Douglas Coupland - Early Life

Early Life

Coupland was born on December 30, 1961 at Royal Canadian Air Force base RCAF Station Baden-Soellingen (later CFB Baden-Soellingen) in Baden-Söllingen, West Germany, the second of four sons to Dr. Douglas Charles Thomas Coupland, a medical officer in the Royal Canadian Air Force, and homemaker C. Janet Coupland, a graduate in comparative religion from McGill University. In 1965, the Coupland family relocated to West Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, where Coupland's father opened private family medical practice at the completion of his military tour.

Coupland describes his upbringing as producing a "blank slate". "My mother comes from a sour-faced family of preachers who from the 19th century to well into the 20th scoured the prairies thumping Bibles. Her parents tried to get away from that but unwittingly transmitted their values to my mother. My father's family weren't that different."

Graduating from Sentinel Secondary School in West Vancouver in 1979, Coupland went to McGill University with the intention of (like his father) studying the sciences, specifically physics. Coupland left McGill at the year's end and returned to Vancouver to attend art school.

At the Emily Carr College of Art and Design (now the Emily Carr University of Art and Design) on Granville Island in Vancouver, in Coupland's words, "I … had the best four years of my life. It's the one place I've felt truly, totally at home. It was a magic era between the hippies and the PC goon squads. Everyone talked to everyone and you could ask anybody anything." Coupland graduated from Emily Carr in 1984 with a focus on sculpture, and moved on to study at the European Design Institute in Milan, Italy and the Hokkaido College of Art and Design in Sapporo, Japan. He also completed courses in business science, fine art, and industrial design in Japan in 1986.

Established as a designer working in Tokyo, Coupland suffered a skin condition brought on by Tokyo's summer climate, and returned to Vancouver. Before leaving Japan, Coupland had sent a postcard ahead to a friend in Vancouver. The friend's husband, a magazine editor, read the postcard and offered Coupland a job writing for the magazine. Coupland began writing for magazines as a means of paying his studio bills. Reflecting on his becoming a writer, Coupland has admitted that he became one "By accident. I never wanted to be a writer. Now that I do it, there's nothing else I'd rather do."

Coupland's work regimen has been characterized as anti-slacker. He works seven days a week, with no vacations. Coupland is quoted as saying: "I've never taken a holiday. To lie on a beach someplace seems almost sinful. What's the point of being around unless you're working on something?"

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