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Pickle Me This

March 11, 2024

Bury the Lead, by Kate Hilton and Elizabeth Renzetti

“There’s nothing to worry about, Glenda. It’s just routine. There’s no way the cops will think a butter tart feud is enough motive to kill someone. This isn’t Midsomer Murders.”

I first read BURY THE LEAD back in January in preparation for Bookspo Podcast (the episode went live last week!) and returned to it again this weekend as I’ll be interviewing co-authors Kate Hilton and Elizabeth Renzetti (who are friends of mine) as part of House of Anansi Press’s Beer and Book Club at Henderson Brewing this Wednesday March 13. And it’s something to read a mystery novel a second time, when you already know whodunnit, and can pay attention to how the machine is working, all the moving parts. For some books, that might take all the fun out of the experience, but not this one, which I liked even more the second time around. I loved the humour, the similes (the old newspaper that “looked like it had been typeset with a machete”), the fact that it’s concerned with newspapers at all (veteran journalist Renzetti brings her years of experience at the Globe & Mail, and a passion for locals news and journalists in general), the fierce feminism, the small-town Canadian cottage-country setting. It’s the story of Cat Conway, who’s turned up in Port Ellis (where she’d spent summers with her grandparents years before) on the burnt out trail of a marriage and a career both gone out in flames. Very soon, however, it seems that her new, smaller, quiet life is not going to be so quiet after all when the lead in local theatre production (who is a world-famous actor) turns up dead on opening night, and not of natural causes. Ever the reporter, Cat is determined to get to the bottom of the story, along with her posse of news colleagues, a motley bunch if ever there was one, except that it seems like somebody in town is intent on getting between Cat and the truth. But is there anyone more indomitable than a middle-aged woman fuelled by rage who has nothing left to lose? Bury the Lead is pure delight.

March 11, 2024

Bookspo Episode Two

Episode Two is live! Listen at Apple Podcasts or on Substack.

March 9, 2024

Both sides brought large speaker systems and screamed

I didn’t observe International Women’s Day in a public platform sort of way. (I did re-watch Hidden Figures with my family, however. Would recommend.) This was not a conscious choice, but when I opened Instagram yesterday morning and the first post I saw was a woman screaming about all the people not included in her feminism, my brain said Nope. Nope. Instead of posting about feminism on the 8th of March, instead of yelling about my politics, I’m striving to embody those politics every day of my life, to live them. Which is more subtle than a soapbox. It occurred to me that it’s been a long time since I posted anything on social media about abortion, which makes me uncomfortable. Embodying politics instead of screaming about them is not the same as staying quiet and being polite, but sometimes it looks the same. Maybe even the effects are the same, which is counter to the way I want to live my life, but all of this introspection has come about because I’m not convinced that yelling gets great results either. Also, as no doubt many are thinking, there are just three people left on the planet who don’t know my stance on abortion anyway. I have nothing new to say on the matter, just as I have nothing new to say about International Women’s Day, about women matter, why intersectionality matters, why feminism is necessary, why a world that’s good for women is good for everyone. I am so tired of reciting the same slogans over and over, the way the repetition comes to rob the words of meaning. The way they mean something when we first hear them, when we first say them, but then we cease to think about what those words mean, and then we cease to think altogether. The absurd theatre of it all, rather than anything substantive. “Both sides brought large speaker systems and screamed duelling chants at each other.”

I keep returning to this, from Rebecca Woolf: “It is in our best interest as a species to hold each other up through the complexity of our feelings instead of pushing each other down. While this moment demands ACTION — and I believe it does — it is also necessary for people in mourning to feel validated in their grief. All the energy being spent on attacking and unfollowing and disparaging each other online can and should instead be spent validating our own feelings and giving ourselves the space to move through them. Denying ourselves the time and space to do so will result in resentment and emotional constipation. (I am seeing this happen with people I know in real time.)”

“All the energy being spent on attacking and unfollowing and disparaging…can and should instead be spent validating our own feelings and giving ourselves the space to move through them.”

Woolf wrote this in the aftermath of October 7 2024, but I think it applies to everything. And yes, “validating our own feelings and giving ourselves the space to move through them” sounds very airy-fairy ’90s Oprah, and maybe some would argue that this is actually inaction, inertia, but are large speaker systems and screaming duelling chants (and self-righteous contempt) any more productive?

March 8, 2024

The Hunter, by Tana French

Tana French is my favourite. Her new novel, The Hunter, is the second book in her new series featuring Cal Hooper, a retired Chicago detective who buys a rural home in the west of Ireland to discover that the big city’s got nothing on the village of Ardnakelty in terms of darkness and depravity. I read the first book, The Searcher, in 2020 and then forgot everything about it, but no matter because The Hunter doesn’t require a reader to be wholly up to date. And I will likely forget everything about The Hunter too because, as with when I read any mystery novel, but especially Tana French’s, I’m more just steeped in the atmosphere than sorting through the details. And the atmosphere is HEIGHTENED in this latest release, set during a sweltering summer as crops fail and everyone’s on his very last nerve. Cal has created a healthy relationship with local teen Trey Reddy, but it’s all set to go awry when Trey’s father reappears after years away in the company of an Englishman who’s probably not what he seems, and when the locals try to pull one over the both of them, it might just be that they’re being swindled themselves, and just when Cal thinks he’s got a handle on things, a dead body turns up in the road on the mountain. Could not love it more. My only complaint is that now I can’t stop saying “Feck.”

March 6, 2024

Transgressions

It had to happen sooner or later, because it hadn’t happened in more than a year, but my pool has closed “until further notice” due to a light falling from the ceiling and smashing on the pool deck, shards of glass in the pool which now needs to be drained, etc. etc. And instead of having a complete nervous breakdown like I did when the pool had to close for a few weeks in 2022 (I blame it on a period of precarious mental health and having recently read The Swimmers, by Julia Otsuka), I am being stoic and patient (okay, it’s only been 16 hours, but I’m hanging in there) and taking the bus to the community centre at Wellesley and Sherbourne to swim in the pool there, which is a great pool, but the point of this story is that has a universal/non-gendered change room. Which, when I used the pool previously, has been absolutely a non-story, and I actually appreciate the non-gendered aspect as opposed to my usual pool where people lie down naked in the steam room with their legs wide opened so I can LITERALLY see right up their butt holes. All butt-holes must be covered in the non-gendered change room, where we get changed in private stalls and everyone is required to be attired. But the other times when I’ve used this change room, it’s been the only change room available, by which I mean that there are actually two change rooms, but only one was open at a time. Today, however, both change rooms were open, and I felt slightly uncomfortable for being in an unfamiliar space where I’m not clear on routines and rituals, so I just tried to look cool and went into the change room before me. Except that everyone I encountered in the change room was a man. Now, this pool, for various demographic reasons, has way more men than women anyway, but I couldn’t help but wonder if I’d missed something and entered a men’s change room by mistake. And the whole point of all of this was JUST HOW MORTIFIED/EMBARRASSED/WEIRD I felt about potentially having done such a thing. How it tapped into something ancient inside of me that’s always been afraid of transgression, being in the wrong space, being the wrong body in the wrong space. Something ancient that doesn’t actually come up so often because inhabiting traditionally male spaces (like when I played the trombone instead of the flute, was loud instead of demure, used to get ridiculously drunk at the Pig’s Ear Tavern) has always been kind of awesome and empowering (I’ve long worshipped at the altar of Jo Polniaczek) but this was terrible and shameful for reasons I’m still not finished unpacking, and it was fascinating to experience this discomfort (as well as unpleasant). What a prison gender truly is in all kinds of ways I’m not even cognizant of.

March 6, 2024

Gleanings

March 5, 2024

Broughtupsy, by Christina Cooke

It’s dizzyingly (dazzlingly) disorienting, the narrative of Christina Cooke’s debut novel Broughtupsy, and that’s by design, for it’s protagonist, Akúa, is racked with raw unprocessed grief after the death of her younger brother and the end of her relationship. Never mind that she’s been trying to outrun grief and gathering losses since the death of her mother years before, after which their father moved the family from their home in Kingston, Jamaica, to Texas, and then Vancouver, Akúa’s older sister, Tamika, refusing to come along for the ride. Akúa, only twenty, is so old and so young at once, essential parts of her stopped at the point where her mother died and her family fell apart. She’s not thinking clearly, her choices are impulsive. She’s decided to take out a student line of credit and bring her brother’s ashes back to Jamaica, to face her fierce older sister for the first time in ten years, both sisters bringing so many grievances and resentments that it’s impossible to connect. But the kinetic vibe of Kingston’s streets turn out to be a useful counter to Akúa’s grief and numbness, and Tamika’s own volatility has a similar effect, however complicated. It’s not healthy, but Akúa doesn’t want healthy, instead she desires to push her luck and flirt with danger, indulging herself with sensory experiences, reminders of who she used to be, the fact that she’s alive.

She meets Jayda, a stripper, and can’t help but be drawn to her, to her world, a world so far away from the staunchly devout Tamika and her judgments of Akúa’s sexuality, her relationship with a woman. Tamika insisting this judgment is not simply morality, but also practicality, because it’s different for a gay woman in Jamaica, it’s dangerous… But what does Akúa really have to lose?

The novel entire is the answer to that question, and it’s ending is powerful, moving, and so satisfying cathartic.

March 4, 2024

Bookspo Episode One

It’s here! Listen to my conversation with Kate Hilton and Elizabeth Renzetti at Apple Podcasts or on Substack.

March 3, 2024

Coming Soon…

My new podcast drops tomorrow. Creating this project has been one of the most satisfying things I’ve ever done, and it’s been a strange and funny way to try to recover from a period of crippling self-consciousness. Strange and funny because listening to yourself really does make clear what a fucking idiot you truly are sometimes. Oh, but you get to EDIT. Imagine if you could do that always, especially to the conversations that wake you up at four in the morning in abject horror. And you also get to LEARN. I’ve learned so much, about listening, and asking questions, and my own weird tics (like whenever I ask a question, I freak out and then re-articulate/re-frame the question again because I’m scared of just handing it off and letting the person I’m speaking with ANSWER….) I’m proud of so many things about this show, but one that I can take almost no credit for is how it’s also a spectacular showcase of some of the best books of Spring 2024. When I came up with my list of people to interview, I hadn’t even read most of the books yet, but they turned out to all be so wonderful, rich, and interesting in their own particular ways. Rom-coms, literary fiction, popculture nonfiction, mysteries, thrillers, philosophical meditations on art, memoir, commercial fiction, and more, proving that bookishness knows no bounds in terms of genre. Ooooh, I am so excited to share it all with you!

February 29, 2024

My February Substack Essay

As you know already, if you’ve been following along, I’ve set myself a challenge of writing a long-form essay every month this year. The second one went live this morning and I am really proud of it—“In Praise of Pieces: Commonplace Books, Friendship Quotes, and Our Bookless Book Club.” I’m posting these essays on Substack, because the opportunity to monetize my writing is something I want to explore, because I want to try something new, and also because Substack offers podcast hosting (the teaser for my new podcast came out yesterday!).

It’s funny though because Substack is working very hard to embrace elements of social media platforms (they just introduced direct messaging, their “notes” is like a hybrid of Twitter and Facebook) and I’m just not interested in any of it. As always, I keep coming back to my blog, to the opportunity to be read in semi-obscurity. And I appreciate the readers who show up here so much.

My first three Substack essays will be available for everyone to read, but thereafter (beginning in April) will be for paid subscribers only. To show my gratitude to the readers who show up for me here, I’d like to give away paid subscriptions to the first three people who get in touch to claim them. Drop me an email at klclare AT gmail DOT com! (I’ll put a note here when they’re gone.)

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