Teri Vlassopoulos’s highly-anticipated novel Living Expenses (Invisible Publishing, 2025) offers a timely tale of reproductive health in an age of both technological and geographical distance. In this interview, award-winning Iranian-Canadian author Hollay Ghadery interviews Teri about representing the biracial experience in her novel, writing about motherhood, and where this fascinating story started.
More about Living Expenses:
As the children of a single mother who immigrated from the Philippines, Laura and Claire have always been exceptionally close. That is, until Claire moves to San Francisco for a startup job in Silicon Valley while Laura and her husband remain in Toronto and decide to start a family. Enter the slow, hopeful, devastating process of fertility treatments. While Laura prepares for IVF, Claire has her own encounter with the fertility industry. Living Expenses interrogates the strain that can accompany even the strongest of relationships, and captures the inevitable creep of technology into all facets of its characters’ lives, from communication to reproduction.
The biracial and bicultural experience in your book isn’t necessarily a major theme, but I found it was a throughline that was fascinating to read. I was wondering if you could talk about bringing the reality of being biracial/bicultural to the page. What sorts of considerations did you keep in mind?
Teri: I’m half-Filipino– my mother is from the Philippines and my father is from Greece. They met here in Toronto. Living in Canada, being biracial isn’t necessarily unusual— it’s a country filled with immigrants from different countries. Growing up, while I knew many people who were biracial, it wasn’t an identity I saw reflected frequently in books or on television or in movies. In books in particular where you don’t see the characters, the assumption is that a character is white unless it’s specifically called out, and if it’s specifically called out, it’s usually directly related to the plot of the book.
I knew I wanted the mom in Living Expenses to be Filipino and for her to have had a fleeting relationship resulting in the birth of her daughters. As a result, the main character, Laura, and her sister, are biracial Filipino/Canadian. While this is a part of their identity, it’s not the major plot point in the book– instead the focus is more on the different relationships they each have with their mother and their father. During the editing phase I wondered if I should make a bigger deal about it– did I need more Filipino-ness in the book?! I thought a lot about issues around whether I had “enough” in the book, and what “enough” meant. In the end, I knew that if I forced something that wasn’t there already, it wouldn’t ring true, and it wouldn’t advance the story. I was satisfied that I accomplished what I wanted to for this specific book, while also staying true to the idea that representation matters.
Where did this book start with you? What was the nucleus?
The nucleus of the book is the relationship between Laura and Claire. I started writing about these two sisters who weren’t twins, but were often mistaken for twins. I wanted to explore that relationship and how it might change as they entered adulthood– perhaps through a fracture of some sort? I wrote different versions of relationship fractures in early drafts (in one of them Claire literally went missing!)
At the same time, I was starting to go through fertility treatments. I was unprepared for everything they entailed, how all-consuming they were, and didn’t know many people who had gone through a similar experience. I processed it the way writers do, by writing. I published some personal essays, but wanted to write something with a broader scope. I experimented with other forms, including poetry, but ultimately settled on fiction. It somehow clicked that this would be an experience Laura would go through, and that it would inadvertently affect her relationship with Claire.
I’d love for you to talk about technology and geography and how these forces in your novel are seen as something that can both pull us together and drive us apart.
There’s a lot about technology in Living Expenses: Claire works for a tech company and also develops her own apps, Laura’s fertility treatments leverage the latest advances. Like all technology, as impressive and helpful as it may be, there can be downsides. For instance, Claire starts exploring the world of fertility technology– startups built around ways to make it easier for women going through fertility treatments– and instead of being excited by it, Laura feels alienated and misunderstood. She sometimes feels the same way about the treatments she’s going through, acutely aware of how divorced they are from her actual body. The Internet also plays a big role in the book– their mother online dates, Laura is a food blogger and reads a lot of message boards and has close online friends, Claire moves to San Francisco but they keep in touch through online messaging. Technology can really reduce the impact of geography, and Laura and Claire rely on it heavily. And yet, the emotional distance is often still there, and can even be exacerbated.
There’s a lot of reconciling that needs to be done to accept technology, but this part often gets skipped, which is what leads to resistance and mistrust, and Living Expenses is a kind of reconciliation of the role of technology in our lives.
As a mother of four children, I was taken by the level of complexity and sensitivity that you brought to your characterization of Laura. She’s this passionate and tender, but also not always likeable character—which of course makes her real. Laura she wants a baby and isn’t able to have one. You managed to show readers how much Laura wants a child without making it seem that procreating is a staple of being a female or a woman. I’d love for you to talk about creating this balance.
Thank you for saying that. I wanted to capture all the aspects around the decision to have a child, and, when it doesn’t happen right away, how it makes a person really confront their reasons for it. When I was going through my own fertility issues, I realized quickly how personal a decision it was, and how it went beyond whether or not it was just some kind of biological imperative. Desire has many forms and I wanted to examine what it looks like in this specific form, and how contradictorily simple and complex the feelings around it can be. Is just wanting to have a baby a good enough reason to do it? This was the jumping off point for the book.
What are you working on now?
I’m working on another novel about divorce when the world is falling apart. There was a 10 year gap between Living Expenses and my last novel, and I hope this one won’t take as long. I also co-host a monthly karaoke salon called All the Feels Karaoke, and we’re starting to run events outside the karaoke bar. I’m also raising a tween who has a lot of opinions! I like working on a lot of different things at once.
TERI VLASSOPOULOS has published two books, a collection of short stories, Bats or Swallows (Invisible Publishing), which was nominated for the Danuta Gleed Literary Award, and a novel, Escape Plans (Invisible Publishing). Her fiction and non-fiction has been published in Room Magazine, Catapult, The Millions, The Rumpus, The Quarantine Review, Open Book, and more. She also publishes a regular Substack newsletter, Bibliographic. She lives in Toronto.
HOLLAY GHADERY is an Iranian-Canadian multi-genre writer living in Ontario on Anishinaabe land. She has her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Guelph. Fuse, her memoir of mixed-race identity and mental health, was released by Guernica Editions in 2021 and won the 2023 Canadian Bookclub Award for Nonfiction/Memoir. Her collection of poetry, Rebellion Box was released by Radiant Press in 2023, and her collection of short fiction, Widow Fantasies, was released with Gordon Hill Press in fall 2024. Her debut novel, The Unraveling of Ou, is due out with Palimpsest Press in 2026, and her children’s book, Being with the Birds, with Guernica Editions in 2027. Hollay is a host on The New Books Network, as well as a co-host on HOWL on CIUT 89.5 FM. She is also the Regional Chair of the League of Canadian Poets and a co-chair of the League’s BIPOC committee, as well as the Poet Laureate of Scugog Township. Learn more about Hollay at www.hollayghadery.com.