November 10, 2025
A Stack of Pym
Did you know my forthcoming novel, DEFINITELY THRIVING, began with my intention to write a Barbara Pym story, but in a contemporary setting? Which means that my book indeed features a tea brewed with water boiled on a hot plate, church committees, considerations about what it means to be an unmarried woman without children, unsuitable attachments, some questions of indexing, a jumble sale, and many more wondrous things, including a protagonist with a name like Clemence Lathbury.
Rereading all of Barbara Pym has been one of my many 2025 reading projects, one I’m not going to complete before the year is out, but luckily most reading projects don’t have a deadline, and I’d actually be disappointed if I were finished. I’ve finally read up to Quartet in Autumn, her first novel published after 16 years in the literary wilderness and her discovery via recommendations of her by Phillip Larkin and David Cecil as one of the most underrated authors of the 20th century. I’ve never read her in sequence before and it’s interesting to consider what a different book this is than those that came before it—but the continuities as well, the things that make a novel a Barbara Pym novel (nosy people looking up clergymen in Crockford Clerical Directory for certain, a forerunner of Google!) and all the complexity that lies beneath these books’ deceptively simple surfaces.
November 6, 2025
Cover Story, by Mhairi McFarlane
I don’t consider myself a romance reader per se, not because I don’t read romance (I do!), but because there is a culture to romance fandom that I just don’t understand, catalogues of tropes and subgenres, and a fervour along the lines of “Name five songs” demands, and I probably can’t. I don’t know. My most shameful secret is that I used to read romance novels and think that these books would be really great if they weren’t so formulaic, not understanding that for so many readers the formula is most of the draw. I get it now, even if I still don’t get it entirely, but still. And of all the romance writers in the land, Mhairi McFarlane is my favourite.
Her latest is Cover Story, about Bel, an investigative journalist in Manchester, UK, whose new intern turns out to be surprisingly handsome…and her age? But he’s snooty and arrogant, and she’s too busy following up on a lead that may out the city’s mayor as a predatory creep. Which Bel knows something about, having just fled a bad situation with a former colleague who refuses to leave her alone. She’s got things on her mind, but then so does the intern, Connor, who is not remotely as put together as he seems at first. But when he stumbles upon Bel in a bar on an undercover mission, the two are forced to pretend to overcome their mutual dislike and pretend to a couple (this is a trope! I know that much. Take THAT, romance aficionados!) and you’re not going to BELIEVE what happens next. Okay, just kidding, but you will be so thrilled when it does.
An ode to feisty fearless journalists and the taking down predatory powerful men? What is not to love? All this AND happily ever after.
November 4, 2025
Wanting It All
It feels good to be part of a beautiful story, which was a chief appeal of jumping on the Blue Jays post-season bandwagon this year. The bandwagon has been an experience that echoed last year’s of Tay-ronto, when the Taylor Swift Eras tour arrived in our city and the vibes were so electric that one was even able to be a functional human being in spite of an American election outcome concurrently that was just devastating. Both of these collective experiences were so restorative for me, and when I’m called on to articulate why, the image comes to mind of boarded up windows across downtown Toronto in June of 2020 in the wake of the George Floyd protests after we’d just lived through a season of lockdown, the insult and injury of all that ugly plywood, and then eventual weekly “convoy” protests just blocks from my house that were loud, mean, and as antisocial as they were stupid. It’s been a hard five years, a hard ten years, and things are still hard, and scary, so much of what we feared at those election results last year having come to pass, and then some. And along the way I’d lost my faith and trust in community, and in any certainty I’d had about what our story was and just where we were going.
It’s been a long time since I’d dared to #WantitAll. Or even dared “to live for the hope of it all.” To provide some context, when I had a mental breakdown nearly four years ago, we’d known something was up when I was expressing secret desire “to just be put into a coma for a few months,” which I thought sounded perfectly reasonable at the time. As recently as last April, I was having conversations with my therapist about how I might manage to avoid the gutting disappointment of yet another electoral result that felt like somebody was stomping on my face, wondering if there was any way I could just cease feeling altogether—until I realized how ridiculous that sounded, and remembered the central tenet of therapy, which is that feeling things is unavoidable (I KNOW, SO UNFAIR).
And so spending the last month cheering for the Blue Jays has been kind of a wild experience, daring to hope, daring to want. Taking part in the collective joy in loving the team as well, as the wonderful example these players have set for what healthy masculinity is all about, including teamwork, and friendship. Sitting with the uncertainty of what baseball offers us—oh, those last few innings Saturday night were just agonizing, the worst. But also the best. So exciting.
As Gillian Deacon writes: I’m going to go so far as to call this wild ride of the Blue Jays’ post-season a love affair with the unknown. The stakes are a lot lower for the viewer in a ball game than in much of the rest of life, but it bears pointing out that the very thing that draws us to watch the World Series—or any other sporting match—is uncertainty. It’s the not-knowing that draws us in; it’s the possibility of what may or may not come that makes our hearts soar (and makes sports betting scandals so offensive). This exciting few weeks in Major League Baseball has been a great reminder that we have not just the skills for handling uncertainty, but an appetite for it.
And I’ve needed that reminder. I’ve spent the days since listening to “Didn’t We Almost Have It All,” by Whitney Houston (along with “Centre Field,” by John Fogerty), and relishing the line, “The ride we took was worth the fall, my friend.” Yes, I’m being dramatic, but it really was. And I’d forgotten that was even possible.
It feels really good (and hopeful) to remember.
November 4, 2025
John Candy: A Life in Comedy, by Paul Myers
I read John Candy: A Life in Comedy, by Paul Myers, during my TPC readathon last Sunday (thanks to everyone who helped me reach my goal!) and it was just a pleasure to learn more about this actor whose work—from SCTV to The Great Outdoors to the Camp Candy Saturday morning cartoon, and more—was such a big part of my childhood, and whose generous heart seems to have been as important to his legacy as film and TV roles. Myers’ biography is a big picture view of a remarkable life that ended too soon, and its focus is primarily his creative projects and the partnerships that served as these projects’ foundations. Candy was a complicated man who faced his own demons, but Myers keeps such analysis at a distance and minds his own business about the details of Candy’s personal life—though most of these details are that Candy was a faithful husband and a loving father anyway, so it’s not like we’re missing a lot of dirt. I learned about aspects of Candy’s personality I’d not been aware of before—his strong sense of justice, how he’d stick up for others, that everyone who talks about him speaks to his excellent character, that beneath his cuddly comedian persona were some serious acting chops. His acting career from the ’70s to his death in 1993 was a whirlwind, full of highs and lows, an unstoppable machine that might have been part of Candy’s downfall—he suffered stress and anxiety, he worried about providing for his family, every crowning glory would deliver the challenge of surpassing or even just sustaining it. There was a never enoughness to Candy’s creative pursuits, a sense that he too was never enough, much of this coming from the trauma he carried from his own father’s early death and the pain of that experience that he never really was able to process. Time was something else that Candy felt he didn’t have enough of as well, and it would turn out he was right. Myers’ compelling biography, however, shows that he filled up every moment he had and then some, and gave this world his all. We’re lucky for it!
November 3, 2025
First Time, Long Time, by Amy Silverberg
I picked up Amy Silverberg’s debut novel after Maris Kreizman called it “this year’s Margot’s Got Money Troubles, a book that poses big questions with both confidence and a breeziness and that will keep you wanting to turn the pages.” And First Time, Long Time, did not let down, though I wasn’t entire sure about it as I was reading, sure of what all the pieces would add up to. Because indeed this a novel comprised of fragments, just as protagonist Allison’s entire life is. She works various jobs—hosting book clubs for rich ladies, and teaching junior college among them—while living in a studio apartment in Los Angeles where she’s trying to launch her writing career and make a fresh start after the death of brother, which looms large in her mind, all the while her divorced parents continue to torment her in their own ways. And one night when she’s out at a bar, she meets a man she at first pretends not to know, but knows him, she does. He’s Reid Steinman, a famous radio DJ whose voice haunted her childhood from when her father was a fan. Inspired by Howard Stern, Steinman is a similarly complicated character who contains multitudes, as Allison learns for herself once they get together and begin a relationship, the daddy issues only multiplying once Allison also gets somewhat involved with Steinman’s 20-something daughter.
“Wait, did you just give away the whole plot?” asked a friend in my group chat where I’d been recommending this book, and I replied that I sure hadn’t. Silverberg, who is also a comedian, turns out to the a master of the set-up, one I’d spent the novel wondering about even as I was breezily turning the pages as Kreizman predicted. Where could this novel of twisted, broken and mirrored family ties, and unsatiated appetites possibly be leading, I’d wondered, but oh, just you wait. The climax is unforgettable, impeccable, perfect, and it leads to the most wonderful final paragraph I’ve encountered in any novel ever.
