Toronto writer Marissa Stapley’s fourth book is proving to be as lucky as the title suggests.
In a first for a Canadian author and book, Reese Witherspoon has chosen Stapley’s latest novel, “Lucky,” as the December pick for her blockbuster Reese’s Hello Sunshine Book Club.
“I’ve known for three months,” Stapley tells me on a Zoom call from Los Angeles at 6 a.m. the day before the announcement, the first early morning light brightening in the background.
She’s in L.A., staying with her family near the Santa Monica Pier to attend events set up by Witherspoon’s book club company, Hello Sunshine. But she was sworn to the strictest secrecy, able to tell only her husband and her kids. “I love my characters to have secrets, but I struggle to keep secrets.”
Witherspoon announced the choice Tuesday morning on her Reese’s Book Club app. “She actually sent me a really nice email the other day just wanting to say hi and connect before the pick and it sounds like she really just fell for ‘Lucky’ herself, who she said was one of the best heroines she’d read in a long time.
“I think I’ll save that email forever.”
So how does a Canadian author stand a chance of getting their book chosen? Here’s how it happened, as Stapley describes: her agent, Samantha Haywood, president of the Transatlantic Agency, sent “Lucky” to a book scout; he gave it to the Hello Sunshine group. Reese read it, apparently, and she loved it.
In September, Haywood and Nita Pronovost, Stapley’s editor at Simon & Schuster Canada, took her out for dinner “under the guise” of celebrating the April publication of “Lucky” in person after not being able to thanks to COVID-19. When they told her the news, “I burst into tears, I think I cried the whole dinner,” Stapley said.
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The idea for the book, about a grifter named Lucky (short for Luciana) who pulls off a heist with her boyfriend and is now trying to start a new life, was sparked when Stapley heard on a radio station in the U.S. that a lottery ticket prize worth hundreds of millions of dollars hadn’t been claimed.
The hosts were speculating about what might cause a person to not claim such a prize “Maybe they’d get arrested, they said,” Stapley recalled. That set her imagination on to a path that led to “Lucky.”
The book is dedicated to Stapley’s mother, Valerie, who passed away from cancer in 2020. She pays homage to her in the book: a police officer named Valerie turns out to be Lucky’s biological mother (and early in the book, a character named Margaret Jean is named for Stapley’s grandmother).
It’s a poignant story, the connection between “Lucky” and Stapley’s mother. She wrote about it in an essay for the Star in February 2021. The book was written as she was caring for her mother in the final stages of her life.
“She told me that if I was going to insist on throwing myself into her care, I would have to keep up with my work. That way when I came to her house she wouldn’t feel like a patient. She liked to call my extended visits ‘writing retreats.’”
As reading is a distraction and escape for many of us, so was writing “Lucky” for both Stapley and her mother. “I wanted it to be fun and distracting, and so I just kept trying to find ways to make it feel good the whole time. I’m glad it turned out as tight and compelling as it did. That was a hard time. I don’t know how I did it, actually. I don’t know.”
Back at the dinner in September, Haywood and Pronovost also told Stapley that being chosen for Reese’s Book Club “changes everything,” Stapley recalled. If history — and another famous celebrity book club — is any barometer, they’re not wrong.
When Rohinton Mistry’s “A Fine Balance” became the first Canadian choice for Oprah Winfrey’s famous book picks in 2002, headlines screamed, “Author wins Winfrey sweepstakes.” That pick was followed back to back by Ann-Marie MacDonald’s “Fall on Your Knees.” Both were originally published in 1996.
“Fall on Your Knees,” published here by Knopf Canada, won awards and sold 200,000 copies, but only 45,000 in the U.S., where it was published by Simon & Schuster.
“That was a good sale for a first novel,” Marcia Burch, publicity director for Simon & Schuster in New York, who published it in that country, said at the time, “but this puts it in a whole other category. We’re doing a first printing with the Oprah logo on the cover of 620,000,” plus, the Star piece said, 70,000 more copies were printed in Canada.
Mistry’s novel had 700,000 printed in the U.S. and the book made the New York Times bestseller list.
Interestingly, in 2018, BookNet Canada did a little digging into the power of Reese’s Book Club on sales, comparing it to the Oprah effect. While they found that Witherspoon’s picks did boost sales to an extent, Oprah was still queen. Reese’s Book Club has had a few years to pick up momentum, though — her @HelloSunshine Instagram following now stands at almost 837,000 followers, with @OprahsBookClub at just 619,000.
Another thing Oprah provided was profile: MacDonald told the Star at the time, “The U.S. is a very tough market to crack; they have their own huge culture … so to have Oprah tell her millions of friends to read your book is major.”
It’s a sentiment Stapley echoes when talking about Reese’s Book Club, saying that one of the biggest benefits is “that people are going to want to read my books, are going to know about them. It can be hard to get the word out … As a Canadian author, it’s not easy on the commercial stage to get your books front and centre and I’ve really battled that for my whole career, just trying hard to get my books into readers’ hands in the U.S. And this is going to make that happen.”
This country’s literary fiction stars used to struggle for pole positions; now Canadian literary writers take their place on prize lists and in readers’ hearts around the world. Stapley is hoping the same thing will happen for commercial fiction writers; her publishers at Simon & Schuster Canada think it will.
“Canada has long been a country with many superb genre writers,” said Pronovost in an email to the Star. “It’s exciting that Marissa is the inaugural Canadian pick; this will amplify Canada’s voice in commercial fiction across North America and beyond.”
Meantime, Stapley’s next book is set in Europe — the writing of which she can focus on thanks to the success of “Lucky.”
“I feel like I have this golden ticket,” Stapley said. “I spent most of the past three months waiting for someone to tell me this was a mistake.”
This article has been changed from a previous version to correct the name of Nita Pronovost.
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