. Her brother, who is a assistant Crown attorney, told her that she probably looked too arty for the prosecution. Yet Lesley had some free time and decided to attend the first day of the trial. Having worked as a journalist, her professional instincts were firing. From what she could pick up online, the prosecution alleged that an innocent man had been murdered in a gangland hit gone brutally wrong. It was a modern-day tragedy, and she went down to the University Avenue courthouse to find out more.

Afterward, she kept going back. Not only was Lesley riveted by the evidence, she could do things that a juror couldn’t do, including talking to the mother of one of the accused in the courthouse hallway.

She also started writing about the trial—about daily life in general—although with a catch. Her family didn’t want to appear in the blogs, not more than glancingly. People at the trial, ranging from the accused through the lawyers and judge, were taking part in public business. Her family was not. So she created some fictional relatives and made up a series of problems that echoed concerns she heard in the courtroom, many of them involving responsibilities toward family members facing complex issues.

For the record, Lesley doesn’t have a half-brother—alcoholic or not—nor a vegan daughter. She doesn’t have a daughter at all, nor does her non-existent daughter have a partner with Multiple Sclerosis.

On the other hand, Lesley’s husband has MS. They went to the cottage described in this book, and vacationed in Mexico at the lovely resort she describes (and which she recommends highly). While they were there, she had a strange experience that was later diagnosed as global transient amnesia. Many of the minor incidents are things the real-life Lesley went through. A stolen car, no. Her friends knew what she was doing, but people she knew only casually got worried, and while writing the blog, Lesley had to field an increasing number of emails asking if she was all right.

Writers of fiction pull many of their real-life experiences into their work. Increasingly, non-fiction writers use the techniques of fiction to burnish their research. Lesley Krueger believes non-fiction writers ought to be clear when they fictionalize incidents, but isn’t sure the reverse is true about fiction. Does it matter if a reader knows which incidents in a novel are taken from a writer’s life?

In this mashed-up case, Lesley Krueger leave it up to readers to make up their minds about what she has done. Murder case, real. Places, real. Family concerns, fictional. In the end, there remains the judgement of one woman who wrote about the book on an online review site.

Yeah, she said, this is what it’s like. Daily life.

Available as an e-book.