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About

About Kerry Clare:

Novelist. Blogger. Reader. Etc. 

Looking for a short bio? KERRY CLARE is the author of three novels, Asking for a Friend, Waiting for a Star to Fall and Mitzi Bytes, and editor of The M Word: Conversations About Motherhood. A National Magazine Award-nominated essayist, and editor of Canadian books website 49thShelf.com, she is host of the BOOKSPO podcast and writes about books and reading at her longtime blog, Pickle Me This. She lives in Toronto with her family.

Photo Credit: Stuart Lawler

Through my work, I inspire readers and writers to grow, learn and explore through engagement with books and storytelling.

Preorder my new novel, Asking For a Friend, coming September 25 from Doubleday Canada.

I’m also a blogger since the turn of the millennium; a National Magazine Award-nominated essayist; a book reviewer; freelance writer; a CBC radio columnist; host/moderator for literary events; writer-for-hire; blogging teacher at Blog School: Pickle Me This; editor at 49th Shelf; and a world-famous would-be pickler. Most fundamentally, however, I am a reader, and I like books even more than I like tea, which is really saying something.

Want to work together? Get in touch at klclare AT gmail DOT com in you’d like to hire me as a writer, to moderate or host your literary event, to learn more about my blogging courses and workshops, or whatever you have in mind. 

I’m editor of the essay anthology, The M Word: Conversations About Motherhood, which was published to rave reviews in 2014 by Goose Lane Editions. You can read those reviews and learn more about the book here. Scroll down for a list of my essay, reviews and short fiction publications. My essay “Love is a Let-Down” was awarded an honourable mention in the Personal Journalism category at the 2011 National Magazine Awards, and appears in the anthology Best Canadian Essays 2011. I graduated from the University of Toronto’s Creative Writing MA Program in 2007.

I read and write in downtown Toronto, where I live in a drafty attic with my husband, Stuart, and our daughters, Harriet and Iris.

Literary Representation: Samantha Haywood, Transatlantic Literary Agency Inc.

Contact klclare AT gmail DOT com

My Work in the World Lately: 

My Books:

Asking for a Friend

Coming September 5 2023 from Doubleday Canada

For readers of J. Courtney Sullivan and Emma Straub, and for fans of Firefly Lane, comes a poignant and astutenovel about life, love, and the ever-evolving nature of female friendship by the author of Waiting for a Star to Fall.

The bottom of Jess’s world is falling out. Cocooned in her dorm in the winter of 1998, she’s reeling, looking to be left alone. But a chance encounter with the older, other-worldly, elusive Clara has Jess yearning for her comforting company. Clara, newly returned from a two-year trek drifting around the world is taking a stab at normalcy for once, and the place she starts is university, where she struggles to fit in. Upon meeting Jess, though, an instant connection is forged between them, and everything seems brighter. Soon, the two are inseparable, undeniable necessities in each other’s lives. But when tragedy strikes, they are unceremoniously torn apart, sent tumbling down different paths. And with each passing day, their unbreakable bond is tested more and more.

As they endure love and heartbreak, loss, marriage, anxiety, isolation, and the complicated existence of motherhood, Jess and Clara must learn how to love one another through it all–and whether growing up inevitably means growing apart.

Spanning across two decades, Asking for a Friend explores the tempestuous journey of female friendship, asking whether its fundamentals–history, familiarity, loyalty–are enough to make the relationship everlasting.

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Waiting for a Star to Fall 

Published by Doubleday Canada in 2020.

“A love story at its core, though one without an ending written in the stars. . . . Timely and insightful.” –Karma Brown, #1 bestselling author of Recipe for a Perfect Wife

For fans of Joanne Ramos, Josie Silver, and Emily Giffin, a gripping and powerful story that asks: Just how much are you willing to forgive in the name of love?

Brooke has long been caught in the orbit of Derek, a rising political superstar. First he was her boss, then they were friends and she became his confidant, the one person he shared everything with. And even though she had feelings for him–it was hard to resist; he’s charming and handsome, respected and beloved–she never dreamed he’d feel the same way. Derek is so much older and could have anyone he wanted.

But it turns out that who Derek wants is Brooke, and suddenly none of the reasons they shouldn’t be together matter. They fall in love. And even though Brooke has to keep the relationship a secret–stealing weekends away with him, late nights with takeout after long days at work, and business trips that are always a romantic whirlwind–being close to him and her dreams of their future make everything worth it.

Then it all falls apart, and Brooke is left holding the pieces of the life they’d shared. Derek becomes embroiled in a scandal–the kind Brooke never could have imagined he’d be involved in–and she is forced to re-examine their relationship and make sense of the man she loves.

Poignant, heart-stopping, and resonant, Waiting for a Star to Fall is a story about love, the things we choose to believe, and how sometimes the path to happily ever after has to start with ourselves.

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Mitzi Bytes: A Novel

*A Toronto Star Most Anticipated Book of the Year

*“Entertaining, engaging and timely, Mitzi Bytes is a pleasure to read from start to finish.” —Toronto Star

Sarah Lundy has a secret online life, and it might all come crashing down.

Back at the beginning of the new millennium, when the internet was still unknown territory, Sarah Lundy started an anonymous blog documenting her return to the dating scene after a devastating divorce. The blog was funny, brutally honest and sometimes outrageous. Readers loved it. Through her blog persona, “Mitzi Bytes,” Sarah not only found her feet again, but she found her voice.

Fifteen years later, Sarah is happily remarried with children and she’s still blogging, but nobody IRL—not even her husband or best friends—knows about Mitzi. They don’t know that Sarah’s been documenting all her own exploits, as well as mining the experiences of those around her and sharing these stories with the world. Which means that Sarah is in serious trouble when threatening emails arrive from the mysterious Jane Q: Time’s up, the first one says. You’re officially found out.

As she tries to find out Jane Q’s identity before her secret online self is revealed to everyone, Sarah starts to discover that her loved ones have secrets of their own, and that stronger forces than she imagined are conspiring to turn her world upside down.

A grown-up Harriet the Spy for the digital age, Mitzi Bytes examines the bonds of family and friendship, and the truths we dare tell about ourselves—and others.

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m-word-cover

Editor and contributor, The M Word: Conversations About Motherhood. Goose Lane Editions, April 2014.  In this original and sometimes provocative collection of essays, Saleema Nawaz, Alison Pick, Nancy Jo Cullen, Carrie Snyder, and others explore the boundaries of contemporary motherhood. There are the women who have had too many children or not enough. There are women for whom motherhood is a fork in the road, encountered with contradictory emotions. And there are those who have made the conscious choice not to have children and then find themselves defined by that decision. Here some of Canada’s best writers face down motherhood from the other side of the picket fence. Find out more about The M Word.

Anthologies:

The Journey Prize Stories 30, selected by Sharon Bala, Kerry Clare, and Zoey Leigh Peterson

A friendship between two older women frays at the seams during a trip to Barcelona. After the sudden death of her grandmother, a student from Uganda finds solace in a chance encounter. Confused parents can only watch as their son’s precocious understanding of the path to enlightenment leads him further into the unknown. The complexities of love reveal themselves as a family gathers by their mother’s deathbed to say goodbye. As she waits to confront a student who has cheated on an assignment, a philosophy professor must contend with surprising photos posted on Facebook. A man begins a relationship with a scientist who wears a mechanical bear suit. While her community mourns in the aftermath of a tragedy, a woman must face her own complicity in what happened to her best friend. After she makes an instant connection with a man during a day trip to the Smithsonian, a writing student’s struggle to find her own voice takes on greater urgency when he visits her at home. When a family reunion at a lakeside cottage is interrupted by the search for a drowned man’s body, long-submerged desires and resentments gradually surface. Two sex addicts fall into a complicated sort of love.

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“Training” in Gush: Menstrual Manifestos For Our Times, edited by Tanis MacDonald, Rosanna Deerchild, and Ariel Gordon (Frontenac House). June 2018.

In GUSH, more than 100 women and nonbinary writers from Canada and around the world take apart the bloody instruction of menstruation: its cultures, its lessons, its equipment, and its lexicon. Co-edited by Ariel Gordon, Tanis MacDonald, and Rosanna Deerchild, GUSH offers menstrual manifestos for our time that question the cultural value and social language of monthly blood loss, with rage, humour, ferocity, and grief, and propose that the ‘menstrual moment’ is as individualized, subjective, personal, political, and vital as the ‘feminist click’. With work from emerging and established writers in poetry, cartoons, flash fiction, personal essays, lyric confessions, and experimental forms, this anthology features the voices of Indigenous writers, writers of colour, writers with disabilities, rural writers and urban writers, representing four generations of menstruators: writers who call down their bloodiest muses. Including work by Yvette Nolan, Mini Aodla Freeman, Sheri-D Wilson, Sonnet L’Abbe, Pamela Mordecai, Susan Holbrook, and many more.

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the-bookshop-book

I have a small contribution in The Bookshop Book by Jen Campbell, published by Constable and Robinson (Little Brown in Canada) in October 2014. “Every bookshop has a story… The Bookshop Book is a love letter to bookshops all around the world.”

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BCE_2011_cover-192x300

“Love is a Let-Down” in Best Canadian Essays 2011. The third in a series that launched to excitement and acclaim in 2009, The Best Canadian Essays 2011 covers an impressive variety of topics. Edited by Christopher Doda and Ibi Kaslik.

Print and Web:

Essays

Short Fiction

Book Reviews

quill-feature

Other Journalism

Interviews and Profiles

Notable Experiences

Boots

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