October 6, 2023
Watch My Author Visit to the Cobourg Public Library!
October 3, 2023
Shelf Love
Everything about this photo charms me, which was probably quite deliberate on the part of staff of Pages on Kensington in Calgary who’ve arranged the shelf so carefully by colour. Thanks to Alyssa P. who sent me the photo!
September 20, 2023
The Long Game
In late 2009, a pregnant friend of mine purchased a baby carrier that was a different brand and model than the one I’d recommended—I’d had a baby for five months at the time, and knew everything—and I was devastated. And not just because my hard-won advice had been passed over either, but because I knew that my friend and her child would suffer the consequences of this choice, and the stakes were just so high. Which is ridiculous, but also it wasn’t, because becoming a mother had blown my universe to tiny pieces and there were these certainties I had to cling to in the chaos, or else I’d have nothing to hold onto and be wholly lost in space.
I thought of this last week as I watched the inevitable online furor in response to a cover story in New York Magazine with the headline “Why Can’t Our Friendship Survive Your Baby?” I actually wasn’t very interested in the article, because I’ve been so bored for so long by how women with children and women without them are pitted against each that I edited an entire anthology about it (The M Word: Conversations About Motherhood, published by Goose Lane Editions in 2014), but the friendship angle was interesting to me because I’d just the week before published my fourth book, Asking for a Friend, which is all about how experiences of motherhood (and pregnancy, and abortion, and miscarriage, and infertility) can make friendships so fraught.
And not least because new mothers can be more than a little nuts (and I’m speaking for myself here—but I know I’m not the only one). It all can seem so personal. Case in point, my upset about the baby carrier (Team Baby Trekker for the win!), but also any debate over breast versus bottle, sleep training or attachment parenting, cry it out or (you, personally) crying it out. The best thing about my kids being older now is that we’re beyond most of all that (and guess what?! Almost none of matters!), though there are new tensions—what age do we let our kids have phones, for example. Or that I am relatively comfortable with my low-stress approach to my children’s education, but sometimes when I see the cars lined for pickup at the intensive after-school math program in my neighbourhood, I wonder how we’ll ever know for sure if we’re doing it right.
One of the epigraphs to Asking for a Friend comes from Erin Wunker’s Notes from a Feminist Killjoy, a line that, when I read it, articulated something I’ve been struggling with for always. “Is it to hard to write your own narrative and witness another’s, simultaneously? …Is that why some friendships between women crash into each other, noses pressed against glass, waving with wild recognition at the person on the other side, and then recede with the same force? Too much, too close, too similar, too uncanny?” (The other epigraph comes from a poem from Erin Noteboom’s new collection A knife so sharp its edges can’t be seen, that poem beginning with “What things are lost? / Many. Most. And those that make it,/ spared by chance…”)
I think that what I’m trying to say is that it’s amazing that any friendship survives at all, and that there are sometimes gulfs among friends who have children that are just as insurmountable as those between people with kids and those without them.
Ann Friedman phrased this so beautifully in her newsletter last week where she wrote:
“The kids question” is not a binary choice, but a complex and personal orientation that is also fluid—likely to shift over the course of a lifetime.
The term also helps me understand why phases of life when many of us are in the throes of working out our reproductive identities (um, our entire 30s?) can feel so stressful between friends. It’s rare for any two reproductive identities to be identical, even when the surface-level choice appears the same. Calling it an “identity” really captures how deep the feelings go, and how tectonic the shifts feel. How hard we have to work to understand and be understood.
“How hard we have to work to understand and be understood.” That’s the crux of it, right? That female friendship isn’t easy, regardless of whatever a particular friend happens to be going through, though there are some women who find it easier just to opt out altogether (“It would have been so easy to count the ways I’d been betrayed by girls… It was not that way with men,” was the line in How Should a Person Be? where Sheila Heti lost me altogether). But behind that hard work, all the doing, the fraughtness and the tension, there lies the richness, in being seen and known and understood, especially by people who themselves have made different choices and live in different circumstances.
Or maybe I’ve always known…that friendship is a long game. That sometimes one friend is going to require more generosity and understanding than the other. That you can’t grade a lifelong friendship based on one year’s performance. That it is deeply rewarding to have friends who lead very different lives than you do.
One of the infinite number of wonderful things about being in my forties now is finally beginning to see how the long game is going to play out, realizing just how much staying the course is actually worth it, and how much all those early tensions—as we were becoming ourselves—would really cease to matter at all. And yes, being seen and known can be as agonizing as it is rewarding, but the true reward—of course—lies in the company we get to keep.
September 18, 2023
Hamilton!
NEXT WEEK! Purchase tickets now!
Join us for a captivating evening with acclaimed Canadian authors Marina Endicott and Kerry Clare, hosted by CFUW Hamilton in collaboration with Epic Books and Penguin Random House Canada.
Doors open at 6:30 with live music. At 7:00 Jill Downie will lead a lively discussion about the new books, The Observer by Marina Endicott and Asking for a Friend by Kerry Clare.
This will be followed by an author meet-and-greet where you will have a chance to buy signed copies of the books.
You will be supporting education through scholarships to students attending McMaster University and Mohawk College. All proceeds go to CFUW Scholarship Fund.
September 7, 2023
AFAF is Launched!
Thank you to everyone who attended my launch last night at the Lillian H. Smith Library. It was an extraordinary night, everything I wanted, and this whole week has been joyful and fun.
September 1, 2023
Book Club Kit!
I’m very excited to share the ASKING FOR A FRIEND digital book club kit, created by my excellent team at Doubleday Canada. It includes discussion questions, a yummy recipe, a playlist, further reading suggestions and a heartfelt letter from ME! I do think this novel would make for a perfect book club kit—you will most likely end up actually talking about the book!
August 28, 2023
AFAF a Chatelaine Fall Pick!
I’m overjoyed to find Asking for a Friend selected as one of Chatelaine’s Fall book picks—in excellent company! Pick up a copy at your local newsstand.
August 10, 2023
It Takes Two Giveaway
🎶 When the sun shines, we’ll shine together…🎶
So here’s the coolest #giveaway YET for ASKING FOR A FRIEND (which drops in 26 days!!).
It’s a giveaway for a very special group of readers, and altogether fitting for a book about BFFs….
Are you buying TWO copies of the novel so that you can pass along the spare to your bestie??
(Or your sister, or your cousin, or your yoga teacher, or your open minded grandpa??)
If you are, DM or email me your proof of purchase and you’ll be entered in a draw to win this gorgeous pair of bookmarks for each of you (designed and created by @breezyknots!)!!
If you’ve already preordered one copy and plan on picking up a second at one of my events this fall (in Toronto, Peterborough, Hamilton, Uxbridge, and more tba!!) that’s also VERY EXCELLENT, or if you’re planning to grab your pair at one of the events and support an awesome indie bookseller, that’s great too! Just drop me a note and let me know, and you’ll be added to the draw!!
Contest runs into the end of August!!
IT TAKES TWO, BABY!!
August 4, 2023
Something Borrowed Parts 1&2
SOMETHING BORROWED is a new feature I’m going to be sharing in the (six!) weeks left before the launch of my new novel, ASKING FOR A FRIEND (coming September 5 from @doubledayca).
Though STOLEN GOODS could also be a not entirely unsuitable name…but art is more charitable than that, I think, and influence is everywhere.
In ASKING FOR A FRIEND, I’ve BORROWED from Laurie Colwin, one of my literary lodestars, the notion of a somewhat preposterous cultural institute. In Colwin’s HAPPY ALL THE TIME. it’s the Magna Charta Foundation, the Morris family trust where Guido works. Similar institutes pop up in her other stories, convenient ways to occupy her quirky characters but not to have them so occupied that they need to be confined to a desk all day.
In ASKING FOR A FRIEND, Jess was originally a teacher. Not having had a proper job myself since 2009 (and even that one was more like a Laurie Colwin job than a real one—I was hired as a researcher for a project that never happened), I am not GREAT at writing work, but in order to have them seem like realized human beings, you’ve got to give your fictional people something to occupy their time with. And then, for a variety of reasons, Jess being a teacher wasn’t working out, and I was rereading HAPPY ALL THE TIME at that point, and decided to take a few Colwinesque liberties. I invented the Charlotte Nordstrom Institute for Folk and Fairy Tales, very loosely based on the Osborne Collection of Early Children’s Books housed at the Lillian H. Smith Library (and I swear its petty office grievances are PURELY fictional. So is its carpet.)
Funnest Fact: My book is launching at the Lillian H. Smith Library on Wednesday September 6! Stay tuned for more details…
Giving Jess work at the Nordstrom Institute was a lot of fun, allowing me to weave in my experience working in libraries, as well as the novel’s recurring fairy tale themes and motifs, all the while playing with workplace/office politics and dynamics, just the way that Colwin does.
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I’m excited to share with you the second instalment of my SOMETHING BORROWED series, in which I share the things I’ve borrowed/STOLEN for my new novel, ASKING FOR A FRIEND.
Most obviously, I’ve stolen the setting for Jess and Clara’s apartment from the real apartment I shared with my friends many years ago, although I’ve cut a couple of rooms out, and changed the raccoon that got into the upstairs bedroom into a family of squirrels (with much more destruction—raccoons are pretty laidback as home invaders go). I’ve borrowed the way the golden light shone through the south facing kitchen window, and the incredible sense of home these friends created which I was so lucky to be a part of.
Weirdly, our apartment, for a period, was turned into a museum, though not until many years after we’d moved out, but it hadn’t changed much in the interim, and my novel too is a kind of museum preserving this curious and essential moment in place and time.
Something else I’ve borrowed is a line from the book which was something my very wise friend, Dr. Rebecca Dolgoy, said to me a few years ago, which was, “The children you have make any other world impossible.” She gave me her permission to use that line, for which she’s credited in my acknowledgements.
“The children you have make any other world impossible.” I think maybe the very same thing can be said about good friends.
PS Rebecca is now a Curator at an ACTUAL museum (Ingenium, in Ottawa!), whose collections include the world’s most ancient sample of flowing water. Sadly, they do not store it in a Gabe Kaplan goblet.
