May 17, 2024

First Bloom

Every year, the peony show down the street from my house never disappoints, and I was excited—on Wednesday—to see that it had begun.

May 15, 2024

Death By a Thousand Cuts, by Shashi Bhat

The first time I read Shashi Bhat was her Journey Prize-winning story “Mute” in 2018, and I remember just feeling captivated by the narrative voice, being struck by the singularity of her character’s experience, and yet noting how much I could identify due to the specificity of her perspective and the choice of such essential details. A scenario that really gets under the skin, that’s really “cringe,” as the kids say. A little “Cat Person,” a little Sally Rooney, altogether timely in the age of #MeToo, but also I just read it and wanted more of literature that can affect me like that, and thankfully Bhat delivered with The Most Precious Substance on Earth, her excellent 2021 novel-in-stories, and now with her latest, Death By a Thousand Cuts, which is just devastatingly devourable and I read in a single day.

Naturally, every time I think of this book, the Taylor Swift song of the same name starts playing in my head, which I’m not sorry about. And I don’t know if Shashi Bhat is a Swiftie, but her literary preoccupations are not different from those in Taylor’s tortured poetry—her stories are about seeking and not finding, about the tedium of dating, about longing and wanting and disappointment, but there’s also a brutality to them too, a sting. (Let the wasp on the cover of the book be a warning.) As I was reading this book upstairs, I kept having visceral reactions to the stories, gasping in dread and horror, and members of my household were concerned for my well being, which says a lot for a book, that they can affect one in this way.

These are stories that will be appreciated by readers who aren’t even sure that they like reading short stories. And while I know short story lovers bemoan the form’s lack of wider and/or commercial acceptance, I get it too—as a reader I want something immersive, something deep and lush to sink into and get lost inside, the way I can inside a novel, but in these stories, I really can, so much richness, so much texture. As satisfying as the dripping fruit of the cover, but even better, because I can read them over and over again.

May 14, 2024

Monsters, Martyrs, and Marionettes, by Adrienne Gruber

As I noted in the introduction to my Bookspo conversation with Adrienne Gruber, I’m not as preoccupied with notions of motherhood these days, or with essays about of motherhood, certainly not as much as I was back in the day when I was publishing my own anthology of essays about motherhood, when I was positively obsessed, and felt like I was working out pressing and essential existential questions with this obsession. The most surprising and disappointing revelation of that experience (along with many others that weren’t disappointing at all) being that motherhood is niche, never mind that everybody everywhere was born to a mother once upon time. But considerations about motherhood themselves are not as fascinated and universal as I’d supposed they’d be back when I was young, starry-eyed, naive and about to publish my first book. (Goodreads reviews for my most recent novel include comments from readers who were disappointed that motherhood factored so strongly into my book, and therefore they found themselves unable to relate to the story.) I think too about what older writers must have thought when I was in the heart of “discovering motherhood” era. And I’m not helping the cause by having now considered motherhood discovered and conquered, because soon it will be a decade since I last changed a diaper. But now Gruber’s essay collection Monsters, Martyrs & Marionettes has gone and got me right back into the thick of it. It’s tapped a nerve. “Pouring off of every page like it was written in my soul.”

There is an essay in this book, “A Route That Does Not Include Your Child,” that is the nonfiction version of the “Hot Cars” chapter of my novel, ASKING FOR A FRIEND. Gruber and I both, I suppose, too attuned to tension, to risk, to possibility (though it’s our job as writers), reading Gene Weingarten’s 2009 article “Fatal Distraction” in the Washington Post with meticulous attention. From the first page of my novel, “Parenthood, Jess observed from her perspective smack dab in the eye of the hurricane, was—if you were lucky— like friendship, a story without end. The alternative too awful to contemplate. But what this also meant, of course, was that it never stopped, there were no breaks from the possibility of something new and worse to worry about around every single corner.”

And this is the neighbourhood that Gruber is exploring in her essays, writing about the various ways that bringing life into the world is tangled with death, dead pigeons on the sidewalk. She writes about her pandemic pregnancy, about the challenges of unruly toddlers and being able to hold a child’s gigantic and ferocious feelings, about being stuck in a two bedroom apartment with small kids due to wildfires that have made the air outside unhealthy to breathe. She’s writing about legacy, about her own struggles with mental illness, and those of her scientist mother, and her grandmother’s cognitive decline. About how essays of motherhood turn out the essays about everything, about the most elemental parts of life itself, milk and sweat, and then a reviewer will turn around and write something like, “This dark comedy is not for the squeamish,” and question who would want to read a book like this.

Anne Enright has called motherhood “the place before stories start”, describing her surprise at finding it was not the sort of journey that one could send dispatches home from. I read Enright’s memoir MAKING BABIES when I was pregnant with my first child, and a decade and a half later I understand what she means. I’d never envisioned how those early days would come to seem like a journey I now cannot imagine having ever taken. “Did we really go through that?” Otherworldly. But this only makes writing down how it was all the more important, because otherwise it would be impossible to remember any of it in that unbroken sleepless blur.

May 14, 2024

Bookspo Eleven

On the tail of the news of Alice Munro’s death at age 92, I’m even more pleased and glad to be able to share the latest Bookspo. Deepa Rajagopalan is the author of the short story collection PEACOCKS OF INSTAGRAM, a book that’s so great it’s got me accosting strangers in the street, and she came to our conversation with a very cool twist on the Bookspo format. Her Bookspo pick is Munro’s short story “Corrie” (which was included in her 2012 DEAR LIFE), which she used as inspiration for her own same-but-different story “Rahel,” published in her collection. Listen at Substack or at Apple Podcasts.

May 10, 2024

Peacocks in Public

Raise your hand if you too are unable to resist the compulsion to stop any stranger in public you see reading or even just carrying a book you love in order to let them know—in case they didn’t already—JUST how good that book actually is.

But never before has the experience been quite as rich and rewarding as when I accosted @livingbyn_designs on Saturday night as she walked down Queen West bearing her newly purchased copy of PEACOCKS OF INSTAGRAM, a book that is not only THE best titled title of 2024, but also everything you’d hope a book with such a great title would be, as I found out in February when I read it for a podcast interview with its author, the talented @deerajagopalan (whose BOOKSPO episode goes up next week!).

The best thing about meeting Nila with her copy of PEACOCKS OF INSTAGRAM Is that she met all of my enthusiasm for this terrific book, and then even exceeded it, positively overflowing with pride and happiness at her friend having produced a book so terrific that strangers will stop you in the street to exalt its praises. I mean, JUST LOOK AT THE EXPRESSION ON HER FACE? Have you ever seen anything as awesome and real?

Our encounter was such a celebration of books and friendship and gorgeous summer nights, and it made me so happy, not least at seeing this book in the world for the very first time. Congratulations on your pub date, @deerajagopalan! I can’t wait to read PEACOCKS OF INSTAGRAM (again)!

(I posted this to Instagram this week, but wanted to add it to my blog for posterity!)

May 9, 2024

The Game of Giants, by Marion Douglas

I loved Marion Douglas’s novel The Game of Giants, though I’m not sure where to start in telling you about it. The back of the book describes the story as beginning with narrator Rose and her partner Lucy in the early 1980s discovering that their son Roger has developmental delays, his abilities marked the third percentile, which sends Rose back into her own history to explore when things went awry, which was early, because Rose as a character is pretty off-beat herself, and so is the narrative. But I’m not actually sure that this is what the story is “about” at all, and instead have a sense that this is a novel intent its own unique trajectory, intent on the propulsiveness and sharpness that results from Rose’s off-beats, and the terrific momentum created by her narrative voice and the remarkable ways that (in her experience) one thing leads to another, questionable choices culminating in a rich tapestry of experience, insecurities, lessons and longings. This novel is such an achingly hilarious story of tender humanity, with Munro-country vibes and the literary influence of Alberta, and yes, unconventional motherhood is where we finally arrive long after the runaway train has left the station on the wildest of rides, Rose struggling to accept the extraordinary reality of her son because she’s never been able to accept the reality of herself. But the reader does, just as Rose’s long-suffering partner Lucy does, Rose Drury a literary creation to fall in love with, made up of foibles, heartaches and broken parts like nobody else is, just like everybody else is.

May 8, 2024

Gleanings

• I do believe in love and humility and that we all deserve a transcendent life. I believe that we are all trying our best and that we are all artichokes, with our myriad glorious fucking wings.
• Which oceans did the textiles traverse, and how did they get to me?
• It’s distance from that phase of motherhood that allows me such a full and free and visceral connection to it.
• She didn’t find a book she wanted, but typically I found four. Perhaps I will be more restrained in 20 years time, like Margaret? We said goodbye and that we hoped we’d run into each other again, at Saver’s or at Vinnies or somewhere in between.
• What might become possible if we said hello because we are surprised and delighted by one another’s precious beingness, and because by doing so we call attention, our attention, Life’s attention – to your being, to our being, to my being. We acknowledge and are present to the miracle that we get to be alive together on this mysterious planet at the same time? What might become possible if we saw each other? If we slowed down enough to see… and be seen?
• “Trillium are propagated by ANTS. Not bees, the wind, or birds. The seeds are covered by a sweet coating which entices the ants to carry seeds underground into their colonies. After eating the coating, the seed germinates in the perfect subterranean environment.”
• Bonds of colour, bonds of affection: I work towards these. Sometimes the results break my heart.
• Words become buzz words and then after a while some tire of them and begin to sneer and speak of them with ‘air-quotes’.
• I read this book at a fast clip…which more and more I think is the best way for me to read–then I live inside the book, carried along with the characters, and even if I don’t like the book that much I’m inclined to finish it because it has in some way become my life.
• I’ve always had an eye for licence plates. The series of green Fords my parents drove in the early 70s each wore FDK 999, below the Ontario slogan du jour, “keep it beautiful.” In those days, the plates stayed with the owner, not the car. While it didn’t yet apply to my life, I bet it made staying hotels easier. No yelling “hey, do you remember my plate number?” across lobbies to whomever you’re with. The letter/number combo was etched in your memory alongside your seven digit phone number and your locker combination. Sometime mid-70s, they changed the policy – plates went with cars. On the 1975 amber Ford Maverick, our plate was HUA 537. 

May 7, 2024

Stories from the Tenants Downstairs, by Sidik Fofana

“But what’s sad in this whole thing is Wild One ain’t the criminal here. No, no, no. He jus a dude who did suttin. The criminals is us people around him, the people watching someone shake someone else awake from a dream and not doin nothin to stop it.” —”The Young Entrepreneurs of Miss Bristol’s Front Porch.”

Reading Sidik Fofana’s debut Stories from the Tenants Downstairs was especially meaningful for me because my friend B. recommended it to me when I was staying at her house last week, and she reads my book recommendations all the time but it’s not so often that I get to return to the favour. And what a rewarding favour this was, 8 stories from the perspectives of residents of a Harlem apartment building whose owners are pushing tenants down and out in a project of redevelopment and gentrification, all this the quiet backdrop to the foregrounded experiences of characters ranging from Ms. Dallas, a teaching assistant (who moonlights doing security at the airport); her son Swan whose friend has just come out of prison and who imagines that everything has changed with the new Black president; Mimi, struggling to get enough money to pay her overdue rent; Kandese, who we meet first in Ms. Dallas’s class, whose father dies while they’re living in a shelter; Darius, venturing into sex work and notorious after a run-in with his favourite celebrity goes viral; Najee, another student in Ms. Dallas’s class, whose scheme to make money by dancing on the subway has tragic consequences; Quanneisha, a top gymnast turned drop out who has come to face a world she’d thought she’d left behind; and finally Mr. Murray, the old man who plays chess outside of the restaurant across the street around whom the community rallies when he’s forced from his spot, but he doesn’t respond to their good will in the way that he’s meant to.

And subverting expectations is what this book is all about, in terms of the characters, but also the stories themselves, each of which comes with the most devastating pivot, sometimes on an epic scale, sometimes unbearably subtle (the push of an elevator button at the end of one story that I will never get over). As a reader, I want things to work out for these characters, but Fofana, a public school teacher in New York City (as well as a celebrated short story writer out of the gate—not everybody gets a blurb from Lorrie Morrie), does not give us the satisfaction, the catharsis.

Instead, the reader sits with the discomfort, with the injustice, a situation as intractable as those of these characters who are part of a system that was never built to serve them. Sometimes, often, this is how it is.

May 7, 2024

Bookspo 10

This episode of BOOKSPO is guaranteed to put a song in your head, as Michelle Hébert tells me all about how revisiting Emma Donoghue’s 1997 story collection KISSING THE WITCH helped her discover solutions to problems she was facing in developing the characters in EVERYTHING LITTLE THING SHE DOES IS MAGIC, her debut novel, which is out this week and pretty magic in its own right.

I’m really excited to share it with you, and hope it makes you curious enough to pick up both books (and you definitely should!). Listen here or wherever you get your podcasts.

May 6, 2024

Light

I have a file in my head I’ve started calling the “Really Important to Understand Even if (ESPECIALLY IF?) You Don’t Agree” file, and the latest addition to it is Zadie Smith’s New Yorker essay “Shibboleth.” It joins Naomi Klein’s “We Need an Exodus from Zionism,” a speech she made in New York City last month at a Seder during Passover, and the essay “Resigned,” by Dashka Slater, which I think was the piece that started it all. Someone I admire a lot posted that essay, and the weird thing about that was the people who reacted to it with comments like, “This!” and “So good,” which didn’t seem entirely to be in keeping with the spirit of the piece, but maybe I just think that because of the parts of the piece that I didn’t agree with. And certainly I’ve posted similar responses to other things often in my time, particularly during the years when I was very on Twitter, and I have a visceral recollection of the relief of finally having someone articulate a reasonable point of view when everybody else seems to be infected with some kind of mania or fever dream, all those posts that felt like a lone thing to cling to in a chaotic world. THIS. THIS. But that kind of certainty isn’t what that I’m craving anymore.

Today, a bunch of people I really like on Facebook are sharing a piece called “50 Completely True Things,” a pretty unobjectionable piece (I might even comment, “This!”) but what bothers me about it and really makes me feel for its author, mo husseini (a Palestinian-American, who clearly is caught in a bind here and has issues that I can definitely relate to about people-pleasing and feeling like he’s required to mediate conflicts that he’s in no way I provoked [I’m not saying it’s the same, but I once published a literary anthology in an attempt to mediate The Mommy Wars]) is this requirement for unobjectionableness. (Not unrelated, but also in my file: Roxane Gay’s “The Age of the Open Letter Should End.”) The idea that such a thing is even possible.

It’s been a weird time, during which I’ve been admonished by people I don’t respect very much for both being an enemy of the Jewish people AND aiding and abetting Palestinian genocide with my silence. And funnily enough, people scolding me, yelling at me, or trying to shame me have not done a lot to enhance my point of view, and I’ve given up altogether at trying to persuade other people by doing the same, not just because the tactic is so ineffective, but also because I’ve become vehemently opposed to righteousness and self-righteousness, want nothing to do with either.

I keep thinking of that line from a book I read two weeks ago: “Wisdom is valuable. But the ability to find understanding is a gift that all creation enjoys… In some ways, you can think of wisdom of light. But it is understanding that carries the light. Understanding is what wisdom travels through.” (The author is Michael Hutchison, and it’s a line of dialogue delivered by a Cree Elder.)

Understanding carries the light. I don’t want to to change your point of view, but I seek to understand it, and I want you understand mine too, even if those points of view are different. ESPECIALLY if those points of view are different. There is room enough for complexity, and nuance, and I hope that with the light that comes with understanding, we can all feel braver and more secure, less defensive and afraid, that light not a beacon in the distance, but instead a shine that lights up everyone, everywhere. A kind of common ground.