May 8, 2026
When It Isn’t Easy
I’m writing a novel right now, and I’m having a hard time. When I’m writing first drafts, I’m usually firmly wedded to forward momentum, just get to the end already, but things have gone off the rails a bit where I’m at, 52 000 words. Or maybe I’m still on those rails but the rails aren’t properly fastened to any foundation, and the narrative is all over the place, and/or no place at once. There’s not a proper focus, a proper through-line, I don’t know my secondary characters well enough, the narrative has disparate elements that need to be pulled together. There are some fundamental mysteries that I need to solve before I’m ready for this story to get where it’s going, and so I’ve gone back to the start for rewriting and reweaving—and I’m really just overwhelmed.
Part of this is because Definitely Thriving flowed so easily, and I was conscious as I was writing that this was something special, and I really feel the absence of that ease this time. Although there was so much ease that I don’t properly feel like I wrote the book at all, instead it poured out of me like magic, and I’m not really sure how to do that conjuring trick again, which is terrifying. And finally, I’m scared because I spent last year writing a story that was never going to turn into anything, and once I stopped writing it, I was just so grateful to be done, and now I’m just nervous that this will be how it goes now, me driving my creative truck straight into a brick wall over and over again.
Next week, I am taking part in a very cool storytelling event produced by the Museum of Toronto called “Toronto Confessions: Love it or Hate It” (tickets on sale now!), an opportunity I said yes to because it was just so damn cool, in really exciting company, the sort of thing I’m always not-so-secretly jealous that I’m not constantly being asked to do. But it’s totally not in my wheelhouse, so far out of my comfort zone. A different kind of story making than I’m used to, with different narrative tools and structure, and I’d have to memorize it all—is my brain even capable of this? I really wasn’t sure. And as I began to put my presentation together, I was so afraid that I’d only embarrass myself, that I wasn’t cut out for this. It’s not very often these days that I try something new.
Except that lately I’ve been trying new things a little more often, my springtime so far filled with travel to new cities, brand new twists in schedule and routines, even just little things that challenge me and make me realize that my capacity might be greater than I think (except for the days when I’m really tired). I don’t want to jinx my presentation next Thursday, and I’m still terrified that I’m going to make an ass of myself, but it’s looking more likely that I will show up and be basically adequate (and hopefully better). It’s been fascinating to make something new, to start from nothing and learn how the pieces fit, how to structure and edit my ideas in a new format, even if it’s been super scary, like walking a tightrope without a safety net. Because how do I really know I can do it? But then I figure it out, and realize I’m starter than I think.
Like maybe even smart enough to figure out how to write this novel? And maybe instead of letting the difficulty become my atmosphere, the air I breathe, I can see this tricky phase as part of the process, a tangle to be unknotted, a problem to be solved.
How do I really know I can do it? (GULP)
I don’t. Until I do. (Or at least I hope I will!)
May 6, 2026
Welcome to Sunny Town, by Théodora Armstrong
Welcome to Sunny Town, by Théodora Armstrong, is the story of Maggie, a young artist stuck in her relationship and creative process who decides to broaden her horizons by moving to Japan to teach ESL in 2001. She joins an artist friend in Okayama and becomes part of the ESL expat community there, but eventually finds that the connections she’s making are somehow making her feel more lost than ever. After the Twin Towers fall in New York City that September, the world feels even more strange, Maggie’s Japanese life an unreality, and she must take stock of her present and her past in order to begin contemplating such a thing as the future.
I loved this book, partly for reasons that are personal. I too “taught” English in Japan not longer after the turn of the century and so the culture and dynamics Armstrong writes about were familiar to me and brought back so many memories—the obnoxious cultural superiority manifesting from all sides in conversation classes, Japanese housewives who befriend young gaijin as a hobby (I got “picked up” in the grocery store a few times), weirdo expats who’ve been in Japan for way too long, and (even worse) the ones who manage to escape and then find their way back again.
Armstrong also so perfectly captures the longing and pain of being in one’s 20s anywhere, realizing how little foundation any of us really have beneath our feet, recognizing our parents as flawed and human, putting too much effort into relationships unworthy of our energy, pushing everything (especially our limits) just a little too far simply to find out what happens if we do.
Welcome to Sunny Town is a Künstlerroman, a beautiful and tender portrait of womanhood and becoming. And while Maggie is a messy character, the narrative does not get bogged down in her boredom and ennui, as I’ve encountered (and been put off by) in other “messy girl lit,” too cool for school. Nope, Maggie dares to feel, to hope, to want, to create.
And to connect, most important of all, both with the world around her, and to the reader who’s lucky enough to pick this novel up.
May 5, 2026
Best Offer Wins, by Marisa Kashino
The most controversial thing I ever did in my life was have a baby before I’d bought a house, which is to say that I know the stakes for Margo Miyake, the protagonist of Marisa Kashino’s debut Best Offer Wins. She’s sick of the one-bedroom rental in Washington, DC, that she shares with her husband, Ian, and figures the stress of their uncomfortable living situation is part of the reason she can’t get pregnant. They’ve already lost out on eleven heartbreaking bidding wars, and so when she finds out about a perfect house that’s not on the market yet, she decides to get in first, ingratiating herself with the home’s current owners, keeping her machinations on the down-low, hoping they won’t find out what she’s really after.
If Margo’s desperation seems extreme, there’s a reason for it, the unstable childhood she clawed her way out of, thirsting for middle class respectability, and in her husband she’s found the promise of that—real estate is the final piece in her puzzle.
But of course Margo is also completely unhinged, the extent of this becoming clearer as the story unfolds. I had been expecting a story along the lines of The Hand that Rocks the Cradle or Single White Female, Margo worming her way into the another family’s household for the life she wants, but the family fast gets wise to her, and Margo needs to resort to even further extremes to fight for the house she’s determined in hers—and the terrifying thing about Margo is that she’ll stop at absolutely nothing.
I loved this book. There is something narratively admirable about Margo’s ruthlessness, if not morally (‘cuz she’s a psychopath!). Best Offer Wins is a propulsive and uncomfortable read, the latter for the relatability of it all—because how far would YOU go?
May 4, 2026
A False and Fatal Claim, by Iona Whishaw
Lane Winslow is back in Iona Whishaw’s latest mystery, A False and Fatal Claim, the fourteenth title in her bestselling series set just outside Nelson, BC, in the idyllic hamlet of King’s Cove. Which is where the story begins this time, not long after Lane’s sojourn to Mexico, when Lane is visiting the beach and discovers not a body (surprising!—or at least she hasn’t found a body YET) but a hat. Meanwhile, a motorboat has been reported missing, and so too has a local boy gone astray.
What connects these three events? And more importantly: where is the body? And whose will it be?
All of this intrigue is in addition to local excitement around the wedding of Sergeant Ames, and the usual small town gossip and shenanigans. Plus, Lane is charged for caring for the missing boy when he finally turns up, because it appears his mother has run off too, just to someplace different. And the boy offers her one of her biggest challenges yet, making her consider questions of nature and nurture and how the troubled boy’s difficult life has kept him from learning to make proper attachments and made him lash out at the least opportunity. (Whishaw’s previous career as a teacher, social worker, and school principal has informed this story-line to great effect.)
I’m also not one to put pressure on couples to have children (it’s not for everybody!) but I’ve been wondering whether Lane and Darling would—it’s been a while since their wedding and a baby could be a nice distract from the poetry manuscript that Lane is perpetually avoiding, not to mention a diversion from stumbling across bodies. And Whishaw drops some interesting breadcrumbs making me wonder if a pregnancy plot-line might indeed be on the horizon…
The setting is cozy, the characters familiar and beloved, the mystery itself twisty and interesting, and all of this is underlined by a gorgeous and satisfying foundation of justice and social justice—the story is set in 1948, but Whishaw’s characters push back against racism and sexism in a beautiful way. As with all the books in the series, which manage to remain vital and fresh fourteen books in, these cozy reads manage to suggest provocative answers to some of the most pressing questions of the moment.
April 30, 2026
Two Months
The last two months have been a little bit wild, especially when you consider that most of my months aren’t wild at all. I’m a creature of habit, wedded to routines, and so I was nervous about the busy schedule that began unfolding for me with book promotion this spring. But oh, it’s been wonderful. So much fun, so much joy in connecting with others, so much gratitude for the opportunity to promote and share my book (and also that these efforts have created momentum so that it feels like the publicity machine is flying without me having to generate all of that energy myself).
I remember someone telling me once that having a second baby feels a bit like what you’ve always imagined having a baby would feel like (as opposed to having your existence blown to smithereens, which is what happened with my first child) and this experience of releasing my fifth book feels analogous—when I imagined being an author, I wanted to feel like this.
Some of this is luck and timing—the wind has been right, and its powering my sails. Some of this is having realistic expectations, and having some of them exceeded. It’s also being okay with the inevitable disappointments, and having stable ground beneath my feet with which to weather these—holding that Pema Chodran duality of big and small at the same time. And not looking for things from publishing a book that publishing a book is almost never actually going to deliver—arrival, self-esteem, certainty, an identity, meaningful respect, love or friendship. The thing is the thing, and that thing is publishing a book, nothing more and nothing less, and I’ve really just had a really good time, and what more can a person ask for?
Want to read more about this? My two recent Substack essays for paid subscribers are “A Yearning that Pours” and “This Book Launch Will Be Different.”
April 28, 2026
Becalming, by Aga Maksimowska
Aga Maksimowka’s Becalming is a novel that complicates dualities in the most fascinating way. The story opens on a sailboat, waves slapping the sides, and Gosia (who otherwise knows a lot) can’t tell a rudder from a tiller, whereas her mother can, at home as the captain, and suddenly Gosia sees there’s another side to her mother, one that she’s never even glimpsed back in Canada. She tells us, “This isn’t Toronto Harbour; this is the Baltic, an arm of the Atlantic, the world’s youngest sea.”
Gosia has returned to Poland with her sister and her mother after living in Canada for decades, painstakingly making a life there, and now—age 30—she works as a teacher, she’s stable in her relationship with Peter. Or maybe too stable? There is something wild and hungry inside Gosia that Peter struggles to accommodate, and Gosia has found herself drawn to a work colleague, the appeal of the forbidden. But stability is appealing too, especially after a childhood where she was left by both her parents—her father for another wife, her mother who immigrated to Canada before Gosia joined her.
The sailboat is important—becalming is motionlessness from a lack of wind, which can sometimes mean relief. The word also is very close to “becoming.” There’s a whole lot going on her, and the depths get even murkier when revelations about Peter’s dying father suggest he wasn’t the perfect man the Gosia liked to suppose he was, the counterpart to her own absent father. And all the counterparts are all messed up anyway—why are her relatives in Poland now doing better than the Canadians in 2007? Is Gosia, drawn to her colleague, more like Peter’s father herself?
In Becalming, Maksimowska weaves a complex and beautiful web of connection and disconnection, then and now, here and there, plot and prose both turning surprisingly, creating a rich and textured portrayal of family, history, and real and messy love.
April 27, 2026
Go Gentle, by Maria Semple
“It’s hard to imagine another writer getting away with this kitchen junk-drawer of a novel,” writes critic Ron Charles of Maria Semple’s latest, Go Gentle, and Charles means it in the best way. Because this isn’t your mother’s kitchen junk drawer, or your own, or anyone’s, instead a junk drawer that could only belong to the wondrous mind of Semple, as brilliant as it’s squirrelly, her narratives prone to sharp turns and unlikely diversions. Stoicism, 1990s’ comedy writing rooms, #MeToo, motherhood, covens, art heists, weird rich people, Central Park, the Louvre, bomb threats, secret agents, divorce, hot sex, success, and failure.
Go Gentle is the story of Adorra Hazzard, a mid-life divorcee, and a Stoic philosopher who lives on New York’s Upper West Side and is populating the units in her apartment with like-minded women so that she can form a coven. But then she meets a man one night at the opera, and the whole world becomes unhinged after that, Adorra cut up in an international plot (or is she just imagining things) that somehow ties back to her earlier career as a comedy writer before sexual assault by a colleague and an NDA put an end to that part of her life for good.
If you’ve never read Semple before, you’ll likely read this book, and wonder what’s going on here, and I certainly did the same sometimes—Semple throws her reader into the deep end, no hand-holding, it’s up to us to find our bearings, and there were moments when I was lost and confused. There is such a breeziness to her narrative voice that I’m compelled to fly through it, but there is some method to the madness and details that need to be attended to. (Up until the novel’s last page, I’d missed the cameo from the protagonist of Semple’s breakout hit, Where’d You Go, Bernadette?)
I’m the last person to read Maria Semple critically—Bernadette was a game changer for me as both a reader and a writer, and I’d follow her sentences anywhere. I loved this book, because I love everything she does—and I’ve also found her weird twisty books give bang for their buck, just as revelatory and fun to read a second time.
April 21, 2026
Adulting for Amateurs, by Jess H. Gutierrez
I made a new friend last week, and her latest book is out today, and if you think it’s all been a bit fast, you would be correct. I watched Jess H. Gutierrez being interviewed at the live taping of the Totally Booked Podcast on Thursday, and fell in love with her sparkling personality, as you will too when the episode airs, and then afterwards we got to talking, and couldn’t seem to stop, having the very best time walking down Sixth Avenue and being endlessly impressed by the big city whirling (and honking) around us. And then we bid our farewells, and I made my way to the train to the airport, sorry to be leaving her company.
But then once I was on the plane, I opened her book, Adulting for Amateurs: Misadventures of a Geriatric Millennial, and there she was again, Jess, just as as vivacious on the page as IRL. The first essay is titled “Same, Girl. Same,” and omg, same, girl. Same. Have you been reading toxic shock syndrome warnings on boxes of tampons while pooping since you turned twelve? Does Kermit strumming a banjo while singing “Rainbow Connection” break your heart? Were your at-home-from-school sick days “resplendent with waiting for paternity tests and familial ass-beatings on Jerry Springer?” Or selling random shit on the roadside (“It’s your damned day, because my dad stupidly left a partial roll of Rolaids hanging out in his van.”). Flight of the Navigator trauma, not to mention the hazmat suit people from ET, and unlikely diversions (involving mullets) on our sexual discovery journeys.
The next essay is “Garage Sale Gold Mine,” about Gutierrez’s childhood adventures mining suburban yard sales with her Auntie Jill, and the incident that led to her mother’s most emphatic teaching: “Listen to me, Jessie… Never ever EVER do we wear other people’s panties. Never.”
Adulting for Amateurs is a collection of essays about the weirdness and wonderment of coming of age at the turn of the century, and about that feeling of arrival that never arrives. Whether Gutierrez is donating plasma for cash (!!), discovering her boyfriend giving a blowjob to a lad in a skirt, trying and failing to be convincing as a death metal chick (“If Christina Aguilera’s “Dirrty” was the wrong kind of music, I didn’t want to be right”), being the world’s worst dog-sitter, and booking mopeds for a joyride in Hawaii that turned out to be …not quite the thing, this reader was cringing, LOLing, same-ing, and gasping in horror and hilarity.
Gutierrez hardscrabbles her way into her 30s and 40s, into a steady job and good health insurance, into marriage, and motherhood, but the humour and incidents of calamity never stops, life being life. Maybe it’s the magic of Jess and her writing, or just the era we grew up in, that the life and times of a lesbian from Arkansas as just so doggone relatable (same, girl. Same). Anyway, I’m just excited that I made a new friend last week, and now her wonderful book is in the world, and you can meet her too!
April 20, 2026
Cool New Reviews!
“Definitely Thriving looks at what can happen if we step outside our comfort zone — whether purposefully or not — and begin anew. It’s a funny, lighthearted read that isn’t trying too hard to be anything else. Clare’s characters are ridiculous but endearing for all their quirks, and Clemence herself, a lovable hot mess, still manages to inspire.” —Lindsay McKnight, Winnipeg Free Press
“Clemence’s story is utterly charming, funny, and surprising at every turn. Definitely Thriving is a great read that I won’t call women’s fiction (IYKYK). I highly recommend it.” —Pamela Sinclair, The Seaboard Review of Books
“There were mishaps, kooky characters and crazy situations that were not expected but relatable and they all made this story a delightful and addictive read. With love affairs, raunchy moments and memorable closet moments, Clemence teaches us all that starting again can be all that is needed.” —Sarah Butland, The Miramichi Reader
April 17, 2026
Cherry Baby, by Rainbow Rowell
I’m a little bit obsessed with the way that every Rainbow Rowell novel is about time travel, not just the one that literally is. With the way she can play with chronology, weaving different eras together, as though our history is ongoing simultaneously with the contemporary moment. And how in the novels where she doesn’t do this, her characters’ emotional baggage stands in for the same, the past ever present, no matter how badly we’d like to put our burdens down. There are so many feelings, so much yearning, and desire, and all of this is at the heart of her latest novel, Cherry Baby.
Cherry Baby is about the particular moment at which Cherry is beginning to realize she’s going to have to disentangle her life from that of her husband Tom, who is also her ex-husband-to-be. But this is complicated by the fact that Tom’s ultra successful biographical web-comic has just been turned into a film, and the caricature he’d created of Cherry—all boobs, curves, and double chins—is going to be rendered even larger than larger than life, for everyone to see. And then Cherry runs into Russ, an old friend, and something is kindled between them, raising the possibility that Cherry might have a future beyond simply being left behind by Tom, but that future is troubled by Cherry’s notion of Russ’s shame about her fatness and his reaction to her depiction in Tom’s film. This same trouble is compounded by Cherry’s one sister’s weight-loss, an anomaly in their family of fat girls and their fat mom, and everyone’s suspicion that she’s been using weight-loss drugs, but the sister won’t admit it.
Fatness is complicated, and I don’t know a single woman—fat or otherwise—who doesn’t have a relationship to it. And what makes it extra complicated is that whether we’re looking at ourselves or somebody else, what we see is a kind of funhouse mirror, a warped version of our own fucked up perceptions. And fatness is complicated too, because it’s complicated, and Cherry feels a sense of betrayal at her sister’s weight-loss, because her sister’s example had always been a sign to her that she could be fat and loved and happy, but her sister has her own reasons for doing what she’s doing, and the novel holds that complexity, the ambivalence, the uncertainty. (I love the destabilization in Rowell’s prose as sentences in brackets undermine what’s just preceded it.) (And then the contents of a second set of brackets serves to further wobble all that. Life, love, relationships, bodies—it’s all so awful and gorgeous and wonderful and messy.)
Cherry Baby is about family, marriage, home, and wanting, and also choosing. And what Cherry chooses in the end isn’t what I’d expected at the start, and (except for the book’s very last scene, which is PERFECTION) perhaps not entirely satisfying, but I find that interesting, actually, that Rowell is not set on giving readers what they want, that she resists those tidy endings. Her books are tough to classify, insist on being true to themselves, but no matter which way it all shakes out, I always find them absolutely delicious.
