April 14, 2025
Back for More!
The hardest working shirt in my drawer is the House of Anansi 45th anniversary tee that I’ve been wearing since 2012, including through an entire pregnancy, which means it’s stretched and misshapen and these days mainly gets worn to bed, but it’s a great shirt, and now that I’m a House of Anansi author (hooray!), I’m awfully glad that I held onto it. I’ve always been partial to House of Anansi, especially since they moved their office into a former pickle factory, which absolutely on par with my sensibilities.
Definitely Thriving, my fourth novel (!), will arrive in the North America in March 17. It’s a novel I started writing in 2021 when the world was bleak and scary and I was desperate for a diversion. It’s an ode to friendship, community, and unsuitable attachments, in addition to being a tribute to Barbara Pym, with my protagonist, Clemence Lathbury, imagined as a modern day Pym heroine. The story begins when Clemence blows up her marriage and returns to her hometown determined to redeem herself by building a sensible life from scratch. Not for her will be the scrapes and schemes of a Bridget Jones-era heroine, instead she resolves to be a stalwart, one of the excellent women of Pym’s mid-century novels. But no woman is an island, and soon Clemence is tied up in all kinds of neighbourhood shenanigans, and drama ensues. There’s a book shop, a church jumble sale, and a one-eyed cat named Bailey who is actually a real cat belonging to my friend Erin. I’m so excited for readers to meet Clemence and her people (and the cat).
If you’ve been paying attention, you will know I struggled a lot after the publication of my previous novel, and that this whole newsletter/podcast project was born out of my desire to climb out of the creative low in which I’d found myself at that point. I’m interested in what it will be like now to head into publication with the new awareness I’ve acquired since working through some of these issues (who knew that my literary success does not actually hedge on making everybody love me, or that loving me is actually an unreasonable thing to ask of everybody) and avoiding the trap of imagining that now that I’ve got no expectations, this is the moment where all the success I’ve been hoping for will finally unfold.
All along I’ve been looking for redemption. It took me ten years after completing my Creative Writing Masters Degree to finally publish my first novel—and here, I imagined, was the moment where the magic would begin. But that novel was not a success. And then I got a second chance—aha, my heroic sophomore book! But that book didn’t do well either, and neither did my next book, and I started to understand that maybe the story wasn’t going to go like that. That in publishing there’s never a happy-ever-after (alas, the one good thing about never having achieved great success is that at least no one expects the impossible task of replicating it! Phew!). I even started to wonder what the point was in publishing books after all, because it certainly wasn’t doing anything like making me happy or feel good about myself. When I wasn’t sure I’d be able to publish another novel, I started to consider a possible upside to not having my self-esteem decimated every couple of years.
But oooh boy, I’m back for more. And I’m even grateful and lucky to be able to say that, I know, and I’m looking forward to sharing this novel with you, and I’m also anticipating an interesting experiment in releasing a book and not losing my mind.
Is it possible? I will keep you posted!
This post was first published in my Enthusiasms Newsletter. If you’re not signed up yet, please subscribe!
