November 8, 2023
Gleanings
- It used to be that I could envelop her with my love; now I have to wrap it around her, more like I do with her dad or a dear friend. The physicality mirrors the emotionality—that she is still able to find solace in my love, but that it is slowly, slowly becoming more like accompaniment than absorption.
- Is “take a penny, leave a penny” my Roman Empire?
- Now more than ever, living ubuntu challenges us to search for our similitudes, to find and preserve humanity – that common thread that is woven into the fabric of each of our lives, connecting us.
- There was a time (yesterday, and a century ago) that all three of them were attached to me like barnacles and the local playground was an extension of our home. Every mother thinks (read: hopes/dreads) that life might stay that way forever, that one day a plaque will go up next to the swings that reads, “she was a good Mum and she swung really high.” Lucky for all of us, it doesn’t
- And yet, for me, this is the allure of eavesdropping – not knowing the whole story and crafting my own version of the interaction I am witnessing.
- My goals for my career have changed, and the deflation is far less than it once was. I have a strategy of having extremely low expectations for my work’s success in the world while having all the hope and optimism that writing requires. I think it’s some kind of detachment I’ve cultivated to survive all this pain. I’ll always write. I love to write.
- The lifeguards laughed at something. Outside the leaves were falling. I turned at the deep end and pushed my way through the blue water. Each song a palimpsest, the empty pool a reminder.
- Later that day, maybe it was the heat from the water thawing me a little but I became aware I was sobbing incoherently standing under the shower-head, shaking, close to falling down. Instead of calling 911, I called a friend.
- Why do I get to live in such abundant peace while others are burying their children? There are days when I could be entirely sunk by that thought alone, feeling sick with the privilege of my safe, warm little house with its overflowing cupboards and soft beds. It is bitterly unfair.
- When mostly, I am coming to embody and realize that life, life is what is always happening right here, right now. And that life is often slow, quiet … boring, ordinary.
- So I’m reading. And the one thing I can do is share what I’m reading. Things that have helped me think things through, make sense of what can’t be made sense of. Here we go.
November 7, 2023
Roar, by Shelley Thompson
From its opening pages, Roar hooked me with its heart. Although if I’m being totally honest, I think I was truly hooked by the blurb from Sheree Fitch (whom I adore) on the back that reads like a Sheree Fitch verse: “Wow. Wow. Wow. I want to roar, READ THIS BOOK.” And I’m so glad I listened!
Roar is the debut novel from actor/director Shelley Thompson, based on her 2021 feature film Dawn, Her Dad, and the Tractor, the story of a family grieving the death of Miranda, its mother, as the younger child, once Donald, now Dawn, returns to their rural Nova Scotia community and the family farm after years of estrangement.
Elder sister Tammy has also come home from her life in Toronto, a prickly character to begin with, and she’s hurt to discover that Dawn, her sibling, now her sister, had absented her and her father from her story, all the while maintaining contact with their mother and actually being with her when she died. Tammy’s fiance Byron finds himself embroiled in the tension of the family drama, with a heightened awareness of the bigotry Dawn faces through his own experience as a Black man in their small town. Dawn’s father, John-Andrew, is at a remove from all of this by virtue of his reserve, but wanting to do good by his beloved wife and out of love for his child, he’s making small steps toward reconnecting with Dawn, although the road there is far from smooth.
The story moves between the perspectives of Dawn and her family (as well as some beautiful scenes from the haunting perspective of Miranda herself) to show how this family moves forward through these difficult days, grappling with the hurt of estrangement, difficulties around understanding Dawn’s transition, hate and bigotry from some corners of their community, and surprising love and acceptance from others. Dawn, who has always been herself, begins the task of refurbishing her mother’s old beloved tractor, this project reopening (and perchance healing) some of her father’s old wounds, and also finally bringing father and daughter together.
November 7, 2023
Ideal Reading Experience
In the New York Times Book Review interview, there is always a question about one’s ideal reading experience, and this weekend helped me to articulate what mine is, though I think I’ve know it for a while. My ideal reading experience is a day with 25 hours in it, particularly if that day features golden sunlight filtered through what’s left of the leaves on the trees. When I linger in bed first thing, picking up the book from my bedside (my phone so far away it’s unthinkable), and I read and read, and then finally have to head downstairs and confront the task of cooking breakfast…at which point I realize that it’s an hour earlier than I thought, and so back to bed to go, actually finishing my book. This pattern continuing throughout the day, always just a little bit ahead of where I’m supposed to be. Right up until bedtime when it’s 9:34 according to the clock in my kids’ room and I’m hurrying the small one up to her top bunk, and if I’m lucky I’ll get an hour or so of reading in before my own “lights out” at 11pm. Except it’s 8:34, and the rest of the evening is laid out before me like…like… a hammock? Cozy suspension, such a terrific indulgence. I’ve just opened a new book and I love it, and I read and read and read.
November 3, 2023
Four Books I Really Loved
These four books are going to have spots on my Favourite Books of the Year list for sure, so I want to make note of them them here, but (apart from Penance, which I read last weekend) they were also books just so thoroughly read for pleasure that I didn’t want the work of writing a proper review….
Penance, by Eliza Clark
I bought Penance after reading a review in the New York Times and I was so glad I did. Set in a desolate English seaside town (is there any other kind of English seaside town?) on the literal eve of Brexit, it’s the story of a teenage girl who is set on fire by a group of her peers, the novel framed as a Capote-esque true crime expose by a male author who has interviewed the girls involved in the incident, as well as the mother of the victim. Although by the end of the book, readers will be asking who isn’t the victim here, and while the dead girl hardly had it coming, this also isn’t a typical story of bullies gone homicidal—there are all kinds of dynamics at play, and there’s a centuries old curse, a legacy of witch trials, a haunted amusement park, and more, which made it a pretty satisfying read for near Halloween.
*
Games and Rituals, by Katherine Heiny
It’s possible that loving Katherine Heiny’s work could constitute a very large part of my literary identity if I let it, and a highlight of 2023 for me was that a new Heiny book was in it, just as I’d read everything else she’d written (and I guess it’s time to reread now). I didn’t love Games and Rituals as much as I did her earlier collection Single, Carefree, Mellow, but that’s a high bar, and I did love it enough to read an advanced copy during a snow storm in December and then buy a hardcover and read the whole thing again in April. All these months later, I’m still thinking about the story of the women dressed inadequately as she’s helping her husband’s ex-wife move, hauling boxes in the freezing cold, a woman she’d first encountered years before when the two of them worked a overnight suicide hotline together. Heiny gets compared to Laurie Colwin (I encountered her first as emcee of a literary event celebrated the reissue of Colwin’s work in 2021), but she also has Sue Miller vibes in mapping unconventional emotional terrain and reinvention of the family tree as family is made and remade. I love her.
*
The Rachel Incident, by Caroline O’Donoghue
I read this one over the August long weekend, partly on the beach, and it was incredible, twisty and full of surprises. It’s about an Irish journalist who lives in London covering Irish issues, their abortion referendum in particular, and she happens to be quite pregnant with her first child, all this the backdrop to a story of something that happened years before when she was a student in Cork and shared a house with her friend James, who’d been her colleague at a bookstore where they’d finagled a professor she’d had a crush on into holding a book launch for his academic book that really wasn’t of interest to anyone, but what happens that night changes the course of everybody’s life. A story of class, love, and friendship. I loved it.
*
Tom Lake, by Ann Patchett
I bought the hype, and the book lived up to it, but also I wasn’t resisting, and I think that’s key. A slow and cozy book, set during Covid lockdown. A mother’s three grown daughters return home to help with the family’s cherry harvest, and she tells them stories of her experiences playing Emily in productions of “Our Town,” the daughters still scarce believing that once upon a time, their mother was almost a movie star. This is a novel about mothers and daughters and their unknowability to each other in fundamental ways. It’s also an ode to Thornston Wilder’s “Our Town,” which I know absolutely nothing about (I think it’s quintessentially American…), and I enjoyed it anyway. Plus I found a used copy of “Our Town,” which I’m looking forward to reading soon.
November 3, 2023
All Souls
Halloween is always a wild week. Just a couple days late to wish you spooky wishes from The Annex!
October 30, 2023
Taking Stock
With thanks to Pip Lincolne for the inspo!
Getting: a new pair of goggles in the mail this week as my last pair…disappeared!
Cooking: Sweet potato leek chicken casserole from this crummy one pot cookbook I bought in 2006 that I will keep forever in spite of the crumminess for this one recipe, which I love, and which I thought was very complicated back in 2006, but now it isn’t.
Sipping: tea! Yorkshire tea (but not Yorkshire Gold because of inflation)
Reading: Valerie Kaur’s See No Stranger and Lesley Krueger’s latest Far Creek Road
Thinking: Of every stupid thing I’ve ever done or said…and it isn’t even four in the morning!
Remembering: yesterday in the soft light of my friend Jennie’s house and a glorious afternoon with my bff’s and our families.
Looking: Out the window as the leaves change from orange to brown
Listening: to 1989 Taylor’s Version, which my teenager plays on her phone as she walks around the house
Wishing: That military grade weapons would spontaneously evaporate
Enjoying: Watching Derry Girls for the third time, but for the first time with my kids
Appreciating: My daily swims, and also one more homegrown bouquet from my garden!
Wanting: to go to bed early tonight so that I can read
Eating: maple flavoured almonds, my most expensive treat, which are on my long list of reasons why I will never be able to afford a house.
Finishing: my work day, which had a different shape because my youngest child had a sports practice at 8am so I took her to school and swam first thing.
Liking: Having my winter coat at the ready this morning.
Loving: reading Halloween stories with my family
Buying: new sheets for my kids’ beds as there are holes in the ones they have now and I would like “providing my kids with unholey bedsheets” to be my legacy.
Watching: Not Ted Lasso, whose third season I haven’t been able to finish because I don’t really like it?
Hoping: to remember to cancel my Apple TV subscription. And also for a movement away from this not great time of right-wing demogogues. And that it doesn’t rain for trick-or-treating.
Wearing: A cardigan, OBVIOUSLY
Walking: the same route daily, from my house, to pool, to kids’ school. Living the dream.
Following: The Turning the Page on Cancer fundraiser, which has raised more than $60,000 this year. Thanks to everyone who helped me surpass my goal and raise $1180.00
Noticing: That it’s getting so dark in the morning.
Saving: the depth-of-my-bones feeling of summer to last me through the darkness of the months ahead
Coveting: Not much! Everything I’ve want, I’ve got. I would like the world to take a chill pill.
Feeling: Like everything is really heavy, but grateful for every single bit of LIGHT.
Hearing: The silence that is my 15 year old fridge no longer making a rattling noise, but also (inevitably) a leaf blower. Tis the damn season.
October 27, 2023
One Week
Publishing a book, as I’ve said before, tends to be weird and embarrassing, and the hardest thing about it (the struggle is REAL) is that there are almost never weeks like this one.
Weeks where a room full of people come together for a fabulous night of fun and conversation, and book buying, and wonderful friendly people line up for my autograph. (Thank you so much to the Book Drunkard Festival for a very good night!)
And then on Wednesday, I got to dress up in an actual sequinned ball gown and be feted (and bring along the most HANDSOME and CHARMING plus-one) to the Writers’s Trust Storytellers’s Ball. We had the best time, and it was truly a night to remember.
And if all that wasn’t enough, I received a message from my publisher at Doubleday Canada yesterday who’d seen a certain gorgeous novel being read on public transit, and she’d even snapped a photo, and that’s even more dazzling than the ball gown.
October 25, 2023
Gleanings
- The bottom line is this: I don’t want to pretend to know more than I do or care less than I do. I want to live in this world awake, gentle, fierce, thoughtful, realistic, other-oriented, intentional, standing up for the least structurally and materially powerful. I don’t want to be pressured into performance or assuaged by box checking.
- I told him how I used to ride in the backseat of my Dad’s car every Sunday night listening to Neil Diamond, how Diamond is my Williams. It’s funny how music weaves its way into a soul, how twenty, fourty years later, we listen to the music from our childhoods and remember.
- As it turns out, the secret to loving yourself is to observe any emotions that surface, no matter how uncomfortable—sadness, fear, guilt, shame, anger, hurt—and just… hold on and brace yourself for this, because it’s kind of revolutionary… Let yourself feel them.
- All the energy being spent on attacking and unfollowing and disparaging each other online can and should instead be spent validating our own feelings and giving ourselves the space to move through them.
- I will continue to talk to strangers.
- I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately in my quest for nicer times – and in my quest to be a better pal/human. Then I figured YOU might be thinking about this kind of stuff, from time to time, too. So in the name of nicer times and more friendly friendship (or family-ship!) here’s a list of things that might be slightly less jarring than the age-old ‘Cheer up!’
- Watching one tiny body bag after another being carried from the annihilation in Israel and the Gaza Strip has cut me to the very marrow. Every night watching the news I feel gutted. All life is precious and finite, but the massacre of children in their kibbutz homes and armageddon at the Al-Ahli Hospital are overwhelmingly soul-wrenching. Childhood innocence stolen by hatred. The promise embodied in those wee souls forever unfulfilled. It’s so much worse than heart-breaking.
- All of this mothering has been calling me more and more inward, into myself, to take responsibility for what’s mine. To feel, to heal, to be. To carry what’s mine to carry.
October 19, 2023
Landbridge: life in fragments, by Y-Dang Troeung
“In the image of the land bridge, the ingenuity of refugee survival is laid bare alongside the scourge of permanent war. Backward from Cambodia to Laos, Vietnam and Korea, and forward to Afghanistan, Syria, and Yemen—how far can this bridge wind on?” —Y-Dang Troeung
This week was a sadly fitting week to read about war, about the terrible violence that human beings inflict on each other, what it means to survive it, what survival even looks like. And in the posthumous memoir by Y-Dang Troeung (a UBC Professor of English who died from pancreatic cancer in November 2022), survival looks like a life—a world—in pieces, in fragments, including letters to her young son, reflections on her experiences in Phnom Penh where she visits tourist attractions devoted to attempted genocide, contemplation of a tangle history of colonialism and Asian connections, news clippings from her own refugee family’s arrival in Canada in 1980 where they were personally greeted by Pierre Trudeau, this contrasted with images of his son—now Prime Minister—greeting refugees from Syria in 2015, and these are supposed to be happy endings, but the true experience runs much deeper and is more contemplated, and also war trauma never ends. Troeung shares photos from her family’s time in refugee camps, where she was born after her family’s survival of “Pol Pot Time,” the horrors branded on the psyches of her parents and her brothers, what it means to be just removed from that. She writes about growing up in Goderich, ON, and falling in love with the work of local writer Alice Munro, wondering if she’d ever see people like her and her family in any of Munro’s stories. “Now, over twenty years since I left Goderich, I have stopped waiting for stories like mine and my family’s to be written by the national artists. When, little by little, these stories do emerge, they come from refugees who write in poems and fragments. We, the children of refugees, let the stories we could never write drop through our fingers.”
October 18, 2023
Something Borrowed: The Epigraph Edition
The SOMETHING BORROWED series is back, in which I share items and ideas that I used to create my new novel, ASKING FOR A FRIEND. In this case, used with permission! My novel’s two epigraphs are from work by Erins Wunker and Noteboom (the latter also known as children’s author Erin Bow). From Wunker’s NOTES FROM A FEMINIST KILLJOY, a few lines about friendship as an uncanny mirror. The poetry by Noteboom (which I originally read in The New Quarterly and was published this year in the collection a knife so sharp its edges cannot be seen) lines about what gets lost to history and what survives, the chance of that, tying into ideas about long friendship and also my novel’s consideration of museums. I’m grateful to both these writers for providing such inspiration.
