July 8, 2026
Actually Romantic
I was steeped in romance this week in advance of our (sold out!) Hot Summer Night event at Book Bar tomorrow night. I’d already read Chasing Summer, the rom-com debut by Frankie Scott (Zoe Whittall), and called it “A sparkling summer novel, and a gorgeous getaway to the beaches, vineyards, and rustic charms of Prince Edward County… [A]n engaging ode to first love, creative ambition, friendship, family, and forgiveness.”
But I was very happy to finally get a chance to read Lavanya Lakshmi’s debut, Leave and Come Back, about Simran, a woman who’s been estranged from her Indian-American family and returns to the fold for her cousin’s big wedding, only to have her boyfriend crash the party and get roped into partaking in the two weeks of celebrations and attempting to win the affection of a very formidable auntie. The story was richly textured with humour and meaning, and interwoven with themes of family, grief and forgiveness, as well as the cultural elements which blend different Indian traditions. The novel’s title comes from the Tamil word for “good bye,” which includes a promise of returning—a promise that Simran needs to learn how to keep.
And then I read Forever is the Sweetest Con, by Joanna Thurlow, the first release from new PEI romance imprint Sugar Shack Books, and did it ever satisfy. After being swindled by her boyfriend, with creditors now threatening to take her mother’s house, Las Vegas waitress and aspiring actress Cleo decides her surest bet is winning top prize on a brand new reality show billed as Love Island meets Survivor. After what happened with her ex, she’s definitely not looking for love, but she’s sure shes savvy enough to follow reality TV rules and act the part of happily ever after with Kei, a musician who has his own reasons for wanting to win, but then the entire production crew disappears and Cleo and the others are stranded on a remote Northern Ontario island. There are twists and turns and surprises galore, and this one kept me engaged to the very satisfying ending.
July 8, 2026
Easy Now
I want to provide an update to my post from early May which was a point at which hammering out the first draft of a novel was feeling like smashing my head against a brick wall—painful and not fun. After writing an entire novel last year that turned out to be nothing (mercifully! because I never want to have to look at it again!), I was more than a little concerned that was just the way I did things now, which did not seem like the best use of time. But I am happy to report that my current writing project really does seem to be otherwise.
I had to break my cardinal rule of first drafts to get to this point though, which is a reminder that even the best rules have their limits. And that rule, for first drafts, was JUST KEEP GOING, GET TO THE END, but by 52,000 words into the manuscript, it was clear that I hadn’t built sufficient threads into the narrative to sustain the story. And so I went back to the beginning, in fact I wrote two entire chapters that take place before that beginning, and I added all kinds of points, scenes and details that flesh the story out. I was also making a common error I see in my manuscript consultation clients’ work, which is exploring disconnection between two characters by having them share no common points at all. But like, if the characters are already so disconnected that no connection can be elucidated, then who cares, right? No, the stakes arrive when the threads are there, even if they’re just barely hanging on. Or when you bring two characters into the same room but they might as well be a million miles apart.
The story was lying really flat in May, and part of my objective in going back to the beginning was adding motion, movement. My original opening scene took place in the morning, as the sun rose, but that is boring and cliched. The new opening scene features my character in the middle of eating her lunch at her desk in her office (which is prohibited) when she is interrupted by a senior staff member with an urgent request, and now all of a study there are stakes, momentum, ongoingness. The story had been missing its energy, its driving force, but it’s there now, and so is the humour. I honestly have no idea how to write funny, and certainly a story that’s flat is going to make humour even harder to come by, but I’ve managed to conjure it, and it’s delightful.
I had a goal of finishing my first draft by the end of July, but I don’t think it’s going to happen. I’m still going through that first first draft, adding substance and details to it, and I’m only 2/3 of the way through. But I’m getting somewhere, and even better, I am having fun.
July 6, 2026
Saudade, by Thomas Trofimuk
As a reader who skipped all the poems in A.S. Byatt’s Persuasion, just say, or who sees a long passage in italics coming in a novel and tends to head for the hills, I might have been taking a chance with Thomas Trofimuk’s sixth novel, Saudade, which is the story of a man whose wife tells him long stories full of digressions as a way to to hide from death. But see, I’d previously had the experience of being absolutely captivated by Trofimuk’s last book, which was narrated by a bridge (you read that correctly), so I had more than a little faith in the author and was willing to follow him wherever the story would take me.
Which is sort of the point of Saudade, actually, about Bruce Flynn, whose anxiety about death is being met by his wife Pilar’s theory that by focusing intently on deeply digressive stories, death won’t be able to find you. And one day while the two are travelling in France, in the middle of one such story, Bruce looks across the table to find that Pilar has disappeared, and thus begins a cross-continent quest to find out where she’s gone, the answer lying deep inside one of her stories inside stories inside stories. And all Bruce has to do is follow the clues, which become curiouser and curiouser, people he encounters on his journey seeming to be people from the story Pilar told, some of the connections uncanny, impossible, and then eventually it becomes clear that Bruce’s journey to find Pilar is actually a different kind of journey, but one no less wrenching, strange, and hard to navigate.
I’ve never read anything else like it. Saudade is unforgettable, a story of longing, grief, love, and marriage, as well as faith and friendship. It’s so weird and so good, and Trofimuk is a storyteller of such consummate skill that the reader is left totally spellbound.
July 4, 2026
Summer Reading: Monkey Beach
“The day promised to be a scorcher, but out on the ocean with the spray cooling my face and the wind drying it away, the heat was bearable. I wished summer would never end. I wished I could do this all year and never have to go back to school. I wished I could pick berries and go fishing with Ma-ma-oo and spend all my days wandering.” —Monkey Beach
For my first Summer Reading essay of the season—during a week in which all days were scorchers—I wrote about rereading Monkey Beach—such a fantastic novel. Paid subscribers can read it here!
July 2, 2026
The Seas, by Samantha Hunt
I’ve been waiting to read The Seas, by Samantha Hunt, ever since Mikka Jacobsen championed it on my podcast as book about a woman wildly wanting, longing. And feeling as I do about water and seas, albeit inland ones, I was drawn to this story of a woman who is sure she’s a mermaid, although her grasp on reality is dubious—or is it? A fairy tale, a fable, I read this short novel with Dar Williams’ song “The Ocean” in my head, a perfect complement, a song I used to listen to in the throes of unrequited love, which is where Hunt’s narrator finds herself too, infatuated with an Iraq war veteran who is only a little less too old for her now that she’s finally come of age. She lives in a seaside town so far north that all the highways run south, a place whose main claim to fame is its rates of alcoholism, and she and her mother are waiting for her father to return from the sea that took him years ago. Weird, wild and spellbinding, I really liked it.
July 2, 2026
Post Pub Aftermath
In February and March, I wrote a lot about trying to release a book in a way that didn’t wreck me, about doing a better job of staying sane and balanced through the whole experience, and for the most part, I think, I pulled it off. Which I was able to do partly because I felt terrifically boosted—my publisher was pushing my novel, they wanted the book to succeed as much as I did, there was a team of talented people working on the sales and marketing effort. I had fun, and got to have some fantastic adventures and events, living out author dreams (signing copies on display in New York City! Never mind that there were only two bookstores stocking my book in New York City! Because there were two bookstores stocking my book in New York City! And I was there for an actual book event. This is the the stuff they put on vision boards, so the caveats don’t count.)
The ridiculous thing about me is that every time I’ve released a book, I’ve been sure it will appear on the bestseller list. And I’m grateful to have been bestowed with a sense of underlying confidence, one that means I am often disappointed, but it’s not the worst way to move around in the world. And I will admit that as I was planning for my book to be a bestseller, I was grappling with how that would factor with my project of having this book launch be different. Like, OBVIOUSLY, if my book is a massive success, I’m not going to be able to take much credit for getting through the experience in a positive way, you know? (What a quandary!) So in a way (silver linings!) it was useful to not be a massive success. (Phew. Dodged a bullet there!) I don’t follow sales numbers avidly, but the book did well enough upon release. It was gratifying to see it appear slip onto the Canadian indie bestseller list. Sale have fallen off since then, which is to expected, and I think I’ve done a better job than in the past of riding this wave in a sensible way, though not sensible enough to have given up on my unrealistic expectations.
The last while has been a little tough though, as the novel fades from readers’ attention, but I was expecting that. The thing about lighter books is that they’re meant to be more ephemeral, for the moment instead of for all time, to borrow a notion from Carol Shields’ novel Unless, about a writer whose work was on the lighter side. As with the bestseller lists, I have high hopes for posterity (who is to say the Nobel Prize might not be calling!), but I keep all this tempered, which is easy when I remember how lucky I’ve been.
But still, the aftermath of publication is a weird time. In the New York “Book Gossip” newsletter, I could relate when Daniel Lavery explains, “As with anything, the reality comes up against the ideal. In the immediate aftermath of a book, there’s a growling unfitness to be around other people. Why are you not all putting me up on your shoulders? I’m aware that when something good happens, I will often slot quickly into rage if I’m not careful about maintaining a more useful mind-set. I’m aware that I will become a bad person for a few weeks. I will become grasping and desperate and vindictive and I will attempt to cover all of that up with an appearance of uncomplicated good cheer and ease. I know that it will pass.”
The one thing I was not remotely prepared for a bout of post-publication anxiety/shame. I went through it when my first novel came out, back when I didn’t understand my anxiety at all (which must have been really hard!), and I wasn’t prepared for it to happen again. I thought maybe this stage was a phase I’d aged out of, but I think I only skipped it with my second and third books by never having my novels receive much attention at all and drowning in the shame of that. This time, having made it through the publication period with my spirits in tact, I thought I’d get off scot-free, but no!
My anxiety has been running high on a general level anyway, and it’s definitely connected to my hormones, but a couple of weeks ago, it jumped into overdrive, and everything just felt terrible. I felt like everyone has made at me, that I’d disappointed everyone, that I’d messed up somehow. It relates, I think, to what Lavery’s question about feeling perpetually lifted up. It wasn’t happening now—why not? It was all on me, and I felt so terribly exposed, vulnerable, walking around like a human bruise, ugly and purple. Embarrassing,
I knew it would pass, but also it was awful and unexpected, both familiar and strange. And a reminder that completely smooth roads are a lot to ask of anything, but like with the darn bestseller list, I really do keep my expectations high. It’s accepting the reality of otherwise that is the trick, but I like to think I’m getting better at that somewhat.
June 29, 2026
Tilt, by Emma Pattee
I don’t ask for much from a camping trip—just perfect weather, and an absolute banger of a read selected from a bookshop en-route to the campground. This time it was Beach Reads Bookshop in perfectly delightful Port Dover, where Robyn’s pick—Tilt, by Emma Pattee—totally made my weekend.
Set in Portland, Oregon, it’s the totally gripping story of Annie, nine months pregnant and shopping for a crib in Ikea—she’s left it too late, as usual—when an earthquake hits, when THE earthquake hits, the big one that’s long been expected but which no one wants to think about. And the novel is about Annie’s journey through the wreckage of the city as she tries to find her husband, the journey alternating with chapters that tell the story of how Annie got here, her dreams, disappointments and compromises, a life she’d never expected when she was young and fresh and being promised that she could accomplish anything she set her clever mind to.
There was a point around the campfire when I was reading Tilt and I was almost in pieces, and my husband said to our eldest, “If this is hitting her this hard, the book must REALLY be brutal.” Because both of them have had the experience of me foisting books upon them by exclaiming, “Read this. It’s GREAT!” and they come back having finished the book and are totally destroyed, asking, “Why did you do this to me?”
Which brings me to the line in Tilt book where Annie notes that there are two kinds of people: the kind who make lists of all the ways a baby might die, and everybody else. (Annie also notes she and her husband never got around to making an earthquake preparedness kit, which was relatable. I don’t like to ground my anxiety in the physical world, preferring to keep it squarely in my head, which makes me feel safer somehow.) I’m definitely among the former group of people, although I don’t think this is the kind of book that will necessarily destroy you—although what do I know? I’m still sorry to anyone who was upset after I told them to read A Heart that Works, by Rob Delaney. I thought it was gorgeous and funny. Sad, but also true and gorgeous and funny.
What I don’t tend to gravitate toward are books that anyone might compare to Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, however, and Tilt might be the one exception to that, mostly because Lydia Kiesling called it, “The Road meets Nightbitch meets What to Expect When You’re Expecting,” and how can you not be intrigued by that kind of mash-up?
I loved this book. I loved Annie’s voice, her compassion, its limits, her humour, her honesty. I love the way the narrative gripped me and didn’t let go. How the novel’s broad scope manages to contain such a massive spectrum of the human experience—the awesomeness of being alive, the terrible and terrific risk of falling in love and wanting, the devastation of realizing just how fragile all this, the very foundations on which we construct our measly existences, and the way we’d do so again and again. What a gift and what a burden it is to be human. How hard we can fight to survive.
June 25, 2026
On Witness and Respair, by Jesmyn Ward
“Come take a ride with me, them Southern boys said, them bluesmen made new. For sure, we answered, we coming, and for a song, a poem, a line, this country and history and the universe rearranged itself, and we were outside of time and space in a different place, crafted and built, paint stroke by poem and prose line by song lyric by music note by shutter click, in another dimension, where we were safe and seen and heard, where our hearts beat wildly and surely with the rhythm, with the rush of the water, with our ancestors at the oars of the boat, their own vessel, cutting through the waters of time, navigating the universes as they would.”
In her latest book, a collection of essays and articles written and published over the last 20 years, Jesmyn Ward resists the simplicity of a single story—about Mississippi, America, Black culture and more—and manages to hold it all, the tragedy and the ecstasy, the devastation and the building, the sadness and the joy, the cruelty and injustice and the overwhelming love.
June 23, 2026
The Glorious Mess
Tomorrow is my birthday. It also marks four years since the US Supreme Court overturned Roe vs. Wade, which meant women across America lost their federal right to abortion and reproductive healthcare. Further, it marks 24 years since the birthday when I was pregnant, but did not know it yet, a circumstance that could have derailed my life, but didn’t, because I was able to access the care I wanted and needed, and I was so naive at the time that it never even occurred to me not to take this access for granted, never mind the generations of activists who’d had to fight to make abortion legal in Canada. I had no idea what forces they’d had to push against, but now I do, because I’m a person in the world in 2026, who has seen what happened to abortion rights in America, and those forces today are as loud as they’ve ever been, in America and elsewhere.
At the same time that I know what the stakes are, however, I’ve also stopped yelling about my abortion on the internet all the time…mainly because I’ve learned that yelling on the internet is not very productive. And I’ve learned too that maybe we need to be more careful with our most tender stories, that women aren’t served by using our hearts as troll bait, and that it’s not actually as simple as me explaining what happened to me so that people understand. (I really thought it would be.) I got bored too of saying the same things over and over, repetition draining my words of meaning, turning me into a puppet, a prop, rather than the human creature that I am.
That I’m quieter about my abortion these days doesn’t mean the experience was any less important to me though, that it wasn’t one of the most defining experiences of my life so far, that it wasn’t the foundation for the beautiful existence I’ve built in the years since then, for the experience of motherhood when the time was right and I was ready. As I wrote in an essay in Today’s Parent almost ten years ago, “Abortion is part of the glorious mess, right there with the Instagram teacups, the sunshine on our kitchen table, the My Little Pony toys scattered on the floor.”
My kids have grown out of My Little Pony, but the rest is just the same.
June 22, 2026
Every Lie I Told, by Hilary Davidson
I’m looking forward to helping New York-based Canadian author Hilary Davidson welcome her latest novel into the world this Thursday June 25 at Ben McNally Books here in Toronto at 5pm. I’ll have the pleasure of interviewing Hilary about this latest twisty (and twisted!) thriller, a deep dive into the PR industry and all its depravities. The story begins with PR star Jackie Swift receiving a call from her troubled sister late one night—she’s at Jackie’s former boss’s house and requires Naloxone. But when Jackie arrives at the house, her sister is nowhere to be found, and her boss—a man who’s caused a lot of harm but to whom Jackie owes deliverance from her hardscrabble background—is dead. Who killed him? Where is Jackie’s sister? For once in her professional life, Jackie is not in control of the narrative at all, and needs to confront ruthless choices she’s made in her own past if she has any hope of saving her sister, and herself. This one is an absolutely wild ride.
