October 1, 2013
How to Feed a Family by Laura Keogh and Ceri Marsh
”Pratt’s postwar-era family table is a site of constant labour, meal after meal–which all fell to Mary, with no foreseeable end.”–Catherine M. Mastin, “Base, Place, Location and the Early Paintings” , from the Mary Pratt book, an excerpt from which appears today on the 49thShelf blog.
It’s a whole new world at our house these days, as I’ve got a 4 month old baby and a kid who has just started all-day school and is usually exhausted by 5pm. So while I am still a decent cook who makes dinner from scratch every night, I find many of my old standard recipes don’t quite work anymore. I need dinners that are quick, healthy, with minimal preparation (because heaven forbid the baby lets me put her down). I need dinners that my big kid will eat, even with her kiddish tastes, and oh yes, they need to be delicious, because I’m going to eat them too.
Enter How to Feed a Family by Laura Keough and Ceri Marsh, a book which couldn’t have come around at a better time. The first meal I made was shakshuka, a tomato egg dish for which I really did have all the ingredients already in my pantry. We got home at 6 that night, and I had to go out again at 7:15, but it all came together, and even Ol’ “I Don’t Like Tomatoes” Harriet ate hers up fine. Here, I thought, is a cookbook that does what it says on the tin.
We’ve had the ridiculously easy and tasty Lemon Linguini (though I threw in some spinach to up the greens), apple chicken curry (which we all enjoyed), tilapia tacos with fresh lime, though everybody’s favourite has been the so-simple sweet potato macaroni and cheese (which I particularly like because it makes a huge batch, and I freeze half for later). I have baked the whole-grain blueberry muffins three times now, and the whole play school is having them for snack tomorrow. I’ve stolen sandwich ideas (chicken and grapes. Yum!), made breakfast milkshakes, and we had cornmeal pancakes for lunch one day, which were terrific.
How to Feed a Family is a product of the blog Sweet Potato Chronicles, from which I’ve scooped recipes from time-to-time and for which my friend Athena writes a lovely column called “A Quick Bite With”. Reflecting its origins, the book is a bit of a mishmash and guided mainly by its writers’ tastes instead of a grander scheme. So you end up with a cannelloni recipe with a whole page of ingredients with another recipe calling for store-bought pastry shells (gasp! horror! says me). And they’re really, really into spelt flour and brown rice syrup, which I just don’t happen to have on hand. Further, my child wouldn’t touch an asparagus/tomato frittata with a ten foot pole, but that’s my problem (and it is. Because when she doesn’t eat her share, I eat it instead, which is a problem I don’t expect is come across by the book’s authors, two former fashion magazine editors who’ve probably long-learned the art of restraint).
I am not completely the target audience for this book–I’ve got my own ideas about food and cooking and I dare their recipe for wholewheat pancakes to compete with mine, which I fry up every Sunday (blueberry banana!). But I’ve also never needed a book like this so bad in my life, and the spine is already way cracked. The pages splattered.Here is a cookbook that’s made to get used, and I am having an awfully good time with it.
September 29, 2013
Projection: Encounters with my Runaway Mother by Priscila Uppal
A few years ago, I developed a cautious admiration for the literary bolter, those mothers in fiction who had dared to turn convention on its head and flee the children–the narrator’s mother in Nancy Mitford’s The Pursuit of Love was known as “the Bolter”, and my thoughts had been inspired by the mother in What Maisie Knew. In conversation we also came up with Mrs. Brown in The Hours, plus the mother in Vendela Vida’s Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name. In the latter two books, the psychology of these bolting mothers and our eventual sympathy for them becomes the point on which the novels turn.
How does “the bolter” complicate our ideas about motherhood, I wondered? What if “the bolter” was a maternal archetype, instead of her actions being construed as unnatural? What does it tell us about motherhood and ourselves that we do such construing? And what does understanding the bolter’s psychology help us to better understand about mothers in general?
In Projection: Encounters with my Runaway Mother, Priscila Uppal is pondering the psychology of the bolter in order to understand nothing in general, but instead to better understand her own life. And here is the thing about non-fiction, of course, that it takes out the nuance and raises the stakes (and I still can’t stop thinking about that line from Americanah: “Like life is always fucking subtle.”). You see, my literary bolters of the fictional persuasion were always a but romantic, bobbed hair, cloche hats and long cigarette holders, far too fabulous for the home-front, or else they were running from something, selfless martyrs who flee for their children’s survival. But real life, of course, is rarely so photogenic, or tidy, as Priscila Uppal discovers for herself when she goes to Brazil to find her mother who’d bolted years before.
Projection has recently been shortlisted for the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Award for Nonfiction, and rightly so, as it is one of the most extraordinary memoirs I’ve ever encountered. It begins with Uppal–an accomplished poet, novelist and professor, with two experiences as Canadian Poet-in-Residence at the Olympics amongst her remarkable achievements–encountering her mother for the first time in twenty years on the internet. Though Uppal has not been pursuing her mother–it is while googling herself in search of reviews of her novel that she discovers her name listed on her mother’s website, along with a childhood photograph. After years of the past being put far away, Uppal must contend with evidence that her mother’s life continued after her bolting, and moreover that Uppal herself exists as a secondary character in her mother’s life.
She goes to Brazil in search of a story, curious and cautious about what she will find there. Brazil, where her mother had come from and the place to which she returned when her daughter is eight years old. And even Priscila can understand what drove her mother to go: an accident had rendered her father a quadriplegic, altering the trajectory of their family life and making her mother his full-time care-giver. Other details are harder to stomach though–how she cleared out her children’s piggy banks, for example, or that her children were left to care for their father in her absence, contending with a serious lack of essential financial and emotional support.
Uppal’s mother is a film reviewer, and a prolific movie watcher, movies becoming the method by which Uppal frames her narrative. Each chapter is title after a different movie, preceded by a line of dialogue, and the narrative of the film itself becomes integral to how Uppal understands her own narrative. Some of the movie picks are straightforward in their mother-daughter associations–Mommie Dearest, Stella Dallas, Freaky Friday–while others seem more of a stretch, but then Uppal makes the connections seem so natural. So too the lists that pepper her text, top 10 lists of things her mother and she share, or of places she has visited in Brazil on her trip. Her chapters also contain special cuts, montages, and flashbacks in keeping with the film motif. It is a curious construction, but one that works, in particular because these breaks provide moments of relief in a narrative which is full of unbearable tension.
It has become standard to refer to memoirists as “brave”, but I can’t help doing the same for Uppal, with the caveat that “brave” means something totally different here, something substantial. First, Uppal’s bravery in staring down this woman, her mother, who is clearly unhinged and exists in the alternate reality her love of movies provides. Uppal dares to confront her, but also dares to understand her, however unforgivingly. She is also brave to not forgive, or to have her story not adhere to standard narratives, to have a happy ending. She refuses to compromise, but also manages to see her story from all points of view. She is brave to take a story with so much pain and turn it into art that’s so extraordinary.
She writes, “I’m willing to endure [my mother] for a book for all the other children of disastrous, neglectful, and narcissistic parents, who beat themselves up for not being able to alter their gazes, not being able to create the love that would salvage the past, turn into into the turbulent backstory of a triumphant comedy.”
Projection is fascinating, compelling, as beautifully written as it is honest. Honest too that there is artifice at work here, that this book is so consciously art instead of a factual record. And yet there is documentation, note and photographs. A fantastic blurring of art and reality, which is the book’s very point, how we all do this to suit our own purposes, Uppal’s mother escaping to movies in order to justify her own choices.
The literary bolter in Projection must be read to be believed. She is so impossibly divorced from reality (as well as the common rules of social decorum) that if she showed up in fiction, you wouldn’t believe she was true. She exists to underline that mothers are fallible, and more: that some mothers are horrible. That real life is more complicated than a story could ever suppose, but then without story, how would we ever convey that?
September 27, 2013
I used to wade into fracas all the time.
I write about my children here more than I write about the wider world, the wider literary world in particular. And sometimes I feel bad about this, about the disconnect, my insularity. I don’t seem to have my finger on the button. It hasn’t always been like this either–I used to wade into fracas all the time. But then it got to the point where I could set my calendar by it–brouhaha about women writers, the Orange Prize as ghetto or goldmine, Canada Reads outrage, Giller Prize moroseness. I was writing the same blog posts all over again, in the beginning fervently hoping to bring change, hoping that if I could just explain the way things ought to be, everyone would finally understand. And then eventually despondently, as it began to become clear to me that these arguments were futile, all of us hashing out the same lines over and over again. It was even boring, and I was really tired, and there are oh so many books to read, books to write about instead. And yes, my children, who are never ever the same, even two days in a row. So now I cease to wade, for the most part, which I fear might suggest I don’t have opinions anymore, except about out-of-date encyclopedias. Because I do have opinions, and they’re even works in progress too, but it’s progress that interests me more than opinions themselves, so I don’t bother to wade anymore.
September 26, 2013
Our Complete Childcraft How & Why Library
It was almost two years ago that I found a near-complete set of encyclopedias out on somebody’s curb, and schlepped them all home in our stroller (which later fell apart, and this may be part of the reason why). The books were the Childcraft How & Why Library, which is basically the whole universe printed and bound circa 1987. Three books devoted to literature (nursery rhymes, poems, myths, fairy tales, and also contemporary stories), and then others about space, plants, animals, math, crafts, world cultures and more.
I am very excited that I finally purchased our two missing volumes online (one of them for a dollar, no less) and that our Childcraft set is finally complete.
The photos are dated and the print a bit faded, but we love these books, and because my child has been raised on faded picture books, this deficiency doesn’t even register. These books have become our first stop for information, because research here doesn’t seem to suck us into a vortex of inanity as the internet does. And truth be told, our family loves any excuse to curl up on the couch with a book. We’ve learned about clouds (which means we get to say “cumulonimbus”, which is always fun), beetles, human digestive tracks, molluscs, the solar system, and so much else.
That the books are a little out of date is actually useful too. Pluto, Harriet knows now, is no longer a planet after all, and I love what that knowledge represents. She realizes that not everything written down is immutable. That the universe is not static. That the world is ever-changing and wild, infinite in its wonders.
September 24, 2013
The Hang of It
My new office.
Now that we’re nearly three weeks into our brand new life, I’m going to take the risk of saying out loud that we might be getting the hang of it. After a very bumpy first week, Harriet is very happy to be in Junior Kindergarten, and has already acquired some brand new skills, such as being able to sit down and focus on a project for more than two minutes, and also the ability to draw something that actually resembles a thing. She is also enjoying being back at her play school in the afternoons. Stuart is back to work, and quite happily now that we’ve learned he’s got a promotion and begins a new position next month. He’s also taking a college course he’s finding very inspiring, which means I am home alone on Wednesday nights.
The first Wednesday night was surprisingly good–I had two crabby kids and a heat wave, so we all jumped in the bath and had a pool party in the tub. Somehow, I managed to drown no one, we had dinner, *and* I mopped the floor, so I got to feel like Mommy Awesome. There was to be no repeat the following Wednesday, however, as the baby proceeded to cry unceasingly and the house looked like it had been hit by a hurricane. We’ll see how I do tomorrow.
Regarding Iris, who is 3.5 months old: we thought we’d been doing so well tolerating her poor sleeping habits, and then she went and showed us that we’d not seen nothing yet as poor sleeping goes, and so now I’m kind of the walking dead. This time, however, we know it’s a problem to be endured instead of something that we can fix, and so we just tolerate the tireds without feeling badly about the whole thing, and that makes a huge difference. She has a cold and has just got her second tooth in, which isn’t helping matters, plus she is a *baby* and we know what they’re like.
What they’re like though is pretty easy compared to 4 year-olds, which I didn’t appreciate at all the first time. I also think that when I was home with Baby Harriet, I was terrifically bored, but now I’ve got commitments and deadlines, and things to get done with Baby lying on my chest. There is no time for boredom, and so Iris rolls around on the floor while I do my work, and I really am accomplishing so much, though I am having to also train myself to type with one hand while the baby screams in my other arm. In the mornings, she falls asleep soon after I drop off Harriet at school, and so I can’t go home because our apartment is up a flight of stairs and I’ve got her in the stroller, so I go to RedFish BlueFish instead and work for the 30 minutes she manages to stay asleep for. (Iris has about six naps a day, 20-40 minutes. This would bother me, except I had another baby like that once before, and everything worked out fine.)
And the very best thing we’re up to these days is that we started reading Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, which Harriet and I are both encountering for the very first time. And we love it. I’m reading it aloud and once in a while get a sense of where possible criticism comes from, but these criticisms would mainly be about there being too many adverbs, or that characters “hiss” sentences which are not sufficiently sibilant, which are the kind of criticisms you really have to go looking for and be an asshole to make.
September 22, 2013
Oh, My Darling by Shaena Lambert
While I was pleased that Shaena Lambert’s short story collection Oh, My Darling received a good review in The Globe and Mail recently, I couldn’t help thinking that the reviewer had kind of missed the point. That her stories-as-houses metaphor had failed to consider the construction of the book entire, that here the book itself is a house, well-built and with a strong foundation, which is remarkable for a story collection. I mean, it’s what a story collection should strive for, but many collections really do end up being haphazard piles of all an author’s publishable stories to date (and some of the stories not even that) rather than a proper whole, but Oh, My Darling really is, and a most impressive one at that.
And I love that, that here is a collection where I can tell you about the book, its themes, its shape, rather than just telling you the plots of three or four of the stories I liked best. Oh, My Darling doesn’t actually reference Clementine, which wikipedia has revealed to me is actually a satire (because who would write a song about a drowned girl whose feet were so big she had to wear boxes instead of shoes?) But its preoccupations are just as morbid, and so darkly humorously so at times that I am sure that Lambert knew about the satire. That tireless refrain, powered by blustery, lust-ery, souls laid bare. So much feeling for something seemingly shallow. Sound going nowhere. Just imagine how it would echo in a cavern, in a canyon, excavating for a mile…
The book is framed by two stories about middle-aged women whose lives are about to change with diagnoses of cancer, though this is a straightforward interpretation of two stories that are very different and not straightforward at all. Each experiences a kind of dissatisfaction with her lot, a sense of dread that is shared with characters in most of these stories. The dread is a beneath-the-bones kind of thing, hard to pinpoint, but it is mortality, it is death. (Everything rustles, and it occurs to me that Jane Silcott’s essay collection would be a fine nonfiction companion to this book).
“Welcome home” is the last line of the first story, “Oh, My Darling”, a greeting to the woman whose cancer is going to make her really aware of living in her body for the first time, an awareness that comes with age even without cancer. Bodies are so thoroughly inhabited throughout all these stories, and fitted with parts–never have I encountered so many vaginas in one text. Bodies are bound and unbound, bodies are revealed, mottled middle-aged bodies with wrinkles and scars and unfeeling abdomens whose nerve endings were never repaired after cesarian sections so long ago. Fragile, flawed and precious. Oh, My Darling.
These are stories of women mostly, usually ordinary, middle-class, each with her own particular tragedies, her own emotions and feelings which can seem so profound and yet are part of a larger scheme, un-grand in its scope. She has a yearning for something just out of reach, but only when she is distracted from day-to-day life. There are things to be done, and she does them, unable to articulate the feeling, the fear in her bones–something decidedly bodily. How do we fit into the world, into our lives, mother-daughter relationships which are freighted and fraught, the awkward symmetry of marriage, the stunning pain of loss. Kitchen-sink stuff, yes, but then there is a drag-queen who is the son of Nazi war criminals and walks on his hands, as well as a death by mountain lion, by which I mean that this collection will surprise you.
And I don’t mean that the stories themselves aren’t worth remarking on either. They are gorgeously, effortlessly crafted, and I particularly admired Lambert’s deftness with chronology, her ability to telescope back and forth through time to consider a moment from all angles, as well as the force of her omniscience. How she is able to zero in on a single detail, a moment, and the rest of the story is a sweeping symphony all around it.
September 18, 2013
Sometimes Love Isn’t a Let-Down
“I just never thought it would be like this.”
This is a line from an essay I wrote a few years ago, an essay whose title and central metaphor was a reference to breastfeeding: “Love is a Let-Down”. The literal let-down though had been the unhappiness I’d experienced during those difficult weeks after my first daughter was born. Not postpartum depression, a label sometimes too broadly applied whose tidiness undermines the fact that becoming a mother is really hard, that new moms are often insufficiently supported, that babies are a lot of work, and the learning curve in those early days can seem impossibly steep. I still maintain that my unhappiness in those days didn’t necessarily mean there was anything wrong with me.
But oh, was my transition to motherhood ever a bumpy one. I didn’t even have breastfeeding problems, and I was having breastfeeding problems. Baby’s latch was fine, my milk was plentiful, and somehow she still managed to lose (or I managed to lose her?) 11% of her body weight, a terrifying ratio for someone so small. I’m not big on mother-guilt, but that 11% is seared upon my brain. It meant that everything in those early days seemed so fraught, perilous. I’d been handed this enormous responsibility and was already doing it wrong just four days in.
Precisely two things would save my breastfeeding life (and allow it to continue for the next two and a half years). The first was my midwife’s gentle care the first day we were home from the hospital after my c-section. “Breastfeeding takes time,” she told me as she helped me with positioning. “And patience,” she said, as we woke up the baby who’d once again fallen asleep on the nipple. And suddenly it became clear to me that this was really going to be work, at least for a while.
But not so much work, and here we come to the second thing that saved my breastfeeding life. The lactation consultant who took a mother-centric view of my situation and determined I didn’t need to be up all night long while my baby suckled away with an excellent latch I was loath to break considering the recent fact of her 11% weight loss. Quite unfashionably, at least in some breastfeeding circles, the consultant weighed my daughter before and after her feed, and took in the fact of my copious milk supply. “She gets everything she needs in five to ten minutes,” she told me. I would be free to cut off the feed when I saw fit, and so for the next week I did, and my daughter still gained weight. It began to occur to me that I may have had some mothering instincts after all.
“Love is a Let-down” I wrote in my essay, because my milk letting down was something I was never able to feel—at least not until it had leaked all over my shirt. In fact, I wasn’t able to feel anything the way I thought I should have, love in particular, certainly not in the ecstatic manner supposed by the rows of congratulatory cards on my window-sill. (“I just never thought it would be like this.”)
But what I eventually learned was that in those early days, love was doing instead of feeling. Love was every time I changed a diaper with tears streaming down my face, every time night turned into morning while the baby screamed, those early evening walks through our neighbourhood with the baby asleep in her carrier, a tiny, gentle reprieve.
It is a bit of a mystery though, how I went from that desperate woman crying over the change table to being somebody who was pregnant again. On purpose, even! Part of it was that four years had passed, and while the vividness of my newborn memories hadn’t faded, I’d had time to get over the trauma. I’d also always known I’d want a second child, which had underlined all my despair the first time: that I’d one day have to do it all over again. And while I was quite conscious that having another baby would come with its own challenges, I’d learned a thing or two the first time and I was hoping that what I’d learned would prove worthwhile.
When my second daughter was born in June, I didn’t dare to imagine that we were prepared, but we had bought a queen-size bed so we could sleep comfortably with her, I had paid a woman $200 to made capsules out of my placenta in an effort to combat the baby blues, and my husband had taken 3 months off work to ensure that when I cried over the change table, I’d never cry alone.
And much to my surprise, relief and pleasure, these measures worked miracles. More, this time I was not so lost in new motherhood—I recognized the landmarks, was accustomed to the topography. It was so strange to encounter this world again, but this time not to be out of my mind.
“I just never thought it would like this.”
Because this time, everything was different, except the parts that were the same, but these were more easily weathered when I was feeling supported and strong. And the best thing of all, which no doubt paved the way for my easier experience—from the time she was forty minutes old and I was lying in the recovery room, immobile from my repeat c-section, my new baby breastfed like a champion.
As her new life began to be measured in days and then weeks, I kept waiting for the hiccups (metaphoric ones), for inevitable bumps in the breastfeeding road, but they never arrived. I never knew how much weight she lost after birth because the number never mattered. She was back to birth weight at one week old, and the road has been smooth ever since then.
So these were my two experiences, shockingly disparate and I am one woman, suggesting a remarkable diversity in the experiences of new motherhood for women everywhere. If I’d had my second experience first time around, I’d have no idea what women were talking about when they talked about difficulty breastfeeding, though I would imagine that I understood. There was a part of me before that just assumed that having a newborn was as terrible for everyone as it had been for me, and that anyone who said otherwise was lying. So often, we might think we’re talking about the very same things, but they aren’t actually the same things at all.
It’s been a revolution, I think, they way we tell our stories now, and not just in hushed tones over coffee in suburban kitchens, but in print and out loud. But while I realize how important it is that these stories are being told, I also recognize something useless in this endeavour. I understand now how unhelpful was so much of the advice I offered to (or rather forced upon) friends who had babies not long after I did. I remember pronouncing like a sage that no one ever need wake a sleeping baby to feed, not considering matters of milk supply, for example. I feel a twinge of regret when I consider the women I might have terrified with “Love is a Let-Down”, women who might have imagined that my experiences would necessarily be their own.
So I think what we have to keep in mind as we’re sharing our stories is that stories are stories instead of facts or even destinies. That “I just never thought it would be like this” isn’t always a bad thing. The great thing about stories is that sometimes you get to write your own. That love is a let-down, and then sometimes it isn’t after all.
(From my presentation at last Friday’s launch of the anthology Have Milk Will Travel: Adventures in Breastfeeding by Rachel Epp Buller)
September 16, 2013
Down with Princessery!
(This piece is cross-posted at Bunch)
With the end of summer, the kids have come home from fishing down at the proverbial crawdad hole, and are now settling back into gender roles as dictated by toy marketers, because let’s face it: our boys will be boys and our girls will be princesses.
But not so fast…
Listen, I’ve read my Peggy Orenstein, and I’ve got an opinion or two about the effects of “princess culture” on boys and girls alike. And so since before my daughter was born, I’ve been unabashedly brainwashing her with my own politics, a plan that has been foolproof so far*. A parent has to have a weapon or two in her bag to use against the big bad world, and these are the ones that have worked for me, but have also served as great reads at the very same time.
Wonder Woman: The Story of the Amazon Princess by Ralph Cosentino: Wonder Woman is the third of Cosentino’s manga-style picture book introductions to classic comics. He tells the story of Diana, the Amazon princess who didn’t want to be just a princess, and chose to spend her life fighting for justice instead. My daughter remains curious about why Wonder Woman has to battle the forces of evil in her underpants, but as princess role models go, you could do worse than this one.
The Princess Knight by Cornelia Funke and Kerstin Meyer: Princess Violetta is raised in the same fashion as her big brothers, although they laugh at her futile efforts to mount a horse while wearing heavy armour. This makes her all the more determined to prove herself as brave and strong, so she begins sneaking out after dark and practicing a knight’s skills in her own way. She eventually becomes so adept that she ends up winning her own hand in marriage (long story) and thus is granted the independence she desires.
Sir Cassie to the Rescue by Linda Smith and Karen Patkau: “Cassie read a story about knights…” this book begins, and when she finishes reading, Cassie tries to cajole her brother into a game of knights. Just one problem: neither of them is interested in being the damsel in distress. After trying out other options, and constructing a variety of marvelous castles in the living room, Cassie and her brother come up with an ingenious solution to their problem. And then Cassie opens a book about pirates, and her imagination starts running wild again…
Olivia and the Fairy Princesses by Ian Falconer: At first glace, it looks like a Princess book, complete with tiara, magic wand and Olivia’s name in pretty pink. But a close look at Olivia’s facial expression reveals that this book will be an examination rather than a celebration of princess culture. Falconer is shameless in his anti-princess agenda, but the story is still funny for kids, and poses questions worth asking your sons and daughters: why are princesses so lacking in cultural diversity? And “If everyone’s a princess, then princesses aren’t special anymore… Why do they all want to be the same?”
The Paper Bag Princess by Robert Munsch and Michael Martchenko: I know you’ve read this one already, but it’s still so good after all these years. Standout lines are, “You look like a real prince but you are a bum” and the best and most genre-defying conclusion of any book ever: “They didn’t get married after all.” Final image is the spirited princess dancing off into the sunset, kicking up her heels, arms embracing the world.
Princess Smarty Pants by Babette Cole: “Princess Smartypants did not want to get married. She enjoyed being a Ms.” In order to deal with the annoying throngs of suitors turning up at her door, she sets impossible tasks that defeat every one of them—until Prince Swashbuckle arrives. He manages to jump through every hoop she throws him, proving himself quite up to the job of winning her hand except for one thing: Prince Swashbuckle doesn’t think that Princess Smartypants is so smart. And it’s too bad for him: Smartypants turns him into a toad. Obviously, they didn’t get married after all either.
And finally, someone needs to write a picture book about The Cockfighting Princess. Irina Walker, the third daughter of the exiled King of Romania, has been charged with running illegal cockfighting events in Oregon, even selling refreshments to spectators. This serves as a most important lesson for little girls everywhere: even cockfighting princesses are not above the law. And that princessing and glamour do not always go hand and hand.
*I know, I know. This is going to backfire at some point. But in the meantime, I want to provide my girl with a foundation that underscores the limitlessness to who she might possibly become as a human being.
September 15, 2013
We met Sheree Fitch. And that’s the least of it…
They didn’t have Sheree Fitch when I was a little girl. But when Harriet was very small, someone gave us a copy of her board book Kisses Kisses Baby-O, and we loved it, its rhyme and rhythm, its simplicity and lovingness. Not long after, I learned that Sheree Fitch had written a novel for adults, called Kiss the Joy as It Flies; I read it for a few days in darkest January, and I remember how it lit up my life.
I think we got Peek a Little Boo sometime after that, which fast became a favourite. Harriet loved the baby faces, we loved the song, and we changed the words so they said her name (“Amazing Harriet, how do you do? Happy Harriet, huggle-wuggle you!”) to hold her attention extra-fast.
Around this time, Mabel Murple was being re-issued, which was immediately beloved and resulted in Harriet’s favourite colour being purple for some time (and the purple house on Brunswick Avenue is called “Mabel Murple’s house” still). We read this book regularly, as recently as last night, and also spend a lot of time talking about it and speculating about its extraneous story (like the shadow of Mabel’s mother which is visible on one page as Mabel gets in purple trouble).
We got Sleeping Dragons All Around, and while Harriet went through a period where she found it “too scary”, that was only temporary. She loves all things dragonish these days, and so the book is a favourite (and I would like to hang a plaque on my wall that says, “We dance in the kitchen! We don’t do the dishes”). Was Monkeys in My Kitchen next? I think so. We love that one too.
I had become online friends with Sheree by this point. (I interviewed her in 2010, and had also read her beautiful collection of poetry for adults, In this house are many women.) We were the lucky recipients of Night Sky Wheel Ride, which arrived in the post on Harriet’s third birthday. I remember literally dropping everything and sitting down to read it with her on our front step, and being amazed by it. “Can you hear the mermaids murmur/beluga whales sing/ feel the whirling stir/ of every little humming phosphorescent thing?” That line blows my mind every time I read it, which is often. Recently, we got If I Had A Million Onions, which is wonderful.
I am laying this all out to illustrate how Sheree Fitch has been a huge part of our family for Harriet’s entire life, which hasn’t been a long life (yet) but still an entire one (so far) which is not insignificant. In fact, Sheree Fitch is one of the things I kept in my pocket as we knew that Iris was coming, one of the parental things we’d have about immediately this time and which would make this babyhood oh so much better that it would be in a Fitchless world.
I am laying this all out because today something extraordinary happened: we met Sheree Fitch! We went to the Eden Mills Festival, which was lacking in sun but otherwise really lovely, and rain very nearly held off too. I managed to catch Saleema Nawaz reading after I had my lunch, but otherwise spent the afternoon in the kids’ area, partly because crying babies are better tolerated there, and also because the readers were wonderful–Aubrey Davis was a particular highlight.
But then. Sheree Fitch. Dressed in purple (naturally). Who actually stole my crying baby and calmed her down while the rest of our family listened to readings. Sheree Fitch. In real life!! It was like meeting a rock star. Oh, I was so thrilled, but this was only the beginning.
I took Iris back while Sheree took the stage to read Mabel Murple. And somehow, Harriet was standing beside her. Sheree began to read, and Harriet read along with her, the whole book memorized, finishing sentences, particularly emphatic upon her favourites: “I’m a purple person and I roar away my troubles!” “Skateboard scallywag, Mabel Murple’s on the loose (and they skedaddled)” And that purple teddy bear named Snickerknickerbox, who snored.
It was amazing. And not just because Harriet is someone I am particularly fond of, and because I am one half of the two people who have read her Mabel Murple 3000 times, but because it was wonderful to see, how Sheree’s joy is contagious, the generosity of her spirit, how her books performed aloud are more amazing than I ever expected (and my expectations were pretty high). Because a book can get so far into a little kid’s head, and because books are so incredible, and how wonderful are these days when we get to celebrate them together.
Because we met Sheree Fitch. And also because Harriet had her Eden Mills debut, which we certainly weren’t expecting. As I watched it all unfold, it was completely clear that this was one of the greatest things I would ever witness in my long, long joyful life.
September 11, 2013
Some thoughts about Sonali Deraniyagala’s Wave
I recently read most of a very strange and fascinating novel by Jennifer Quist called Love Letters of the Angels of Death, a novel I had to ultimately quit because it was just a little too strange, mostly because the characters kept saying “dang” instead of swearing properly, and I just couldn’t get past that. But I was disappointed to run into trouble with the book because it really was remarkable in so many ways, and I keep bringing it up in conversations. Talking about this novel which is about a happy marriage, its curious second-person narration that makes so much sense upon the book’s conclusion (which I did read, though I skimmed bits in the middle), about how two people long-time married experience a kind of merger of self.
I thought of this book again this week as I read the stunning memoir Wave by Sonali Deraniyagala, when I encountered this line near the end of the book: “I often think I utter Steve’s words, not mine.” Steve, Deraniyagala’s husband who died in Sri Lanka along with their two sons, her parents and hundreds of thousands of others when the tsunami hit that country’s coast on December 26, 2004.
**
I remember that “tsunami” was once a word I looked up in the dictionary, not long before December 26, 2004. In the years since, while it has also become every headline-writer’s go-t0 metaphor, the event in its enormity has remained something of an abstraction, cemented in history. And yet born of that hugeness, born of so much death and sprawling awful, is Deraniyagala’s slim memoir, so spare and deliberate in its prose.
Wave is the book I thought I couldn’t bear to read, but then such a claim is sort of precious because I always wanted to, a peeking through my fingers as I hid my eyes sort of thing. I listened to Deraniyagala on CBC’s The Sunday Edition last winter one morning as I fried banana pancakes, and found the way she told her story so impressive. She was so articulate, interesting, and I found nothing shameful in being witness to her pain, the way I might have with a woman less in control of her own story.
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“That Deraniyagala wrote down what happened is understandable. But why would some unconcerned individual, someone who has not been similarly shattered, wish to read this book? Yet read it we must, for it contains solemn and essential truths… In witnessing something far-fetched, something brought out before us from the distant perimeter of human experience, we are in some way fortified for our own inevitable, if lesser, struggles.” –Teju Cole
“Sometimes, usually when the weather is base and the freeways are black with ice and the commute takes too long, you try it on–my death. You take it in–shallow but still very much beneath your skin. It’s a tiny injection of grief and fear. It’s meant to protect us, like an inoculation. You stand in our kitchen as the sky outside gets darker, and you let this contrived, imaginary tragedy immunize you against real sorrow. In your imagination, you marshal the possibility of my death into the small, controlled sphere–one you hope cannot coexist in the same world as a truly dead one. It’s a bit like Halloween–playing dead, acting it out to keep real death away.” –Jennifer Quist, Love Letters of the Angels of Death
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There are books I’ve read, Joan Didion’s Blue Nights and The Year of Magical Thinking, Calvin Trillin’s About Alice, books I’ve read imagining some sort of usefulness, that they might possibly “fortify me for my own inevitable sorrows”. But they won’t, of course. You can’t read up on this sort of thing, prepare for it. Instead it’s more like what Quist writes about, these vicarious griefs something that we try on, a kind of dare. But then we close the books, put them back on the shelf. Maybe it’s that we imagine they’re fortifying wherein lies the attraction. But they’re just not. They can’t be.
Though perhaps they help us better understand how life is, its shape, to glimpse its darkest corners. There is is usefulness in this, I suppose, deepening our vision of the world around us.
What makes Wave intriguing as compared to other memoirs and what makes it so profound is that instead of Deraniyagala casting herself as central character, she tells the story as filtered through her own perspective, what she sees and feels rather than who she is, or what she has become (though we do get a sense of that). She writes, “And I cringe to be bereft in a way that cannot be imagined, even though I do wonder how impossible this really is.” Her narrative exists to aid us in making that imaginative leap, in bridging the chasm between our experiences. Her self-effacement enhances this.
Though it is also a product of her tragedy–when she loses her family, Deraniyagala loses herself, and hers is the story of a reclaiming of her identity in the face of what has happened to her. So firmly anchored in her own perspective, we are to understand how time slows and spins in the immediate onset of grief, the confusion and the fury. She can’t bear to sleep for fear of waking and having to remember her loss all over again. She can’t bear to remember her family at all, can’t quite believe she ever had them, and it is years before she is able to return to their home in London, to confront what had been taken from her. The house is a museum, and she wants none of it disturbed. The pain of being there is overwhelming, and yet the pain of not having it to return to is worse. “I lost my shelter,” she writes, which seems to stand for everything.
This is the story of how she allows herself to remember her family and her love for them, to feel the pain of their loss because that pain is how she keeps them close to her. “I suspect that I can only stay steady as I traverse this world that’s empty of my family when I admit the reality of them, and me.” It take years for her to get to this point, and the book documents her journey closer and closer to the heart of the matter. And along the way, she brings her family back to life, her sons, her husband, her parents. She paints them each as distinct and striking characters, creating moments of levity that infuse her story with such light. It’s a story as sad as it is happy, what she lost underlined by what she had. Which doesn’t make it any easier that she doesn’t have it any longer, but neither are her loved ones thus entirely gone.
The key to this book, I think, and its usefulness for us, lies in a particular word that occurs at least twice. First, when she returns to her family’s London home and comes upon their back garden in early morning, the sight of a snail making its way across the patio table: “They would be so stirred by this.” Later, she writes about her husband who’d grown up on a council estate in East London, and his first trip to the Natural History Museum when he was six years old. At the sight of a life-sized model of a blue whale: “this was the most stirred he’d ever been.”
To be stirred then, to have our quiet disturbed. Perhaps this is why we should read this, or any book. A gentler version of Kafka’s frozen sea, and I like that. Not fortifying, but instead (and not merely) our reason for being.
