February 24, 2013
"Worse still, her parents were always bringing home MORE books."
The Girl Who Hated Books by Jo Meuris, National Film Board of Canada
Three years ago, I posted about this short film, but I’m returning to it again because this weekend I purchased the book upon which it is based for 50 cents from a bake sale/book sale taking place outside Harriet’s swimming lessons (along with a rice crispie square and two slices of cake). The book is The Girl Who Hated Books by Manjusha Pawagi and Leanne Franson, and we love it. I like the glimpses of storybook characters we know and love, but also how the family in the book is a little bit like our own, only far more eccentric:
“There were books in dressers and drawers and desks, in closets, cupboards and chests. There were books on the sofa and books on the stairs, books crammed in the fireplace and stacked on the chairs.
Worse still, her parents were always bringing home MORE books. They kept buying books and borrowing books and ordering books from catalogues. They read at breakfast and lunch and dinner…”
We’re not quite that bad, and while we do have books crammed in the fireplace, on the stairs, and even on our ceiling, we have not yet had to resort to the sink. And reading at dinner is strictly forbidden, though breakfast and lunch is all right, Saturday paper breakfast in particular. Obviously.
I like this book also because it’s a perfect addition to the excellent list we posted at 49thShelf last week, Picture Books Featuring Canadian Children of Colour, compiled by TPL librarian Joanne Schwartz.
February 21, 2013
Something is not right.
I don’t imagine I touch my neck very often, but somehow yesterday while I was eating breakfast, I happened to discover a very large lump on my throat. “Something is not right,” I realized, in Miss Clavel style, and it was an interesting realization because I spend as much as any woman does examining my body for lumpy things, and being that bodies are quite lumpy in and of themselves, I’d always wondered how you’d know when you found a real one. But it’s like love, I guess, and orgasms. I got up from the table and announced that I had googling to do. I kept googling to a minimum as you always should whenever anything is actually wrong, and made an appointment with my doctor. She saw me later in the afternoon, and couldn’t believe I hadn’t noticed the lump before. But then, as I’ve stated, I don’t touch my neck very often. The lump, she says, is on my thyroid, and feels more like a cyst than a nodule (and therefore, hopefully, less likely to contain nasty things). It is probably huge because I am pregnant, and pregnant bodies don’t do anything half way. She told me I am not to worry. I have an ultrasound next week which will confirm just what the lump contains. It is likely we won’t have to worry about what to do about it until after the baby is born. She said, “You’ve got bigger fish to fry anyway” (ie having a baby, who is, I am grateful to say, bigger than the lump).
I am writing about this here not be melodramatic, but because the more I’ve talked about it, the more ordinary and okay matters have seemed. It helped considerably when I realized that Betty Draper too had had a lump on her thyroid and that she was fine. (I also had a funny conversation with my mom about how we’d tried desperately to have me diagnosed with thyroid problems when I was a teenager, but it turned out that I was just fat because I went through entire tubs of cheez-whiz in a weekend. There was, sadly, no other excuse.) I am writing about this here really to be the opposite of melodramatic, because keeping my anxieties to myself would only make me crazy and because the likelihood of everything being fine is as such that being a brave, desperate martyr isn’t really called for. There is sort of a script for these sorts of situations, in which I start imagining my children growing up without me, planning my own funeral, and things being as they are, following this script would be more self-indulgent than anything else. We will save the panic and melodrama for when it’s really required. And while it’s easier to follow the script, really, because it’s a script, it’s not a useful script. It is always helpful to remember that one is not a character in a television drama. It is always better to face troubles as they are, as they arrive. To not jump so far into the future. To do otherwise is a waste of a life.
And so, onward. This post resonated with me”: “I want to be strong. I think I am strong. But sometimes I wonder, at what point does “strength” become “unwillingness to appear weak”?” But then we’re all constructed of various strengths and weaknesses, aren’t we? We’re all vulnerable, and sometimes that vulnerability is the clearest sign we have that the world and everything we love in it is real.
Update: It occurs to me that this is a situation for which Caroline Woodward’s and Julie Morstad’s Singing Away the Dark comes in handy.
Update 2: I am feeling far less morbid and dramatic a few days later. Looking forward to an ultrasound this week that will confirm that all will be well. And in the meantime, are people ever kind. Thank you for your kind comments and emails, for tracking down second opinions, and offering to refer me to your thyroid specialist doctor dad. I sure do have some fine people looking out for me. And it’s much appreciated. xo
February 21, 2013
On my amateur theatre-going and literary criticism
Even though we would have much preferred to go bed at 7pm, Stuart and I dragged ourselves out the door on Friday night to see Do You Want What I Have Got? A Craigslist Cantata at the Factory Theatre. And we’re so glad we did, because basically the show was 80 continual minutes of us laughing. Stuart and I aren’t the most sophisticated theatre-goers, not least because Stuart and I aren’t the most sophisticated anything. We’re always a little bit disappointed by any play that does not contain song and dance, and the highest compliment we could think to pay to Do You Want What I Have Got? was, “It was a lot like Alligator Pie!” (Which is a high compliment. Really.) Really, our immediate response to most theatre experiences is a gleeful exclamation of, “We are at a play!!” Definitely not an outing to be taken for granted.
Anyway, we loved Do You Want What I Got?, which was funny, smart and really well-executed. And it wasn’t just whimsy–there was meaning behind it too, that eternal story of the human condition, looking for connection in a crazy world. The show runs until March 3, and I’d urge anyone who can to check it out in the meantime.
There is a point beyond this, however, and it is what I take away from all of this in my position as literary critic/book reviewer. Now, Do You Want What Have Got? has received excellent reviews, but I’m always amazed by the criticisms that manage to turn up whenever I read a review of a play I loved. “How could the critic have noticed that?” I wonder. “Of all the things to focus on…” I think that criticism is really important, essential even, but part of me that feels that critics miss out on the unified experience, that they never get the pleasure of fidgeting in a seat and thinking, “We are at a play!!” It takes so much more to wow a critic, and that’s the critic’s loss.
But not entirely, of course. Being ill-informed and therefore wowed by mediocrity is really nothing to be proud of, and it’s probably better to be eternally dissatisfied. But still. I think critics have to strike a balance, to understand how the common reader/theatre-goer will be greeting the experience, what that impact will be. And I think the critic has to hold on to that wonder, that sense of, “Holy cow! This is art! I am lucky to be here.”
February 20, 2013
The Rosedale Hoax by Rachel Wyatt
“We started out, if you want to begin at the beginning…, an army of professional people, branching out to change things, in this lousy city, to make it great. All of our cells were full of energy. Each of us was a mass of creativity and talent. We were going to do great things as young men and women dream of… Maybe the tall buildings were too much for us because now we walk along long streets, carrying our briefcases with our heads bowed, to talk to each other across polished tables… The gold and silver skyscrapers are very new and quite beautiful but they distort the images of everything around them. You’d think, wouldn’t you, that our daily feet, give us this day our daily feet, beating the same tracks would have worn the sidewalk to a groove….” –Rachel Wyatt, The Rosedale Hoax (Published by House of Anansi in 1977).
More than two years after I read it for the first time, Amy Lavender Harris’ Imagining Toronto continues to play a huge role in my reading life, and has led to so many amazing literary discoveries. It was because of Harris’ book that I noticed The Rosedale Hoax by Rachel Wyatt in the pile at a used book sale a year or so back. And it was probably also the reason too why I became intrigued by Wyatt’s 2012 novel Suspicion, which I enjoyed very much last summer (and decided was the Canadian version of Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl). In my review, I wrote, “Suspicion is a literary trick masquerading as a great suspense novel, a story with meta-elements in which characters must reconcile the fact that they’ve become characters.” More than 30 years before, The Rosedale Hoax had taken a similar approach, but satirizing upper-crust Toronto instead of small-town life, and with characters who are all too ready to cast themselves in the story of their lives.
I had some difficulty settling into The Rosedale Hoax, mostly because Wyatt casts her reader straight into the deep end, does not go to great lengths to delineate context, and takes great joy in language and its tricks. The first sentence of the novel is, “On the wall opposite was a picture of Elsa as Miss Niagara Wholesome Fruit 1967.” Elsa is the mistress of Bob Ferrand, nuclear engineer whose career is being held-up by government bureaucracy (turns out the Ontario government has been less than determined about power plants for awhile now), and whose marriage to the wonderful Martha has grown stale. Bob is the son of a peach farmer who has married well, and is raising his family in the same Rosedale home his wife grew up in. Ever conscious of his status as outsider, Bob seeks solace (and stems boredom) in sex with the former Miss Niagara Wholesome Fruit who lives in an apartment around the corner. He comes home in early morning light before his wife returns from her night shift as doctor at the hospital emergency room. Unbeknownst to Bob, though, his odd comings and goings are being spied by his peculiar poetess neighbour who has decided to take him as her lover. And there are other, even stranger forces at work–blackmail letters are turning up in the milk box and Bob becomes convinced that the mailman is the culprit, or the milkman, or the paperboy.
Anyway, about midway through, I was enjoying the ride, and found The Rosedale Hoax to be completely hilarious. I love that the 82 year-old Wyatt could release two novels decades apart that are both so very much of their time (and yet the older one not even remotely dated). There is a dark humour and deep sense of whimsy running through both books. A fantastic use of different voices too–it is not surprising that Wyatt has spent most of her career writing for radio. I’ll be keeping an eye out for her other novels, and you should defintely look out for this one.
February 19, 2013
My review in The Rusty Toque
I am very excited to have a review appear in the new issue of The Rusty Toque, because it puts me in good company, and because I get to go about literary criticism at length. From my review of Alix Ohlin’s books Signs and Wonders and Inside:
“Read enough of Alix Ohlin’s new novel and the word “inside” becomes conspicuous, begins to assume invisible italics everywhere you spy it. For example, in the following sentence: By this point, it’s impossible to review either of Alix Ohlin’s new books inside a vacuum.
Ohlin’s novel, titled Inside, was nominated for the 2012 Scotiabank Giller Prize and the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize, and even endorsed by Oprah. On the flipside of all the hype, both Inside and Ohlin’s short story collection Signs And Wonders were the subject of a spectacularly nasty review in the New York Times, critic William Giraldi declaring Ohlin’s use of language to be “intellectually inert, emotionally untrue and lyrically asleep.” Borrowing the “immortal coinages” of a few dead men and employing clichés of his own, Giraldi takes care to define Literature proper and situates Inside far outside its bounds. (I will cease with the italics now, but you see what I mean.)
So the reviewer encounters these books now with an awkward self-consciousness, and, though Inside and Signs and Wonders both deserve to be considered in their own rights, each book as a self-contained universe, the world beyond can’t help creeping in.”
Read the rest here.
February 17, 2013
Capital by John Lanchester
I wanted to read John Lanchester’s novel Capital partly because I enjoy his writing in the London Review of Books, but mostly because Matt Kavanagh’s review of the book in The Globe & Mail made me crazy. This paragraph in particular:
[Capital] gets off to an ingenious start, prompted by the realization that “houses had become so valuable to people who already lived in them, and so expensive for people who had recently moved into them, that they had become central actors in their own right.” For a culture where mortgages are equivalent to a secularized notion of fate (whether you believe in a kindly God or a cruel one depends entirely on the movement of interest rates), Lanchester’s insight is the basis for a revitalized social novel that reveals how the abstract realm of economic relations structure everyday experience.
Have neither Kavanagh nor Lanchester himself ever read an English novel? Particularly those with such central characters as Pemberley, Thornfield Hall, Wuthering Heights, or Brideshead? Even Darlington Hall, or Hundreds Hall more recently. How about Howards End? And speaking of a “social novel that reveals how the abstract realm of economic relations structure everyday experience”, how about Howards End again? Or Pride and Prejudice? Not an English novel, but the best contemporary novel I’ve read yet to deal with the 2008 financial meltdown is Anne Enright’s The Forgotten Waltz, a novel which is profoundly about real estate, but then what novel isn’t? (I love this line from Enright’s book: “You think it’s about sex, then you remember the money…”) And not a novel at all, but what about Three Guineas? A Room of One’s Own? Abstract realm indeed.
Kavanagh’s review was as irksome as it was familiar, a critic lauding a male writer for venturing into female territory (because what is a novel about houses than “domestic fiction” after all?) and declaring that territory still yet to be explored. I wanted to read Lanchester’s book in order to understand if anything new was really at work here, and also because it seemed like the kind of novel I would probably enjoy.
“…immensely enjoyable, but important too.” So goes Claire Messud’s blurb on the novel’s back cover, and she’s right on both accounts if we assume “important” to mean, “notable non-fiction writer makes up tales based on current events”. The “enjoyable” part is pretty straightforward, Capital being a novel that is not altogether novel and which relies on traditional narrative shapes and patterns. Its heft is mainly in page count only (500), and the pages fly by in this story of colliding, disparate and parallel lives. They mainly take place on Pepys Road, a street in London whose homes were built in 19th century to cater to lower middle-class families but which had become, in the 21st century, residences for the rich: “The thing which made them rich was the very fact that they lived in Pepys Road. They were rich simply because of that, because all the houses in Pepys Road, as if by magic, were now worth millions of pounds.”
The residents include the Younts, Arabella and her husband Roger who works for a bank in The City and begins the novel urgently calculating the likelihood of his million pound bonus, whose acquisition has become vital in order for the family to sustain their extravagant lifestyle. At the other end of the scale is Petunia Howe, in her 80s and growing frail, her daughter struggling with an awareness that her mother’s death is going to make her a very wealthy woman. In between them live an African footballer, a family of Pakistani immigrants who run and live above the corner shop, and coming and going are the Polish builder (who is hired three times by Arabella Yount to paint the same wall a different shade of white), the Hungarian nanny, and the Zimbabwean traffic warden who is working illegally.
Kavanagh’s analysis of Capital is interesting when he remarks that the book “seems to ignore the lesson of [Lanchester’s earlier non-fiction book] I.O.U.: However individualistic our culture may be, the financial crisis reveals that we’re all in this together. The novel’s characters seem oddly unaffected by one another, particularly in their encounters with others outside their own station.” The characters in Capital only come together briefly for a community meeting after a strange campaign involving somebody leaving postcards on every doorstep with images of each of the houses on Pepys Road, marked with the note, “We Want What You Have”. Someone is photographing the houses, and also filming them, posting the images on the internet, and the residents of Pepys Road are uncomfortable with this attention. (“They love it… It’s that great British middle-class battle cry: “Something must be done!”… They’ll stop at nothing once they get their indignation going… It gives them an excuse to talk about property prices. It’s the only time they’re ever allowed to talk openly about money, so it’s no wonder it gets them excited.” )
Lanchester’s observations about the English and their peculiarities are one of this novel’s great charms, particularly as seen through the eyes of the book’s non-English characters. The trouble, however, is that rather than functioning as actual characters, Lanchester’s people are so forced to stand for England proper that they are types instead of individuals. No one ever takes a ride on a train or in a car without conjecturing about city and nation flying by outside the window. Everything here is functioning on a grander scale.
Capital is a novel that calls to mind the works of Zadie Smith, partly because it revisits ideas of a multicultural England and also of religious extremism that she wrote about in her first novel White Teeth. But also because Capital is similar in approach to Smith’s latest novel NW. While NW was a novel as flawed as it was ambitious, its reach counts for something. Smith understood that to write a novel which recreates a city, the shape of the novel itself would have to be recreated too, pushed further beyond the linear, the grid of well-drawn careful streets. She understood further that for a novel to truly encompass the diversity of characters she was writing about, she would need to employ a similar diversity of narrative styles. The shape of the world of Lanchester’s illegally-employed traffic warden, for example, would have to be vastly different from the well-born City banker. While both walk the same streets, those streets are not the same at all to each character, and moreover, their paces differ, as does their language, the rhythm of their thoughts and ideas.
For Capital to be successful as a piece of literature instead of merely “enjoyable and important”, Lanchester would have had to demonstrate this narrative divide, and he doesn’t even attempt to. Though it is possible that his novel is more enjoyable for the lapse, from the point of view of anyone who loves an absorbing and unchallenging read, but for this reason and others, Capital is certainly less important than we’ve been lead to believe.
February 15, 2013
Valentines Aftermath
I really do love my Valentine. Our plan was to celebrate tonight with dinner out and tickets to “Do You Want What I Have Got? A Craigslist Cantata”. It has been a wild week, what with the excitement of the book deal announcement, me finishing a draft of another project that has owned my life for the past six weeks, and the most atrocious day of parenthood on Wednesday that left me in tears and in despair at what we’d wrought on the world by delivering it this child. I’m starting to lose my second-trimester thunder, and fatigue is creeping in–my midwife appoints now becoming biweekly! Terrifying! Further, it ocurred to me suddenly on Wednesday evening that it is February, which never really kicks in until halfway through but when it does, the month is hard to beat. February can make everything seem quite unbearable, no matter how much loveliness is going around. Once I realized it was February though, everything seemed better. It wasn’t all me after all.
We’ve been in the market for new bedroom furniture, a queen-size bed in case the new baby decides to bunk in with us, because a double bed doesn’t cut it for such things, plus I recently found the receipt for our mattress which we bought in 2005 when we were so so poor and it cost us $200! (I remember at the time thinking it was very expensive, and so it’s no surprise that it’s not holding up so well 8 years later.) This week, I found a Craigslist ad from a woman who was selling her entire bedroom suite for a very reasonable prize, so we booked the Autoshare Cargo van (and a babysitter) and went to pick it up last night. Not a very romantic Valentines, we supposed, carrying a bedframe, two bedside tables, and two dressers out of a condo building, and then up the two flights of stairs into our bedroom. But now we had a bedroom suite! Furniture that matches! I never imagined such a thing was even a possibility. We still have to buy a boxspring and a new mattress, our house is in complete disarray, and if anyone wants to pick up a bed that my mom bought at a farm auction in 1976, I’m your man! But we love the new furniture.
We hauled the furniture inside, and supposed the worst of the night was done, but it actually turned out to be just the beginning. Harriet woke up screaming with a problem I’m not going to get into, but google searches provided no answers, and so we opted to take her to the hospital. We were only there for two hours, but as ever, a trip to the Hospital for Sick Children provides enormous perspective ie the child in line ahead of us whose parents feared was rejecting her transplanted liver. It was the first of all our annual visits to the hospital too where I wasn’t imagining terrible scenarios that would require us to be in the hospital for weeks at a time. I knew she was fine. Our visit was unpleasant, but to be borne (so bravely by our little one too), and we were home in two hours. Walking out of that place with my healthy girl in my arms remains the greatest luxury of my entire existence, even more so than matching bedside tables.
Anyway, my point was that from a tactical standpoint, our Valentines Day was a romantic disaster. Worst night ever. But it wasn’t, actually, because we were in it together, hauling enormous dressers or entertaining Harriet in the waiting room with a pen and an elastic band. As I said to my beloved Valentine this morning, “There is not a road that I wouldn’t be willing to walk down with you.”
February 13, 2013
After Claude by Iris Owens
“‘…Harriet, Harriet,” she moaned, and it passed through my mind that of all the countless treacheries my mother had perpetuated, naming me Harriet was the most infamous.” (p. 62)
“I can’t describe how impossible it is to pronounce the name Harriet to a hidden audience. When you say it, you need to deal on the spot with the listener’s reactions. To call a child Harriet is to condemn her to mediocrity.” (p. 146)
Of all the literary Harriets, I do believe that Iris Owens’ is my favourite. In her novel After Claude, Owens’ has created an unlikeable female character who manages to be irresistible. Which is amazing, but more than that, she isn’t stupid, or scattered, or zany, and not once does Iris Owens’ Harriet fall off a chair. Here is a rare thing: a comic heroine who does not embody silliness. Which isn’t to say that Harriet is mentally stable, exactly, and she’s certainly not as smart as she thinks she is, but then that is setting a high standard for anyone. Further: she suffers precisely NO self-esteem issues. To be fair, she could probably afford to take on one or two, but how refreshing that she never does. That she’s utterly un-neurotic.
How does Owens do it? I can’t figure it out exactly. I’ve thought a lot in my time about unsympathetic female characters, and how little us readers can bear them. That we’re so much harder on the women than the men who fall into the loser-lit genre. Part of it could possibly be that Owens gives us just a few days in the life of her Harriet so we can bear her that long, and moreover that we can discern that underneath of veneer or self-assurance (and really, it’s a voice that wins you over to it) that Harriet is absolutely powerless. She gets as bad as she gives. As was Jim in Lucky Jim, just say, whereas the unlikeable characters in Christine Pountney’s The Best Way You Know How or Kate Christensen’s In the Drink, for example, were characters with enough agency who’d just squandered it by being irresponsible, by making stupid decisions, by having dreams of Bohemian grandeur that don’t add up to much. Perhaps the problem with female loser-lit is that authors are rarely brave enough to situate their character at rock bottom.
“I left Claude, the French rat,” the book begins, and a careful reader will note a wide gulf between Harriet’s perception of matters and what appears to be reality. We figure out quickly from various cues that Harriet is a parasite, lazy and irresponsible, a person who makes up her own history as she goes along. She’s spent the last six months living with her boyfriend Claude, but he’s had enough and wants her out. He’d first encountered her crying on the doorstep of their building after the friend she’d been staying with the on the first floor had tossed all her belongings out the window (after Harriet had snuck a strange man into the friend’s bed to enact a rape fantasy. Clearly with Harriet, no explanation is ever straightforward). She’d spent a period of time in Europe which she attempts to define herself by, though it’s clear that some kind of similar drama to the others is what had sent her back home to America. And now Claude wants to be rid of her, but Harriet’s not budging, even going as far as to get the locks changed, which is far for Harriet who can’t usually summon the initiative to get out of bed.
Oh, she is horrible and scathing, one of those people who calls the world as she sees it. Likes like this like, about her friend, the former roommate, “How often I used to tell her, ‘Rhoda, stop brooding about your size. Having a perfect figure may be a blessing but believe me, it’s not the only thing in life. A saint may come along who is not primarily concerned with with proportions, but when he does, if you drag him in here, be prepared to administer mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.'” There was just something about the voice that won me over, lines like, “Unless he had magically transformed himself into a book of matches stuck to my ass, he was definitely not in the bed.” Humour, as always, is a relative thing, but I found After Claude absolutely hilarious.
Harriet is one of those women Caitlin Moran writes about in How to Be a Woman, a woman who enacts entire relationships in her mind, except that in her mind, Harriet has reinvented the entire world. Her point of view nearly unbudging–that she is is smarter than everybody around her, envied, beautiful, and that she’s going places even when she’s stopped. And it’s true that many of the people around her are so obnoxious that you start to see her point, that she looks good on them, really. Harriet is so sure of herself that the reader can almost believe it.
But not quite, however much we’d like to. The novel’s final third takes place at the Chelsea Hotel where Claude has finally been rid of Harriet, and she falls into strange company across the hall, an odd party populated by members of a cult and she latches onto their leader as she does to every single man she ever encounters, and he gets the better of her, but not without giving her something in return. The novel ends with Harriet back in her room in her single bed: “I had no thoughts, only a dim awareness of myself listening and waiting.” Which is actually the strongest awareness of herself that Harriet has ever shown us that she has.
Iris Owens’ biography contains the detail that she was “the daughter of a professional gambler”. She made her reputation as a pornographer writing under the name “Harriet Daimler” for the Olympia Press in Paris during the 1950s. After Claude, published in 1973, is one of two novels she published under her own name, and the other was based upon her marriage to an Iranian Prince. So that is Owens, who is anything but boring, and I promise you that her novel is even more ever so much so.
February 11, 2013
News!! Truth, Dare, Double Dare: Coming in April 2014
I started talking about motherhood three and a half years ago, joining a conversation that I’d never supposed could be so absorbing, perplexing, and reflective of larger issues and politics. And as I talked about motherhood more and more, it began to occur to me how alienating was that conversation to so many other women, whether they were mothers themselves, or had wanted to be, or had become mothers in ways that were less than straightforward, or had never wanted to be mothers at all. I started to see how the motherhood conversation was not nearly wide enough to encompass women’s diverse experiences of motherhood, and maternal things. I began to see how understanding the various relationships that women have to motherhood could tell us a lot about about women’s lives today, the real nature of “choice”, and how far feminism has brought us (or not, in some cases).
It all started with my friends, really, whose experiences of infertility, adoption, abortion, maternal ambivalence, miscarriage, being child-free were so absolutely ordinary in so many ways, but were also represented as being far outside the bounds of the motherhood conversation. I wondered if there was a way that these experiences could be included in a broadened conversation, along with stories of stepmothering, grandmothering, single motherhood, other relationships with children that weren’t necessarily biological, having many children, having only one, having children die, worrying about having children die, exercising choice, or having choice taken away from you.
It was last December when I was talking about this with my friend Amy Lavender Harris, and she said, “This would make a really good anthology.” That night, I got to work emailing women writers I knew whose stories fit the bill. I spent last winter and spring contacting writers, so many of whom responded with complete support for this project. I spent the summer writing my own piece (over four amazing days at the Wychwood Library, during which I listened to “Call Me Maybe” on repeat) and was constantly aglow with the idea that all over this country were brilliant women were busily at work creating this book with me. They sent me their essays and they were wonderful, and I spent late-summer and Fall putting the pieces all together.
And now I am happy to report that the news is official. Our book, Truth, Dare, Double Dare: Stories of Motherhood will be published in April 2014 by Goose Lane Editions, whose people have been as supportive of this project as I could have dreamed of. Key champion has been my agent Samanatha Haywood–I feel so lucky to have her in my corner. And my mind has been blown by the generosity and brilliance of the women who came together to make this book possible: Heather Birrell, Julie Booker, Diana Fitzgerald Bryden, Myrl Coulter, Christa Couture, Heather Cromarty, Nancy-Jo Cullen, Marita Dachsel, Ariel Gordon, Amy Lavender Harris, Alexis Kienlen, Fiona Tinwei Lam, Michele Landsberg, Deanna McFadden, Maria Meindl, Saleema Nawaz, Susan Olding, Alison Pick, Heidi Reimer, Kerry Ryan, Sarah Yi-Mei Tsiang, Carrie Snyder, Patricia Storms, Zoe Whittall and Julia Zarankin. Each of these writers has underlined the one thing I’ve always been sure of, which is that women are absolutely amazing.
