October 12, 2022

“Learning and Growing Through Our Entire Lives”: A Conversation with Ann Douglas

In 2013, when the anthology The M Word: Conversations About Motherhood was published, I was so thrilled to receive a blurb from parenting writer Ann Douglas, and so it felt like things had come full circle when I was able to provide an endorsement for her latest book, Navigating the Messy Middle, a book that marks a shift in Douglas’s own professional journey. “The best thing about Ann Douglas’s perspective, as always,” I wrote, “is her understanding that one-size-fits-all advice fits no one. Instead, in Navigating the Messy Middle, readers will discover an empowering guide to finding one’s own way through the ups and downs of midlife, a time when seeking strength in connection, embracing the changeability of the physical self, and focusing on one’s real values and priorities can create a powerful moment of (finally!) becoming.”

Thank you to Ann Douglas for agreeing to answer some of my questions about her book, which I enjoyed so much, and which you can pick up right now from your favourite bookseller.

What more can we ask of ourselves but that we remain open to the opportunity to learn and grow as humans, both individually and together?

Ann Douglas

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Kerry: This book was born out of a midlife shift for you after years of writing about parenting. How did it feel to make this pivot (scary? exciting?), how did you decide on where to land, and in what ways did your experience tie into themes and ideas explored in the book?

Ann Douglas: I had been feeling, for the past couple of years, that I was aging out of the parenting books category. (It’s hard not to feel this way when your youngest child is 25!) Now don’t get me wrong. I will always care passionately about parents and kids, and I will continue to advocate on issues affecting them. But in terms of being immersed in the really hands-on years of parenting? I am well past that stage, and so it seems like the right time to pass the baton to the up-and-coming generation of parenting writers. And there are a lot of them doing really amazing work.

In terms of deciding what would come next for me as a writer and a person, that was more exciting than scary. I’ve always been the kind of person who has a million ideas for creative projects, so it was simply a matter of seizing the opportunity to write about something else. In terms of landing on which “something else” that might be, there was a bit of serendipity involved. I’d had a rollercoaster ride of a journey through midlife, so midlife growth development was very much top of mind for me. And then, out of the blue, I received an email from my literary agent, telling me that she was dying to talk to me because she knew what my next book needed to be about. She needed a book about midlife and she needed that book to be written by me! We started brainstorming the possibilities and developing a book proposal. That casual conversation (in September 2019) resulted in a book deal (in February 2020, right as we were heading into the pandemic).

I guess the common thread in terms of my career as an author is my life-long fascination with human development: how we continue to learn and grow throughout our entire lives. Midlife has been a deeply challenging time for me, but also an opportunity for tremendous learning and growth. In fact, I can honestly say that it has been my favourite life stage so far.

I guess the common thread in terms of my career as an author is my life-long fascination with human development: how we continue to learn and grow throughout our entire lives.

Ann Douglas

I wanted to capture that sense of possibility in this book, while also endeavouring to keep it real. Because no one wants to read a faux positive guide to anything in 2022—not after everything we’ve been through over the past two-and-a-half-years. That’s what I tried to do in this book: to be both “fiercely honest and wildly encouraging,” as the subtitle of Navigating The Messy Middle indicates.

Kerry: Fercely honest AND wildly encouraging? IN THIS ECONOMY, ANN??? How is that possible? 

Ann: If there’s one thing I’ve figured out at this point in my life it’s that you don’t have to settle for a single emotion. It’s possible to feel anxious, hopeful, discouraged, grateful, and frustrated all at the same time. Heaven knows I feel all those things simultaneously myself—and I do so on a regular basis.

So honest and encouraging? It’s definitely possible to have both those things at the same time. In fact, I feel like I’ve been focused on those two experiences for my entire career as an author: trying to write with honesty while at the same time offering encouragement. (Over the years, countless readers have told me that they really trust me and I think that’s why: that blend of honesty and encouragement.)

If there’s one thing I’ve figured out at this point in my life it’s that you don’t have to settle for a single emotion. It’s possible to feel anxious, hopeful, discouraged, grateful, and frustrated all at the same time.

Ann Douglas

Kerry: As the shape of the book emerged, what parts surprised you the most? 

Ann: This book ended up being much more political than the book I had intended to write—and that my book publisher had intended to acquire. As I note in the opening pages of my book, “My agent negotiated the deal for this book in February 2020, just as the pandemic was beginning to be felt here in North America. The days and months that followed ended up changing everything, including me. I found myself launched into an eighteen-month journey into rethinking pretty much everything about my life. And judging by the depth of the conversations I was having with other women, I know I’m not the only one who was profoundly affected by this multi-layered experience of pause—the pandemic pause layered on top of the self-reflective pause that is so characteristic of midlife.” So that was definitely the biggest surprise for me: the approach I ended up taking in writing about midlife—that mix of personal and political. I have to give my publisher a lot of credit, for allowing me to write the book that demanded to be written (as opposed to the one I had planned to write). So, kudos to Douglas & McIntyre.

Kerry: Almost every argument I have about anything these days (with myself or others!) comes back to the fact that the answer or reality lies not in anything definitive or black or white, but instead somewhere in a grey area in between. The middle, as your book shows on a variety of levels, is a magical place rich with wisdom and opportunity, but yes, it’s going to be messy. How do you try to reconcile that and be comfortable in that uncertain and variable space? 

Ann: I feel like the pandemic has been a masterclass in learning to live with uncertainty. It’s become pretty clear that nothing is entirely predictable and that there’s no simple solution to anything right now. Life is messy. Life is complicated. And yet, as humans, we have brains that are capable of sorting through that that messiness in a way that allows us to spot patterns and land on solutions. Maybe not perfect solutions. (Is any solution ever perfect?) But the kinds of solutions that allows you to steer clear of endless second-guessing, and regrets. The kind where you can say to yourself, “I made the best decision I could with the information I had at the time—and I reserve the right to rethink this decision next week. Or maybe even tomorrow?” What more can we ask of ourselves but that we remain open to the opportunity to learn and grow as humans, both individually and together?

It’s become pretty clear that nothing is entirely predictable and that there’s no simple solution to anything right now. Life is messy. Life is complicated. And yet, as humans, we have brains that are capable of sorting through that that messiness in a way that allows us to spot patterns and land on solutions.

Ann Douglas

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About Navigating the Messy Middle:

Roughly 68 million North American women currently grapple with the challenges of midlife, faced with a culture that tells them their “best-before date” has long passed. In Navigating the Messy Middle, Ann Douglas pushes back against this toxic narrative, providing a fierce and unapologetic book for and about midlife women.

In this deeply validating and encouraging book, Douglas interviews well over one hundred women of different backgrounds and identities, sharing their diverse conversations about the complex and intertwined issues that women must grapple with at midlife: from family responsibilities to career pivots, health concerns to building community. Readers will find a book that offers practical, evidence-based strategies for thriving at midlife, coupled with compelling first-person stories.

Offering purpose and meaning in a life stage that can otherwise feel out of control, Douglas pushes back against the message that women at midlife are no longer relevant and needed, highlighting the far-reaching economic, political and social impacts of these messages and providing a refreshing counter-narrative that maps out a path forward for women at midlife.

Both a midlife love letter and a lament, Navigating the Messy Middle both celebrates the beauty and rages at the many injustices of this life stage and provides readers with the tools to chart their own course.

September 29, 2022

Woman, Watching, by Merilyn Simonds

I LOVED this book! Louise de Kiriline Lawrence is the most fascinating woman I’d never heard of, born to Swedish aristocracy, goddaughter of the Queen of Denmark, trained as a Red Cross nurse in WW1, which is how she met her Russian husband, whom she followed into a post-revolutionary Soviet Union beset by civil war, and then he was eventually killed by the Bolsheviks, and in the aftermath of that loss, she emigrates to Canada to begin nursing in Northern Ontario, where she becomes the nurse to the Dionne Quintuplets during their first year of life…all this taking up just 64 pages in a book that runs for 300 more.

Because after those extraordinary formative experiences, according to Merilyn Simonds in biography Woman, Watching: Louise de Kiriline Lawrence and the Songbirds of Pimisi Bay, is where the real story begins, Lawrence buying a rural property where she builds a log cabin (without plumbing or electricity) and becoming one of the foremost ornithologists of her time, thanks to her own powers of observation and correspondence with other bird experts who informed her ideas. She’s able to note effects of habitat loss and other human interference before Rachel Carson became well known or celebrated, build support and information networks with other women birders, and write six books, many articles and magazine stories, and a foundational monograph on woodpeckers.

Born into affluence, Lawrence’s early years of hardship would have primed her to be resourceful and grateful for small pleasures, but even still, her strength and stoicism were remarkable—there is a part where she ventures into the bush to find moss with which to insulate her windows for her unheated cabin, and then she falls and dislocates her shoulder, but (as she reports cheerfully to her correspondent—she was also a prolific letter writer, fortunately for her biographer!) she was able to push the joint back into place AND ended up getting some of the best moss she’d ever gathered.

In some ways, this story of Lawrence’s cabin near North Bay reminded me of Virginia Lee Burton’s The Little House, with the city ever encroaching, growing closer. It’s also a story of the North American Conservation movement (some parts of this mapping beautifully with Michelle Nijhuis’s Beloved Beasts, another book I loved), of discrimination against women in science, of changes to science so that amateur observers have less to contribute, of the struggles in the career of a writer, and the perils of growing old, but most of all, it’s a story about birds, and what we might see if pay attention to the world around us, of the wonders and miracles of the natural world.

September 13, 2022

Big Flex

September is a new season, a new year, in many ways (and this September marks three years since I started Blog School!). For me, it’s always been a time for reflection and renewal, especially having come off such a restorative, restful summer with the goal of bringing that some of that softness with me as I go back to the “grind.” (I also would like to aim to not ground down to dust, less grind in my grind, please!)

“I think this fall,” I said to my husband, “I would like to have a kind of structure for my days, but one where you can move things around, everything not rigidly fixed in place.”

“You mean, like a calendar,” he said patiently.

“OMG, yes!” (Or maybe I finally need a bullet journal after all?)

But what I’m really saying is that I want a framework with a bit of slack, where my days have different shapes and things can be moved around to accommodate whatever else might be going on. My tendency is to be so unyielding in my approach to my days, partly because you have to be protective when you are self-employed and work from home, because everybody always things you’re just sitting around waiting to have coffee all the time, and also because I’m worried that if I’m not disciplined, the whole structure will fall apart.

But the thing is that sometimes I actually do want to go and have coffee, and also that often I actually can!

And I know that for some people, none of this is complicated, and also that adaptable calendars might not even be a revelation, but it’s too easy for me to become inflexible in my approach to my schedule, to do the same thing every Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, etc, for one to be this day, and one to be another. I keep envisioning a structure that’s less a grid than a hammock, one of those knotted ones that are full of holes, but not so large that everything just falls through. Just that there’s give, and it’s easy, it stretches wide and low when it has to.

Is this the beginning of me FINALLY becoming laid back?

Don’t bet on it.

But maybe I can be me with more room to breathe.

April 27, 2022

The Direction of Your Dreams

I was recently writing in a journal of prompts in response to the question of what I’d like to tell my younger self about my life right now. And what I remembered was how much possibility my younger self once found in the phrase attributed to Thoreau , “Go confidently in the direction of your dreams and live the life you imagine.” Inscribing it into all kinds of scrapbooks, perhaps purchasing a poster of a sunset with it quoted.

What I’d tell my younger self: “Look! I did it.”

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Two years after my first novel came out, I’d found myself in a creative jam. My publisher had rejected my next novel. I was proud of Mitzi Bytes, but its sales hadn’t set the world on fire, and I was feeling pretty despondent. Like this was my chance, and I’d blown it.

(Never mind that so much of things like book sales are outside an author’s control. Suspicions I’d long held were underlined in a really smart and candid recent post by novelist S.K. Ali, who wrote, “Your book sales are not yours to bear…if you love marketing, great! but a publisher has the greatest pull of all and can put a book on any list — NYT, Indie, USA Today etc — without you moving a finger. So, Sajidah, keep doing all of that stuff you do, giveaways, tiktoks, AMAs, but only because you love your readers. [Those things don’t move book sales. YOU don’t move book sales. Don’t bear that burden.]”)

It was late 2018, in response to that despondency, and feeling like I’d used up all my chances, that I decided to conjure some more. In 2019, I launched the #BacktotheBlog Movement, which led to Blog School, and also a wonderful bookselling project I’m still so proud of, the now-departed Briny Books. And then, in the midst of that summer, I signed a deal for my second novel, everything coming up Kerry after all.

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I wonder if any advice I have to impart about going in the direction of one’s dreams would be as relevant if I hadn’t ended up defying the odds and getting that book deal in the end? I think it probably would, because my happy ending was not the end, but just another chapter (hurrah!), but experience has shown me that an author is never set, never really arrives, that writing, like everything, is a process of becoming, and the next thing is never sure. That the advice about going in the direction of one’s dreams never stops being applicable.

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When I say, “Keep going! Don’t give up,” I’m not saying that you should keep beating your head against a brick wall. Sometimes “keep going” means doing something different, a shift, a pivot. I finished a novel in 2007 that nobody wanted to publish, and I’m glad I didn’t go to the ends of the earth in an attempt to find a publisher, because I might have found one if I’d tried hard enough, and that novel wasn’t very good.

What I’m saying is don’t stop creating things. Don’t stop being inspired. The wonderful thing about literature is that readers are so central to the form—there’s nothing passive about it. Keep reading. Keep engaging with ideas. Keep a notebook. Keep a blog. Maybe you have bigger dreams of projects you’d like to get to the end of, but in the meantime, a notebook, a blog. A quilt. A cake. A conversation. All these things are tangible and real. In keeping with the life you’ve imagined.

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(Keep on creating.)

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I started thinking about all of this in response to a recent post by Kelly Duran, whose kindness, generosity and candour as an author has been so refreshing to encounter. Her feelings about where she is two years out from her debut novel resonated with me for sure, and made think about the metrics we have to measure success. As well as the dangers on fixating where we’re going instead of noticing and appreciating where we are right now.

With writing, its always about the next thing. And while I understand that, but it’s not the way I want live my days, to measure out my life. I want to rest on my laurels. I want to breathe. I want to rest.

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I started thinking about all this in response to the book Creative Not Famous: The Small Potato Manifesto, by Ayun Halliday, whose comics I used to read in Bust Magazine back in the days when I was learning to call myself a feminist. I think I am the small potato I am because of Halliday’s influence, because of her example that it’s possible to live a creative life, to combine that life with motherhood. Blogging’s DIY ethos in line with her zines and off-off-Broadway plays. Her example of how exactly one goes about confidently in the direction of one’s dreams and lives the life she imagines.

Most of us are never going to hit the big time. But is that really the reason we’re doing it?

It’s not the dreams themselves, it’s the direction.

I’m thinking of yoga, and how much of a pose is about reaching for it instead of actually getting there, and how it’s really the reaching that makes the process worthwhile.

If you didn’t have to reach, what would be the point?

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I remember thinking about my goals when I was a little bit older, too old to be penning axioms by Thoreau into pretty notebooks, and I wasn’t actually thinking about Thoreau at all. But I was plotting out my life the way one might be plotting the trajectory of a line on a graph, and it occurred to me that if I tried to be a writer, to write, that even if I never achieved such goals as a published book (or two books, or three, or a bestseller, or a prestigious prize) that I’d end up in a very different and likely more interesting place than if I hadn’t tried at all.

That it’s actually impossible to lose this game.

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What Thoreau actually said, from Walden: “I learned this, at least, by my experiment: that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.”

April 26, 2022

Gleanings

• Surrender to knowing what it should look like or where it’s going to show up, how I’m supposed to do it, or who’s supposed to find it or connect to it or show up. Plant and tend to the seed. And surrender the rest.
• My plans are mere sketches, a few chords on which to improvise; they delight me.
• Seasons always reassure us that life in all its forms continues. It shifts, evolves, and readies itself for what is next.
• This poached, cooled asparagus waits patiently until you’re ready for it and when you are… you just dump it on a plate. [“Nobody writes recipes quite like the Smitten Kitchen!” said nobody, today at least.]
• In this part of the world, at this time of year, there is such a dramatic change in the way light fills our days. As winter ends, and we transition through spring towards summer, we are reminded of cycles – days, seasons, lives.
• I continued with the business of daily living. I felt grateful to be able to. And that’s win enough.  
• I still have chilli peppers in glass jars in the freezer, but they don’t begin to compare to the fieriness of the ones I hung to dry in the window. 
• I carry my past, in ways I wish I did not. I carry the groceries despite having teens. I carry myself in dignity except for when I am swept away .
• What you can’t hear are the fine grits of gravel ticking off the car doors and the wind singing in the barbed wire fences.
• Today, I celebrate the gift of joy, of connection, of relationship. And, I’m so grateful for the reminder to stay open … you truly never know who is going to come your way, cross your path, and through their very being, create invitations and possibilities in your own becoming.
• Like many people, I’ve spent much of my life seeking external validation, permission and approval, especially from my immediate family. I worked hard to make sure that wasn’t part of this process. I wanted to stand in clear ownership of my lived experience and the stories within it, to take responsibility for this being my story, not our story, hence my desire to inform and invite
• What I’m getting at is – creating, exploring with curiosity, learning from the masters at their craft, experimenting and painting over – this is how I want to spend my days.
• What became intolerable to me was devoting my life so fully to my kids becoming themselves, while losing myself so completely in the process. What kind of example was I setting? Who would they become if their mother was nothing more than a reflection of their wants and needs?

April 11, 2022

4 Great Essay Collections

Run Towards the Danger, by Sarah Polley

I’ve read a run of great essay collections lately, which kicked off with actor/director Sarah Polley’s bestselling new release. It was a book I regarded curiously, at first, because the premise was strange: six essays about various experiences from Polley’s life, in which an adult perspective circles back on childhood trauma. Polley is a former child actor and now an acclaimed film director and writer, and I wondered if the whole project might be a gimmick, but then I kept hearing from reader after reader about how excellent the book actually is. And they were right. I loved this one, its searing, visceral writing, its willingness to complicate, to circle back and around, its acknowledgement of darkness and light, often in the very same place. Brave, original, and interesting, Polley writes about growing up too soon after the death of her mother, about stage fright, exploitation as a child actor, about carrying the story of her experience abuse by a notorious celebrity, about a complicated pregnancy and introduction to motherhood. Polley has had a remarkable life and she owns both her privilege and her trials at once, demonstrating that our experiences and our perceptions of experiences are multitudinous and ever subject to change.

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Spílexm, by Nicola I. Campbell

Celebrated children’s book author Nicola I. Campbell’s Spílexm (which means “remembered stories” in the language spoken by Nlaka’pamux in British Columbia) is a beautiful collection weaving poetry, memoir, journals and letters to tell her story of becoming as Nlaka’pamux, Sylix, and Metis, and the daughter/granddaughter/etc of residential school survivors. This is a story of grief and survival, and a testament to the remarkable powers of love, family ties and personal will to overcome trauma and design a better future for one’s self, and Campbell imagines the same for Indigenous people across Turtle Island. My favourite parts of the story are those where she writes about canoe racing, discovering her own power and the power of community. This is such a generous and achingly beautiful offering to the world.

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Send Me Into the Woods Alone, by Erin Pepler

While this collection is subtitled “Essays on Motherhood,” it too is a story of becoming, a story of womanhood and daughterhood, and personhood. Truly it’s a smorgasbord of goodness, essays recounting a difficult pregnancy, the details of labour (that one is called “A Million Hands in One Vagina”), and onward through the years. At the beginning I wondered if these essays might suffer a bit from the desire to be relatable and inclusive at the expense of specificity, but such concerns fell away as Pepler delves into her own story and writes with such candour about her struggles with anxiety, and about how her own family experiences growing up inform her parenting now, for better or for worse. The collection is tremendously moving, but also very funny—I kept reading parts aloud to whoever happened to be in the room with me. Like motherhood itself, Send Me Into The Woods Alone is equal-parts light and dark, joy and misery, another writer who’s unafraid to be complicated and tell the truth.

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I Came All This Way to Meet You, by Jami Attenberg

And finally this collection by American novelist Attenberg, the story of her Midwestern roots, her years in New York, and finding home in New Orleans, an unlikely outcome for someone who spent years couch-surfing, which turned into years staying in friends’ spare rooms as their lives stabilized but hers didn’t for such a long time. Coming later to writing, put off by an assault in her first year of undergraduate studies, a story she tells in connection to the testimony of Christine Blasey Ford about how Supreme Court nominee had sexually assaulted her years before. Attenberg writes, “Why do we believe these men are the best when they are the worst? Why do we hold on to them?” In this collection, Attenberg writes her process of coming to own her story and her voice, all of this underlined her her persistence in staying true to her art through the ups and downs of the writing life and her determination to succeed as a writer.

March 29, 2022

Gleanings

• What’s in a song? What’s in a robin song heard in the trees on a March morning?
• My daughter becoming a mother reminds me of what those first few months of motherhood are like.
• As they say, if you want to get fit, hang around with fit people. And, if you want to read more, hang around with readers!
• Every year around this time I see tulip leaves emerging in the gardens around Victoria College and I worry that they’re too eager, that they won’t survive another Spring snowfall.
• What if, after two years, we actually understood each other better instead of being convinced that only one of us is right.
• I’m not sure why or when I imagined I was supposed to know things or have a “valuable perspective” to offer. Or, you know, some kind of wisdom. Ha.
• I won’t suggest that braiding a rag rug is a quick and easy zero-waste solution to repurposing your used bedsheets. There’s nothing quick about making a rug, and while the actual process is easy enough, it’s a project that demands time and staying power, not to mention some muscles and balm for your soon-to-be tender pinky finger.
• But thick black eyeliner and jelly shoes aside, I’ve always found that the most difficult thing to express when people poke fun at the decade, is how we lived with a thick air of potential nuclear annihilation and destruction that permeated even the most French Formula-hardened ‘do. It was everywhere. And it followed us around for years.
• Our eyesight may be changing, but we start to see wider and further, from a different perspective. Our inner lives are richer than they were before. And we know there’s still more to know.
• And very practically speaking, writing every day has me quiet … listening, noticing, observing, reflecting … a necessity in order to have something to put down on this page each evening, trusting and seeing that when I arrive here, I don’t need to have it all, or any of it figured out, but just allow what already exists …
• Here’s to sitting in the darkness, then, with beauty and love, just sitting on our laps like cats — an orange one and a gray one.
• I’m not going to let my messiness stop me from loving this wild and precious life.

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February 25, 2022

The Sentence, by Louise Erdrich

“Even one person of a certain magnetism in this time can seize the energy and cause a maelstrom to form around each sentence they utter. One person can create a giant hurricane of unreality that feels like reality.

‘That’s what’s happening,’ she said. ‘Just look around.’

I didn’t have to. I felt like I could see everything—hatred valor, cruelty, mercy. It was all over the news and in the hospitals and all over me. Watching and waiting…had turned me inside out.”

I loved this extraordinary novel so completely, The Sentence a fiction made up of all kinds of pieces from the world, its characters including its author, Louise Erdrich herself, who flits in and out of the text, and with Birchbark Books, the independent bookshop Erdrich owns in Minneapolis, the backdrop for much of the story.

Set between November 2019 and November 2020, the novel’s protagonist is Tookie, an Indigenous woman struggling with returning to ordinary life after an incarceration, and who, on one of her shifts at Birchbark Books, is one of the first staff members to discern that the store is haunted by one very specific ghost, namely that of their most charmingly annoying customer, a white woman called Flora who had been an enthusiast for all things Indigenous.

As the trouble with Flora’s ghost escalates—she keeps knocking books onto the floor—much else is going on, of course—it’s 2020 after all. Tookie’s husband’s daughter—with whom Tookie has always had a fractious relationship—turns up with a newborn baby son. And then Louise takes off on a new book tour in mid-February, as news of a novel coronarvirus is becoming ever closer and closer to home, and I had such a visceral reaction to this part of the novel, back when everyone was wiping down surfaces and proceeding “out of an excess of caution.” Erdrich captures it so well, the looming dread, the incredible unknown, and the unfathomable way that time kept passing.

The bookshop closes to customers and Tookie and her colleagues find their work deemed “essential”, and so they spend their days socially distanced and packing up online orders, which arrive in surprising numbers. (Another visceral reaction for me was recalling that sad forever spring, and how wonderful and uplifting it was to have an order of books from local indies landing on our doorstep…) And Flora, or her ghost, at least, is still there, her presence becoming more urgent, beginning to seem dangerous.

But danger is everywhere after the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis that May, killed by police at the store where Tookie’s husband goes sometimes. The city erupts in rage and violence (the chapter is called “Minneapolis Goddamn”), explosive and uncontainable, and Tookie fears for her loved ones and for the future, her own impressions and experiences of police violence kept close to her chest, but here and there they burble to the surface and recall her own sentence in prison, and are complicated by the fact that her husband is a former officer. But still she feels with all those grieving Black mothers, and she knows the names of the men who’ve gone before, and she knows too that Indigenous people are just as likely to be murdered by the police, but you’re probably not going to hear about it, these crimes happening in more remote places where people aren’t happening by with cellphone cameras.

This book is everything. Comedy, tragedy, current events, recommended reading list (it’s so gloriously bookish!), ghost story, love story, a story of community, and also a harrowing tale of individual survival and resilience, and I just loved it so much, and it found it to be a comfort in the light of our own tumultuous moment, reminding me of all the things that really matter and the spectacular possibilities of books.

February 14, 2022

Free Love, by Tessa Hadley

Free Love was in the air—I’d heard about the book’s release in the UK, and anticipated a delay before it becoming available in Canada, but there it was, on sale February 1, and so I ordered it. Before the book arrived, another friend was already posting about it on Instagram with a rave review, and then the day I finally started reading, another friend sent along an email telling me that it was one of the best books they’d read lately and that I really must pick it up, and I do so love being told what to do when I’m doing it already.

Tessa Hadley is newish to me. I’ve read her novels The Past and Late in the Day in the last few years, and really enjoyed them, and have been looking for other copies of her books in bookshops ever since, but they’re not widely available here in Canada. It’s also true that while I enjoyed both books, they didn’t leave overwhelming impressions on me and I can’t remember much about either one except that they had atmosphere. And I think that’s actually the point.

Because Free Love too is an atmospheric novel, a book full of tension and interiority instead of wildly swinging plot. And even when the plot does swing with housewife Phyllis abandoning her suburban life to pursue a relationship with the bohemian son of a family friend, or even before that when fate conspires to bring this unlikely couple together in the first place, kissing beside a garden pond on the hunt for an errant sandal, the earth barely shakes and life continues on, seasons changing, floors requiring sweeping, dinners making. Everything is changed, but also nothing at all—but then about two thirds of the way through there comes a revelation that blows everything apart, and has me texting the friend who’s read it already “OMG I JUST GOT TO THE PLOT TWIST!”

But it’s not in fact the plot twist that matters at all really, instead the rhythms and patterns of daily life, both before and after, that Hadley manages to capture so beautifully, the way that life goes on, and on—if you’re lucky—no matter your choices. Every moment itself is a narrative leap.

February 7, 2022

The Cure For Sleep, by Tanya Shadrick

“How I began to spend my time that season would enlarge my life in a way I would only understand later, looking back. At the water’s edge that very first day when I stepped out from the hidden and habitual along with my clothes, I couldn’t know that even a middle-aged mother swimming laps in a small town can send ripples through the universe. But it did.”

Tanya Shadrick’s memoir The Cure For Sleep: Memoir of a Late-Waking Life is a story of becoming, of wonder, awe and possibility. It’s a story of life after death, of creative fulfillment after motherhood, of fierce determination, and the triumph of artistic expression and human connection. Triumph that comes against the odds, for Shadrick grew up accustomed to hiding on the margins, shy and uncomfortable with her place in the world, the working class daughter of a broken marriage, rejected by her father, growing up in the shadow of her mother’s difficult second marriage. Shadrick makes it out of her hometown, however, attending university, where she falls in love with a boy who’s as comfortable retired from society as she is, and they make a life together whose foundation is books and ideas, questions and conversation. And then soon after the birth of their first child, a medical emergency after complications, Shadrick comes as close to dying as one can while still being able to tell the tale, and a vision in this moment causes her to re-imagine her place in the world, to find a way to live more boldly and grow through connection with others.

Shadrick writes about early motherhood as an expedition in a way that delightfully recalls Maria Mutch’s memoir Know the Night, challenging notions of maternal instinct as these were feelings she had to conjure by practice. After having told the story of her “First Life,” she begins to live her second one differently, venturing out to meet other mothers and finding connection there, the inverse of such a tiresome cliche, and together these women support one another and find new ways to make a village. Shadrick eventually leaves the security of her administrative job at the university she attended to begin collecting stories of people living out their last days in hospices. She also starts swimming during the hours she can find for herself, which proves most inspiring, and she eventually becomes an artist in residence at the swimming pool, writing what she calls “laps of longhand.” All these experiences leading Shadrick to become known by a woman called Lynne Roper, whose notes and diaries, after Roper’s death, are edited into a volume called Wild Woman Swimming, longlisted for the Wainwright Book Prize in 2019.

How does one build a life? How does one become an artist?

(And most pressing: what does one wear for such an occasion? Shadrick would recommended a headscarf and an apron.)

If you’ve ever been a human, you’ll intuit that Shadrick’s path is not straightforward. That her success does not extinguish her pain and longing that resulted from her father’s rejection. That her long and beautiful marriage does not continue without the complication of Shadrick falling in love with somebody else. That achieving one’s goals does not always (or ever?) deliver happily ever after, and a wife, a woman, a mother, is forever becoming, which is the best possible outcome, even if it means that such a thing as satisfaction is always out of reach.

I ordered The Cure For Sleep from the UK after following Shadrick for some time on Instagram (swimming connections, I think) and coming to appreciate her artistic vision, and the memoir was everything I’d hoped it would be. Rich and literary, complex and thought-provoking, challenging and absorbing at once.