How a Toronto mural changed Ian Williams’s book title

To write You’ve Changed, Ian Williams’s new book, the author took a construction course to see the world that his main character would be living in.

Williams is the author of several books of fiction, nonfiction and poetry. His debut novel, Reproduction, won the Scotiabank Giller Prize. He gave the 2024 Massey Lecture on his nonfiction book What I Mean to Say. 

He’s currently an English professor at the University of Toronto and director of the creative writing program.

In You’ve Changed, middle-aged couple Beckett and Princess are having marital issues. They’re sent into parallel mid-life crises after their friends come to visit for the weekend. While Princess is concerned that their problems stem from her physical attributes and turns to surgery, Beckett decides to relaunch his contracting business in the hope that his accomplishments will revive their relationship.

The sharp, funny and deeply human novel asks questions about how much people in a relationship can change while remaining together. It was also longlisted for the 2025 Giller Prize.

Williams spoke on Bookends with Mattea Roach about his book and the stories behind it. He also revealed that the title came from a mural in Toronto.

Mattea Roach: I want to start by asking about this title, You’ve Changed, which feels like a scary phrase, it’s not one that’s often used as a compliment. Where did that title come from for you?

Ian Williams: The book was called something else for a long time. Maybe somewhere around the eighth draft it changed and that liberated the book for me.

This book is actually about change and the degrees of change that we can accommodate. I was living in Toronto at one point and there’s this huge mural that says “You’ve Changed” in block letters against a red background.

This book is actually about change and the degrees of change that we can accommodate.– Ian Williams

To confront that every day — when you’re on the streetcar, when you’re coming back home — it’s perfect public art because you’ve got to engage with it and say “Have I? In what ways have I changed? It’s inevitable, but is this a compliment?”

The main character, Beckett, a white Quaker from Maine, is referred to by some of the other characters as a bit of a redneck. Why did you want to inhabit his point of view?

I think a lot of fiction these days is moving towards the autobiographical but I really believe in the possibilities of the imagination.

I wanted to write a character that does not resemble me, at least from the outside. We talk a lot about empathy on the part of the reader — how can characters help you understand the rest of the world?

For writers, it’s really important to inhabit points of view that you don’t own, that maybe you don’t even respect, to get inside the inner workings of the human being.

There’s something imperative about writers doing this kind of work — and in long form, in novels — where you can actually have to pay attention to interiority in a way that you can’t in some of the other genres.

For writers, it’s really important to inhabit points of view that you don’t own, that maybe you don’t even respect, to get inside the inner workings of the human being.– Ian Williams

Beckett does work in construction; he has something he frames as a superpower of being able to walk into a space and see its flaws — but also see the potential in a space to improve and to deconstruct and rebuild.

You did some construction work to really get into that mindset and learn more about his world. Can you tell me a bit about that?

My whole thing is really trying to understand a character from the inside out. So, what do you need to do to really have access to how they think? You can’t go back into their childhood and relive it or re-experience it, so I did this construction course in the north of Toronto. You sign up for it and spend three months doing courses.

We built a house from the ground up. Foundation, the framing, the drywall, electrical, all of that stuff. I worked in teams to build this house. At the end we demolished it because there’s a safe way to take apart a house just as there’s a safe way to construct a house.

Sometimes your work needs to be taken apart for the next group to come and build the same house in the same spot. There was so much learning happening. There’s practical learning, don’t kill yourself with the drill or the saw, but there’s also learning of where people come from, like, what leads people to these professions?

In your novel, Beckett has this sense of manhood that’s very tied to his work and to his aptitude with his work tied to his role as a husband to Princess. Did you see this novel as kind of an exploration of manhood?

An exploration of identity and manhood is part of it. His masculinity is tied to his job and the things he possesses. Certain big-ticket items: you need a house, you need a car, you need a big screen TV. So, these very reduced options for an identity, right? Like, here’s what it means to be a man.

You can’t go back into their childhood and relive it or re-experience it, so I did this construction course in the north of Toronto. You sign up for it and spend three months doing courses.– Ian Williams

I think that part of it is gendered but when you think about labour and identity, we would have a hard time framing ourselves for other people if we couldn’t fall back on what we do.

It’s one of the first questions that comes up when you meet a stranger. “So what do you do?”

And that seems to fill in a whole bunch of other information about your background, your values, how much you earn, where you might live and all of those things. It’s a shorthand for status that’s really hard to undo when our society is constructed on that kind of thing.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. It was produced by Lisa Mathews.