British Columbia·Q&ADespite her natural drive to write and create, Kathy Page felt she didn’t have the capacity to write fiction after being diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease. But she did have it in her to write non-fiction — in particular, about her experiences having been diagnosed with a neurological condition. ‘There’s a profound lesson in this, that we’re not in control. It’s good to be able to live with that somehow’CBC News · Posted: Oct 19, 2025 10:00 AM EDT | Last Updated: 4 hours agoKathy Page, an award-winning novelist on Salt Spring Island, B.C., is sharing her experience with Parkinson’s disease in her latest book. (Billie Woods)For writer Kathy Page, Parkinson’s disease has changed everything: her sense of self, her capabilities, her relationship to others, and even her writing. “I think I’m better known as a novelist,” she told CBC’s North by Northwest. “I’ve written science fiction, I’ve written mythological short stories, I’ve written realism. But I found I had no interest in making things up.”Despite her natural drive to write and create, Page felt she didn’t have the capacity to invent stories any longer. But she did have it in her to write non-fiction — in particular, about her experiences having been diagnosed with a neurological condition. Her memoir In This Faulty Machine, published by Viking, explores the complicated science behind Parkinson’s disease and how it’s impacted her and her loved ones. From her home on Salt Spring Island, Page spoke with CBC’s Margaret Gallagher about her new reality. LISTEN | Kathy Page on CBC’s North by Northwest:North by Northwest14:53Kathy Page on “In This Faulty Machine”Acclaimed author Kathy Page opens up about being diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease in her honest, compelling, and often humourous memoir “In This Faulty Machine.”This interview has been edited for length and clarity. Tell me a little bit more about the title, In This Faulty Machine.When I decided that I wanted to convey what it was like to be in this new neurological situation … I realized how difficult it is to convey almost any experience. Particularly as others have written, physical pain is very difficult to convey, and that we slip into the habit of making comparisons, a sort of metaphorical thinking where we say what something was like. The title refers to the feeling of being unable to control my limbs, my walking, my bodily system seemed to be failing. It’s like being a driver in charge of a faulty machine, where things can sometimes be fixed, but never permanently, and you’re hurtling down a long road towards a precipice and trying to keep the car under your control, but it’s kind of impossible.Sometimes people don’t really know how to talk about things with people and this is something that you really lay out in your book, you’re very honest and very intimate about your experience, about how difficult it is to navigate that changed space sometimes with people in your life. It’s difficult to communicate because you’re in a different situation and people really want to help or understand it, but there’s a big gap to be bridged. One could get irritated perhaps as the sick person or frustrated as the other person trying to understand. This is part of what I want my book to do, to communicate clearly and gracefully, in some way, what the situation is like. What kind of changes have you experienced? I think I’m better known as a novelist. My most recent one was Dear Evelyn, which is based on reality. But on the whole, in the past, I’ve invented a lot of things. I’ve written science fiction, I’ve written mythological short stories, I’ve written realism. But now I’ve found I have no interest in making things up. And then I realized perhaps that was because I also have lost almost all the capacity to do so to be inventing things. This actually is something to do with Parkinson’s, I think, it does tend to be thought of as something that gives you a tremor and makes you stumble, but it does affect your brain functioning and particularly that sort of central organizing authority, the power to multi-task, which I’ve always hated, coordinate things, take on huge projects and sort of manage them, which a novel is. It’s a huge project, so much to pay attention to. So I think it was between can’t and won’t with fiction.WATCH | Kathy Page explains how to write fiction based on reality:Kathy Page on how to write great fiction that’s based on real lifeIn the latest episode of the CBC Books’ video series Why I Write, the award-winning author talks about her writing process and how to write fiction based on personal experience.But at the same time I did feel that the task of just passing along my experience to someone else as clearly as possible so that they could get it was something I could take on and wanted to take on because I’m a communicator, and that’s what I want to do in life. You do make the point that regardless of what it is that changes your machine, we’re all going to deal with some sort of change in our bodies or loved ones facing something at some point in our life that you can relate to the philosophies and the experience of this book.I think we like to think that we’re in charge, and perhaps we are to some extent, with all the modern technologies and medications and things that we have, we can influence things a lot. But there’s a profound lesson in this, that we’re not in control. It’s good to be able to live with that somehow, to find ways. Kathy Page is a novelist and short story writer based on Salt Spring Island. (Billie Woods)It’s made me quite vigilant about any arguments to the effect that there’s justice in these things, that people who have ill health are people who live unhealthily. There may be some mild, minor way in which we can influence our fates in that way, but it’s just bad luck. It’s not justice. We try to make things more just by helping, but in the end, we’re up against a kind of randomness. Who do you hope reads In This Faulty Machine?Anyone.But I think it will often be people who are either facing some kind of health challenge or the kind of people who would read Oliver Sacks, not having their own neurological problems, but just because it’s fascinating. By that I’m making no comparisons. He’s was a wonderful writer and human being, I think, though I never met him. Anyone who likes to think about how we deal with life and how we conceive of ourselves as well. With files from Courtney Dickson and North by Northwest
Award-winning B.C. novelist Kathy Page pens memoir detailing Parkinsons diagnosis
