That was the philosophy behind Governor General award-winning playwright, acclaimed novelist and Banff Distinguised Author Ann-Marie MacDonald's third and latest novel.
Adult Onset follows the everyday trials and trivialities faced by Mary Rose MacKinnon — nicknamed MR or "Mister."
A successful young adult author, MR is semi-retired and lives in a comfortable Toronto neighbourhood with her partner, Hilary, an in-demand theatre director, and her two young children, Matthew and Maggie.
For those who know MacDonald, this might sound uncannily familiar.
That's because it was written in the moments between the hours of 8:30 a.m. and 3 p.m. when both of MacDonald's children were safely in the hands of Ontario's education system.
"So I thought, OK, I have this scrap of time and this scrap of cognition. Through the midst of sleep deprivation I'll start with what I have. I can't do all this research, etc. I have to work with what I have. I have to be able to write this book from what's already inside of me. How hard can that be?' I said to myself."
MacDonald calls it her "pasta book" -- as in that's all she had in the cupboard so that's what she served up.
Since she was writing about what she knows, MacDonald figured she would produce a novel that wouldn't require ironing. While she wasn't wrong, the result took her by surprise.
When she first sat down to write, MacDonald thought she was going to write a "light divertimento" — a "fun comedy of contemporary manners."
She did not expect to find herself digging as deep into her own emotional being as she did.
"I really did think I can't bring a whole lot of sets, lights, costumes — this isn't going to be epic on the outside. But of course the epic has to go somewhere and it all went inside. So this actually turned out to be probably the most challenging book that I'd written, especially from a fictional point of view, because I really did use my own psyche, emotional, experiential tissues. I donated it all because that's what I had to work with," said MacDonald.
As with her two previous books, Fall to Your Knees and The Way the Crow Flies, below the domestic tribulations lies a much deeper battle — one that MacDonald herself experienced as a young adult coming out during the second wave of feminism.
Coming out at a time when lesbians were seen as unfit mothers, MacDonald lent her voice to the LGBT liberation movement of the 70s.
"I became very public and very vocal before it was considered safe to do so," she said. "And I came into a personal pain that was scarring to me."
"Quite frankly, it was devastating."
Revealing her sexual orientation resulted in alienation on behalf of her parents.
And this is what she explored — although unintentionally at first — with the help of her parallel self.
"The fact that queer people now have the same rights and responsibilities as everybody else is a huge human rights triumph. It is historic. It was amazing to be alive at a time when this changed and to have been a part of that change," she explained.
Yet decades later she found herself married and a mother — two things she never thought she would be — with a now peaceful relationship with her elderly parents, and still haunted by the pain of the past.
"I realized I skipped over something. I skipped over processing a few old demons. And if you do that — if you have any old demons hanging around, the moment you have children they'll come out in full force."
"I thought if I don't write about this now, I never will because I'll let it resolve into a blur which will have a lovely, romantic gel on the lens of when my children were small and how lovely that was. I have to write the truth now, while I'm barely out of the toddler trenches," said MacDonald.
MacDonald will wrap up Wordfest 2014 with a one-on-one interview session on Saturday evening, 7 p.m. at the Margaret Greenham Theatre.
For more information on other Banff Wordfest events, running Oct. 17-18, visit wordfest.com.