A novel about a Toronto actress in the 1960s and ’70s who evolves into a theatre director known for her innovative style at a pivotal time for Canadian theatre. In her private life, she enjoys sex, likes men but does not want to live with one; consequently, her deepest loves are for three married men. The plot of the novel turns on how she eventually makes friends of their wives and draws them around her in her work.

Andrea, born in 1939, arrives in Toronto in her teens with the sole ambition of becoming an actress. She appears in new Canadian plays, develops a script for her own one-woman show, becomes a teacher who helps students discover new forms of theatre, and a director of experimental plays. While she seldom strays from the purity of live theatre, she has a brief spell of astonishment when she becomes a commercial star, selling chewing gum and making money.

As she explores the arts with the growth of Canadian theatre, Andrea also explores her sexuality with the availability of the Pill. The three main loves of her life are three married men all of whom work in the arts. As each of these men falls out of her life, she unwittingly draws around her their three wives — not only as friends, but as co-workers. A manager, an artist and a pianist all see their lives enhanced and their careers invigorated as they join Andrea in her projects, while Andrea remains forever silent on the past.

Author comments

Andrea’s passions and lifestyle reflect the history of her time.

Theatre. As a teenager in Toronto, she studies with a European master and plays in small workshop productions. She explores the use of poetry with a solo dancer, finds her voice in musical revues, sheds her clothes in nude theatre, plays ‘other women’ in television and summer stock until she finally writes a script for herself about unmarried women of history. After touring this show across Canada, she briefly becomes a commercial star on TV selling chewing gum, discovers an affinity for teaching actors and later develops as a director of stage musicals and theatre productions that use new techniques such as video and new ways of presenting a script.

Sex. At a time when the pill gave women freedom to explore, Andrea is more than ready to take advantage, enjoying the constant something new and relishing the adventure of discovery in different beds. After a lengthy but ultimately false step with an older married man, she becomes somewhat hardened to the inevitable but does her best to do no harm while never wavering from what is best for her. She has a lively sexual history but never loses sight of what she wants to achieve. As she states at one point, ‘Lovers come and go, work is there for ever.’

Feminism. In her rebellion against the ‘other woman’ roles she is offered in theatre and TV, Andrea develops a one-woman play about unmarried women in history who she finds frequently vilified as whores, witches and old maids. She plays The Spinster Show in Toronto and then tours it across Canada. In 1980, she rewrites the script briefly after discussion with lesbians in Vancouver, then takes the show around Ontario. On this second tour, in which she now calls herself an actor, she finds audience members — both men and women — who question their own marriages or lack thereof and are now willing to talk about that.

Marriage and Family. When Andrea first receives an offer of marriage, she sees it only as a restriction on her freedom. During the course of writing her Spinsters show, she discovers that her maternal grandmother never married the father of her children. Andrea herself never knew her father, who was killed at Dieppe, and when her mother leaves Toronto to rejoin the B.C. family while Andrea is still in her teens the two do not meet again for twenty years. Apart from one desperate plea to a departing lover, Andrea never seriously wants children and appears to find a substitute in her work with students and child actors.

Friends. They come through her work.

Damien is a dancer who takes his first plunge as director on the dance show in which Andrea reads poetry. He later directs the show she writes for herself and becomes her best male friend.

Martha is the poet of that first dance show, a Cockney from London who lives on the Six Nations Reserve in Brantford. As an older woman, she becomes a calm and wise friend to Andrea, someone to turn to in moments of distress.

Felicity is an actress who meets Andrea on a musical revue, later offers to help with the dance show, becomes Andrea’s capable stage manager on the tours, and moves on to be an assistant stage manager at the Shaw Festival and to create her own poetry show.

The wives of three married men Andrea has loved eventually become her best women friends and, in varying degrees, co-workers in her theatre ventures. As these three women lose their men through circumstances unconnected to Andrea, they find themselves in different ways drawn into Andrea’s enthusiasm for her own work and intrigued by what she has to offer.

Unpublished endorsement

In My Other Women, Pauline Carey takes a sidelong, sardonic look at marriage, through the eyes of a young woman who wants no part of it. Andrea Dermot is a gifted, determined young actress who creates a life and career for herself in the wave of theatrical innovation and experiment that appeared spontaneously in Toronto in the 1960s. Believing that an artist with serious ambition needs to guard her independence, Andrea chooses not to marry, but she can’t ignore love.

Carey’s portrait of a time of rebellion and change is sharp, insightful and entertaining. Her examination of love and friendship adds a deeper emotional colour and truth to the story she tells.