by JULIET WATERS

It’s no surprise that D.Y. Béchard is getting pressure to release a memoir, even with the recent anxiety in the publishing world over James Frey’s fabricated facts and J.T. Leroy’s fabricated identity. Béchard is young, photogenic and it sounds like he’s had a colourful life. He doesn’t, however, seem in any hurry to exploit this. His first novel, Vandal Love, took him eight years. The devotion to craft shows, as does his passion for a subject that’s hardly an easy sell: the loves, the loneliness and the dislocation of transplanted Quebecois. Béchard has lived most of his life out west and in the U.S., but he calls Montreal home, for now. Back in town briefly last week, he took some time out to talk about the life that may or may not be the subject of his next book.

Mirror: So tell me a bit about your family.

D.Y. Béchard: My father was right from the edge of Gaspésie. His family originally came there in the mid-1800s, all fisherman all the way through. Then he left in his late teens. He logged, he worked odd jobs, he had a fifth-grade education. He left, he met somebody, started doing criminal work, got set up on his...

M: Okay, wait. Criminal work?

DYB: My father used to tell me about how he got arrested in California, and they took him back to trial in Florida. And every stop in the country, every jail he stayed in for the night he’d have to fill out a form where under occupation he’d write “unemployed bank robber,” because that’s what he did for 15 years.

M: So he was serious.

DYB: Oh yeah. He robbed one bank, he told me, for half a million dollars, did jewellery heists, safe-cracking in Montreal. Based on his stories—assuming that they’re true, which is all I can do—he says he robbed about 50 banks in the course of his life and about 50 jewellery stores. 50–50. That’s a pretty solid career. Then when he met my mother, she wasn’t comfortable with it, so he made a speed lab out in the woods. Then he and my mother got arrested for that, so they decided when I was a kid he was going to stop... But he was always looking for a scam. When I was kid a he used to steal electricity by bypassing the meter with jumper cables. And then one day it started raining and they exploded, so he decided, “Maybe we should start paying.”

M: Did your parents stay together?

DYB: No, my mother took us away. There was a trial and legally I wasn’t allowed to see him until I was 15. And then the day I turned 15 I called him up. I admired him. I thought he was this really tough guy, this bank robber. I was getting into trouble then and I thought I was a bad ass. So I went back and discovered this was not as much fun as I thought it was going to be.

I remember this one time he said to me, “You think you’re tough,” and I said, “Yeah.” So we’re driving down the road and it’s raining and there’s sleet and he pulls into this subdivision and he says, “There’s a guy in there who owes me $50.” And he hands me a baseball bat and he says, “I want you to go get it for me.” I was 15! I get out of the truck, with this bat, step out into the rain and he pulls away. So I go to the front door and I knock and this woman, seven months pregnant answers, and I say, “Is Dale there,” and she says, “No. Sorry.” And she closes the door. And I waited around for about 10 minutes. Then my Dad came back and I got into the car and he drove off and he didn’t say a word. He knew I didn’t have that money.

Vandal Love by D.Y. Béchard, Doubleday, hc, 345pp, $29.95