January 16, 2023

Modern Fables, by Mikka Jacobsen

Modern Fables started out strong and never quit, a collection of personal essays that begin with a wake (with whisky, which leads to a brawl) and concludes with a wedding (with watermelon vodka-cocktails, which leads to Jacobsen fucking the best man, and the dissolution of her friendship with the bride). And in between, a wide of stories that take no sides, but instead examine every side—on sports and mascots (you can read an excerpt at 49thShelf); about a white Albertan’s relationship to the Indigenous peoples upon whose land she lives (complicated by her psychologist mother’s shamanism); such an artful revenge essay on a shitty ex-lover who turns out to be a plagiarist but which is also a treatise on women’s work and textile arts, and Mrs. Ramsay’s brown stocking.

In “Kurt Vonnegut Lives on Tinder,” Jacobsen notes how an affinity for the Slaughterhouse Five author is shorthand for something on the popular hook-up app, and resolves to figure out just what that means. “Modern Fables” tells the story of a relationship with a seeming pathological liar, and also catfishing, and cats, and rabbits, and other dead household pets. “Me vs. Brene Brown” is another story of a love story gone sour, in this case between Jacobsen and Brown’s ideas about been empathy and shame, which seem revolutionary at first, but Jacobsen soon realizes she’s read something like them else before (oh, yeah, right, in almost every work of literature ever, not least of all The Scarlet Letter), not to mention how Brown’s work seems to preclude the possibility of a fulfilling life outside of a nuclear family, and what Brown’s folksiness might suggest about what she thinks of the intelligence of her readership. And finally, “David Silver,” taking on the 90210 actor and other notable Davids (including he who battled Goliath) in a rich and provocative piece on mental illness, convening with the spirit world, and the possibility of cosmic order.

I loved this book, a collection that relit my flame of passion for the personal essay, a collection up there with Susan Olding’s two, which are some of the finest in CanLit—in Freehand Books, Jacobsen and Olding share a publisher. These essays are gorgeous, brutal, stunningly crafted, and pack a punch, like a one-two, WHAM, and then another, and then another, you’re sad when it’s all done.