June 15, 2014
Bookish Sunday in the Sun
For Father’s Day, we gave Stuart posh coffee, Jo Walton’s Small Change series (which is probably a gift for both of us), and Tigana by Guy Gavriel Kay (because of this recommendation in 49th Shelf’s Shelf Talkers series). Iris has become a full-fledged biped, and it’s no coincidence that her sleep habits have also become transformed in the past week. She has finally started napping in her crib, taking her naps later, and staying asleep for a couple of hours. Her nighttime sleep has also improved, which meant that we’re feeling a little less tired than usual this weekend. It also means that Iris has become a lot less portable, and we’re not going to sacrifice her proper nap for anything. So we went out for a Father’s Day brunch this morning, and then came home so Iris could sleep while Harriet watched innumerable episodes of The Riders of Berk. I drank tea and read my book, and it was bliss.
It meant, however, that it was nearly 2pm by the time we departed for Trinity Bellwoods Park and the Luminato Literary Picnic. We had a splendid walk there, Harriet scootering, walking or being piggy-backed, while Iris was chauffeured in the stroller. We ate gourmet popsicles, and then Harriet went to play in the playground, while Iris and I checked out literary fare. I heard a few writers here and there, but the only writer whose whole presentation I caught was KD Miller’s. She was fantastic, and no surprise–her book got a rave review in Macleans this week, and Vicki Ziegler had been sharing Angie Abdou’s great review in Quill & Quire.
So I was pleased to hear her read, and then to have her arrive at the sale table just as I was about to buy her book, so she could sign it for me. Reviewers have stressed that indeed, a writer can situate interesting stories within the walls of an Anglican Church (the book’s title, All Saints, refers to said church), but seeing as I am a card-carrying member of the Barbara Pym Society, they’d be preaching to the (church) choir.
After that, we hit the bookmobile, which is always an amazing adventure: a bus full of books! A library on wheels! The bookmobile will never cease to be remarkable. We got a book for Iris and Harriet each, and then Harriet wanted to get a comic too. She sorted through the stacks and selected The Wonderful World of Lisa Simpson #1. I think she picked it because Lisa is riding a pink unicorn on the cover, because Harriet has never heard of the Simpsons. But that was the point of the cover I think, and now Harriet has heard of the Simpsons and we had a good time reading the comic together. (It was strange having to introduce someone to Bart Simpson. I also like that it’s a cool comic geared to young girls, whose writers and artists are women.) The best: in the final story, Lisa opens her own Little Free Library to disastrous results. A comic about a lending library? It was dying and going to book nerd heaven.
After that, I went across the street to visit Type Books and pick up some of the books on my list. I got The Vacationers by Emma Straub, which had been included in Chatelaine’s Summer Reading Guide. And I got Based on a True Story by Elizabeth Renzetti, which had an amazing review in The Globe yesterday. And then we walked home along Queen Street and up Bathurst, stopping en-route at Yogurtys because we really hadn’t had enough dessert. Plus, they were giving away free fro-yo for dads, so that was spectacular all around.
June 15, 2014
Blanche Howard
I was sad today to hear the news of Blanche Howard’s death at the age of 90. I knew Howard best through her extraordinary collection of letters with Carol Shields, which I read for the first time in a hammock in 2007, and a second time a few years later. I’d also read her novel, Penelope’s Way, and Celibate Season, the collaborative novel she published with Shields in the 1990s. When she and Shields began corresponding in the 1970s, it was actually Howard who’d been the most experienced writer of the two, generously providing the novice Shields with advice as the latter embarked upon the publication of her first book. An extraordinary friendship would grow between the two of them, and Howard’s characteristic generosity continued as she shared their letters with readers in A Memoir of Friendship. (Generosity was a trait both friends had in common.) The letters are a remarkable documentation of the course of women’s lives–the joys and trials of motherhood, the better and worse of marriage, the pains and injustice of aging. Their discussions of feminism and politics were illuminating and important. And so too their stories of the writing life.
Shields was a very special writer, and entirely deserving of her good fortune, but she did strike literary gold with The Stone Diaries, which took the world by storm and everything she touched ever after seemed to turn to gold. This was not necessarily always going to be her destiny (though, as a reader of the letters will note, her success did not seem to change her a bit). Howard, on the other hand, had more of a struggle, starting off strong with her novels in the 1970s, then her books went out of print, and while she never stopped writing, it would be years before her next book was published (in addition to A Celibate Season). She self-published an e-book in 2010.
This is a far more typical story than Shields’, a familiar trajectory for most writers who do not go on to win the Pulitzer. Howard’s story was a lesson in endurance, persistence, and optimism. In writing for the love of it. In growing old but staying sharp, learning and growing all the while. (It’s a lesson in courage too–Howard bore loss of her husband after years of Alzheimer’s Disease and the demands of his caregiving.) In our society, we’re not always interested in hearing from women later in their lives, as Howard’s failure to secure a publishing contract would attest. It’s a difficult world out there, but it’s even harder for a woman with grey hair. Hard work is not always necessarily rewarded.
And yet, there is something in the struggle, which is what I learned from Howard. This is what life is after all. To reach but never quite make it. The striving is an achievement though, and it shapes a life, makes it rich with experience and vision. It is certainly not an ordinary life. Hers was a way of truly being in the world, and I so admire that. It’s so important for us to have these kind of examples of the kind of women we might grow to be, women with strength, and dignity. A life rich in friendship. Truly, she made a mark on the world, and her loss will be felt by her readers and the people who knew her.
(Thanks to Allyson Latta who shared the news of Howard’s death, as well as an essay she’d written called The Stories We Tell.)
June 15, 2014
The Difference a Year Makes
We have come very far since Father’s Day last year.
Which makes me think of this song, which seems fitting for Father’s Day since Mad Men, actually.
June 13, 2014
Friday the 13th
Friday the 13th is a lucky day for me, for it was a Friday exactly eleven and a half years ago that I happened upon the person who, of all the billions of humans on the earth, would become my most beloved. Truly, no one has ever been luckier than I was that day.
And since then, two has become four. We’re still a bit blown away by this. It is possible that we always will be.
June 12, 2014
Viviane by Julia Deck and Linda Coverdale, trans
Viviane by Julia Deck, translated by Linda Coverdale, is a spectacularly deceptive novel in a variety of ways. A small book, at just 149 pages, I figured it would be a quick read, but it wasn’t because I read it twice, and then skimmed it again. Deceptive too because I thought I knew what I was getting into, but I didn’t. I’d recently read The Dinner by Herman Koch, and Viviane was comparable—a narrative voice whose grasp of reality is hard to gauge, is she the problem or is it the world? But while Koch’s unhinged narrative comes at his story with a terrifyingly cold sense of control, Deck’s Viviane has lost control and scarcely even realizes.
She knows something is amiss though–“You are not entirely sure, but it seems to you that four or five hours ago, you did something that you shouldn’t have.” (The narrative moves between first, second and third person, employing also the informal second-person that would be clear in the novel’s original French, and the first person collective–this movement signifies Viviane’s tenuous hold on her own self and her story.) She seems to think that she’s just killed her therapist, cold blooded murder, but then she’s torn between hiding her crime and going back to the scene to find out exactly what had happened. Throughout all this, she’s caring for her 12 week old infant daughter on her own, having just left her husband and a disastrous marriage. She’s been on maternity leave from her job as a communications executive at a cement company, and she’s terrified that she’s being edged out of her job just as she was forced from the marriage.
It’s a disorienting novel. Viviane dashes around Paris, stashing her infant wherever she can manage. She tracks the other figures in the murdered therapist’s life, scours the papers for details, haunts her ex-husband and maintains a complicated relationship with her mother who may or may not be dead. It is never clear whether her reports are accurate–she starts one day twice, seemingly with no memory of the other. Her grasp of time and place is clinging and desperate. The baby herself is not a convincing presence, though nor is she for Viviane herself, or any mother of a newborn:
“There’s this child in our hands and we wonder how it happened. The babysitter handed her over without a fuss, pretending to believe she was our legitimate property. We sneak off with her… Once safely in the sixth-floor apartment, we settle into the rocking chair and observe the child for a very long time, waiting for a response, a revelation.”
Viviane is deceptive also because it’s rife with mysteries that are never solved. What went wrong in the marriage? Is she experiencing postpartum psychosis? Is the child in danger? How much can we believe of what she tells us, particularly since she doesn’t really believe any of it herself. And yet even without answers, Deck weaves an intriguing web of possibilities.
Viviane made a huge impact on the French literary scene when it was published in 2012, winning the French Voices Award, and Nominated for the Prix Femina, the Prix France Inter, and the Prix du Premier Roman for a first novel.
June 11, 2014
Well-known blogger is an oxymoron
“The Andrew Sullivan era of journalism is over. Blogs — defined as “an eclectic, scattered” reverse-chronological journal, “covering everything from foreign policy to TV to religion,” often in the first-person — are all but dead.” (This was actually posted on a blog. Alas).
It’s on a regular cycle that I come across articles about news outlets shutting down their blogs, this offered as proof that the blog is dead. All the while, I sit here typing at my blog, which I’ve been writing for fourteen years, with every intention to keep on writing my blog, first because I can’t stop and also because it’s done me a world of good professionally and in terms of general well-being. As I sit here typing at my blog, momentarily distracted by the blogs of others (who am I reading lately? I love how Sarah from edge of evening and I have such serendipitous reading habits; I’m a new reader of Alice Zorn’s blog; longtime fan of Matilda Magtree; I’ve been reading Making It Lovely since we both had daughters around the same time 5 years ago; I’ve been checking in with DoveGreyReader forever; I’m devoted to Girls Gone Child; I’ve learned so much from Rohan Maitzen’s Novel Readings; Shawna Lemary’s Calm Things; and I am so so overjoyed that Nathalie Foy is blogging books again. Oh, and you. I read your blog too. Likely, this is really so.)
So while the Andrew Sullivan era of journalism may be over, let this not be a statement about the state of the blog. First, because blogging is not journalism, and it was never meant to be. Blogging was always going to be on the fringes, so Sullivan’s new venture’s failure (in that only five pages on his site have received 100,000 page visits) is actually a statement that the blog is, um, bloggier than ever. Let it also not be a statement on the state of the blog because for many of us, the Andrew Sullivan era never registered. All the while that bloggers were making forays into mainstream media (and supposedly changing its face… until blogging died), most of us were sitting at home with our typepads, blogspots and wordpress sites. Content to be independent operators, doing our own thing, learning and growing, and pointing our modest traffic, our readers, in the direction of the world and saying, “Hey, look at this.”
It is amazing to me the way that women’s blogs have been ignored by those seeking to chronicle the history of the form. (I wrote about this three years ago in a post called, “The Womanly Art of Blogging”) Crucially, it is always the habits of male bloggers that are heralding blogging’s demise, and these are almost always political bloggers (as though political blogs are somehow blogs entire, as though politics were somehow the world—can you imagine?) but once it was a book blogger, and that too was ridiculous and wrong. It seems that everyone thinks that blogging is dead just around the same time he stops doing it. But.
All the while, the rest of us keep blogging, toiling away in semi-obscurity, and this is unfailingly true. Even well-known bloggers are semi-obscure–even those with enough ad revenue to pay the bills. Well-known blogger is an oxymoron. If it gets to be otherwise, well, maybe you’ve made it, but you’re also not really a blogger anymore.
June 10, 2014
In which we encounter The Book Bike
The neatest thing I’ve come across lately is the Meatlocker Editions Book Bike, which was at the Bloor Street Festival on Sunday. It’s true that if you put up a red sign that says “Books”, I will be on of the many curious people who come flocking, and my curiosity was more than satiated by what I found. The Book Bike is a community library on wheels, a very mobile way celebrate books and reading. The Book Bike turns up at community events and flocking readers are invited to take a book or leave one (and they are interested in larger book donations too–just drop them a line).
In addition to pedalling books around the city, Meatlocker Editions are also in the business of inspiring readers and writers through various projects, including workshops and publications. Their focus is supporting young women writers, a most inspiring response to the under-represenation of women’s voices in literary spheres.
There were some very cool small press gems on display on the Book Bike. I was quite thrilled to get a copy of Desert of the Heart by Jane Rule, which Karen Hofmann recently included on her “Barefoot Girls and Wild Women” list.
All in all, a most spectacular encounter. Go MLE!
June 8, 2014
They Left Us Everything by Plum Johnson
When Plum Johnson’s mother died, as eldest daughter, she was charged with the task of packing up the contents of the family home. This would be no easy task for anyone, but particularly not for Johnson whose parents’ lakefront house on Oakville Ontario was both enormous and stuffed with the materials of decades and decades of family life (including ancient receipts, her father’s impeccable financial records, antique cans of soup, books and more books, and a wasp’s nest). Johnson left her own home in Toronto and moved into her parents’ house, figuring the task before her would take six weeks or so, but she ended up staying for over a year, an experience she recounts in her memoir, They Left Us Everything.
In some ways, Johnson’s is the kind of story that many readers will relate to–a tale of years of demanding elder care, about the peculiar grief of losing one’s parents and the complicated and surprising emotions which accompany this, about coming to terms with who our parents were and the people we wished them to be. But in others, her family’s story is more, well, storied (so much so that her mother has an entire shelf in their home related to books published by or about members of their family). Her family’s interesting background remains peripheral in this memoir, but informs the fascinating lives of the characters who populate it. We learn about her mother’s privileged upbringing in the American South, her father’s war exploits, the early years of her parents’ marriage in Asia, and their eventual settlement in Canada (which was a compromise between their respective heritages). Not everyone has a huge house on the shores of Lake Ontario to come home to for years and years, and there is a hint of exotic to Johnson’s family’s everyday life that makes for a compelling read. Also compelling is the terrific bond between Johnson and her siblings.
Johnson does a specular job of weaving the personal with the universal here, of making her parents so present in a story about their loss, of untangling the difficult legacy of inheritance—all this stuff, but then it’s everything that’s left of her parents in the world. And so Johnson delves into it all and discovers that she never really knew her parents after all. Her approach is similar to two other books that I enjoyed so much—Baking as Biography by Diane Tye and Outside the Box by Maria Meindl, in which women’s lives are discovered through unlikely archives.
In the end, They Left Us Everything is a literary mishmash just as much as the cupboards in Johnson’s parents house were repositories for every kind of thing. It’s a tale of grief, but also a record of fantastic stories, memorable characters, of family life in the mid-20th century, a scrapbook of fascinating objects, a portrait of family ties, and what it means to be a daughter and a mother. It’s an artfully crafted memoir, and a really wonderful read.
June 8, 2014
Summer Reads
I wrote a fun blog post for 49th Shelf last week about books with fun summer covers, including my favourite summer cover of all time which is All the Voices Cry by Alice Petersen.
And speaking of summer reads, Chatelaine has a bumper-crop of great books lined up in their Summer Reading Special. I am happy to have reviewed the memoir Glitter and Glue by Kelly Corrigan, about a young American woman whose eyes are opened to motherhood and the experiences of her own mother during a gig working as an au-pair for a widower and his children in Australia. I found the book touching and remarkable for its M Word associations. You can read my take on it here.
Some summer reads I’m looking forward to getting to soon are Mating For Life by Marissa Stapley, The Vacationers by Emma Straub, Thunderstruck by Elizabeth McCracken and Based on a True Story by Elizabeth Renzetti.
