Prescription For Success

Sun Herald

Sunday June 1, 2008

Lily Bragge

Vincent Lam mixed his two jobs - author and doctor - to create an award-winning debut work. Now he's preparing for a repeat, writes LILY BRAGGE.

Trying to find balance in his busy life is proving elusive for Vincent Lam. Not only is the Canadian author juggling the pressure of being an emergency room doctor in Toronto, he is working on his second book as well as fulfilling the continuing publicity demands of his debut novel, the best-selling Bloodletting And Miraculous Cures.

Just 33, Lam is married to a fellow doctor and is the father of two children under the age of three.

"I don't know if I'm managing to fit it all in or not," he says. "I just seem to stumble from day to day."

Lam grew up in a Chinese family in London, Ontario. A practising Christian, he speaks English, French and Cantonese. Recently in Australia for the Sydney Writers Festival, he engages in our conversation in a manner that is both polite and reserved. However, the thing that really strikes me about him is his voice. It sounds kind. Which is not to confuse it with being saccharine or lame - neither of which Lam is. So, it seems fitting that one of the big themes examined by Lam in Bloodletting And Miraculous Cures is kindness (and the lack of it).

The doctor's success as a novelist has a real dream-come-true quality about it. After finishing the gruelling demands of medical school, Lam indulged in his teenage passions of reading and writing literature. He believes it was the simple act of "being a reader and enjoying books" that made him want to write.

"Most writers end up being writers because they love to read," he says.

Reasoning that it took him 10 years of intensive study to become the doctor he is today, Lam gave himself a similar timeline for becoming a fiction author.

"I fully expected to write three or four books without them ever being published. I thought that after a certain amount of years of doing it, I would get to be as good a writer as I am a doctor."

Asked to name his favourite authors, he says he endeavours to give different answers every time that question comes up. "I'm a big fan of Peter Carey," he says. "David Malouf is wonderful - particularly Dream Stuff - and Margaret Atwood. For us in Canada, she is very iconic."

It was a serendipitous meeting on an Arctic cruise ship in 2004 with Atwood that changed everything for Lam. He was serving as the ship's doctor and Atwood was the ship's writer-in-residence.

During dinner one night, Lam mentioned to Atwood that he was working on his first book. She agreed to read the manuscript and loved it, describing the novel as "a stunning debut". Atwood sent it to a publisher and Lam was immediately signed up. In 2006, Bloodletting And Miraculous Cures won Canada's richest, most prestigious literary award, the Giller Prize, making him the youngest and only debut author to receive the honour.

Lam says he wrote the first draft quickly and spent the better part of three years paring it, mostly editing it himself: "I didn't think about it or mull so much over it, as get up and write it."

Shocked at the book's success, he credits Atwood with being one of the people who has helped him "to begin to learn the art of writing".

Bloodletting And Miraculous Cures began life as a single short story called Code Clock, about two young resident physicians responding to a code blue emergency where a patient dies. "It became the bricks and mortar - the foundation for me building the rest of the stories in the book."

The finished novel is a series of 12 interconnecting stories about a group of four medical students in the first 10 years of their careers.

Written with precision, clarity, dark humour and insight, Lam reveals the interior life of these doctors, illuminating them in such a way that the reader soaks them up.

In April, the Canadian production company Shaftesbury Films announced it would make an eight-part television series based on the book. Excited about the forthcoming production, Lam says: "I wrote Bloodletting And Miraculous Cures because I felt the stories were human, and I wanted to communicate a particular truth about doctors, patients and the act of caring to readers. I'm happy that this can be shared with an even broader audience."

Lam weaves the stories of these physicians and their private and professional lives, giving a perspective on shocking moral dilemmas, untenable situations, relationships, ethics, compassion, truth, lies and humanity.

He clearly draws from his own experience: "It's a tricky thing to write from one's own realm of daily experience because there is the hazard of re-telling it just the way it was and that can hinder rather than help the story."

So far, he says he has not been pigeonholed as a Chinese-Canadian writer so much as he is being characterised as a doctor writer. There is a rich tradition of doctors who wrote literature - W. Somerset Maugham, Anton Chekhov, Mikhail Bulgakov and William Carlos Williams. Lam's contemporaries are Oliver Sacks, Peter Goldsworthy, Michael Crichton and Khaled Hosseini.

The demands of doctoring and literature are such that it is difficult, ultimately, not to choose one profession over the other. Does Lam think he will be forced to forsake one? "It's a hard question to answer because they've both become part of me and part of what I do. Thankfully, with emergency work, it's all based around shifts. Your patient responsibility ends with the shifts. Everything is a question of working things out and being flexible."

Describing writing as "very stressful and not at all relaxing", Lam says he was quite happy doing both jobs before his children were born, but now he doesn't want to miss out on being with his kids while they are young. "My relationships - my friends, family and colleagues - are very important to me. I often muddle through the day and think, 'What the heck am I doing?"'

In the meantime, Lam will continue his precarious balancing act. For readers who have fallen in love with his novel and are eager for more, we won't have to wait too long. He is well on the way to finishing his second book, a memoir-like account of his grandfather's migration from Vietnam to Brisbane.

"As a human being, a doctor and a writer, I find people fascinating. I will always be interested in hearing about and interpreting our stories, one way or another."

Bloodletting And Miraculous Cures is published by HarperCollins, $27.99.