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.
*
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.
July 6, 2023
ASKING FOR A FRIEND Book Trailer REVEALED!
I’m so excited to share my very first book trailer for Asking for a Friend, which Stuart and I had the most fun creating together back in the spring. I hope that it makes you extra excited to read the book and that you’re even moved enough to share it with your own networks! Two more months until everybody gets to meet Clara and Jess!
June 26, 2023
Most Anticipated: AFAF is 20% off at Indigo this week!
Is there a nicer way to kick off the week than with the news that ASKING FOR A FRIEND is part of @indigo’s MOST ANTICIPATED CANADIAN BOOKS promotion with pre-orders on sale for 20% off until July 2?
I DON’T BELIEVE THERE IS!!
Out September 5 from @doubledayca, now’s your chance to support it with your pre-order and get a sweet deal in the process.
I am so excited for readers to fall in love with Clara and Jess!
“This novel is like the best kind of friend: honest, wise, complicated, endearing, smart—and Kerry Clare as a writer is all these things, too. What a poignant, observant tribute—and elegy—to the life sustaining force that is friendship between women. Clare sees it so clearly: the way friendship can be a love story, complete with heartbreak and redemption. I plan to share this book with my dearest friends, all the while marvelling at how lucky I am to have them, and how much better a place the world is with Clare’s books in it.” —Marissa Stapley, New York Times bestselling author of Lucky
June 23, 2023
Happy Birthday, Clarence Thomas?
Before last June, it had never occurred to me that Clarence Thomas had a birthday. That he had not, in fact, emerged into the world middle aged, sitting in a room crowded with concerned-seeming people who pronounced “harassment” in surprising ways while telling stories about pubic hairs left on pop cans that were bewildering to my 12-year-old ears, and that I don’t understand any better today.
But it turns out that Clarence Thomas’s birthday is today, June 23, and also the day before mine, which I discovered the morning I turned 43 while hanging out sheets on my clothesline and listening to @mollyjongfast on her political podcast right before I got the terrible news that the US Supreme Court had ended abortion access for millions of Americans.
Happy Birthday, Clarence Thomas…I guess??
Thanks to @shedoesthecity for publishing my essay on the devastation of Roe vs. Wade falling one year ago, but also about how it made me realize how my new novel (ASKING FOR A FRIEND, forthcoming from @doubledayca on September 5) had to end.
June 8, 2023
AFAF Mood Board: Part Three
Time for mood board number 3 for ASKING FOR A FRIEND, coming September 5 from @doubledayca. This instalment takes us through 2006-2007 as Jess and Clara find themselves back on the same continent for the first time in years, but worlds apart in so many other ways, Rihanna’s “Umbrella,” playing low on the radio in the background: “Said I’ll always be your friend, took an oath gonna stick it out to the end.”
Save the date for a Toronto launch on September 6!!
April 26, 2023
AFAF Mood Board: Part Two
Mood Board 2 for Asking for a Friend, my new novel coming from Doubleday Canada on September 5! These images are inspired by the novel’s third and fourth chapters in which Jess and Clara begin to make their respective ways in the world after having lived a life entwined throughout their early 20s. How are they supposed to be themselves without each other?
Asking for a Friend is available for pre-order from your favourite bookseller!
April 6, 2023
AFAF Mood Board: Part One
Yesterday marks five months before the release of my new novel, and to celebrate, I’m sharing a mood board for opening chapter, set from 1998-2000. So excited to share this book with you!
March 22, 2023
Asking for a Friend: Cover Revealed!
I am beyond thrilled to finally be sharing with you the gorgeous cover for my new novel, ASKING FOR A FRIEND, coming September 5, 2023, from Doubleday Canada, designed by the talented Lisa Jager. It’s the cover of my wildest dreams, encompassing two of my favourite things, extravagant sunsets and SWIMMING, and it’s such a wonderful encapsulation of this story, which I’m so looking forward to sharing with the world.
You can preorder your copy now at the SHOP LOCAL link at my publisher’s homepage, or at your favourite bookseller. Stay tuned for preorder goodies and launch plans.
January 13, 2023
235 Days
235 days until Asking for a Friend is released! And in the meantime, my previous novels are still out there in the world, being read, and (in one case) wearing a moustache. Thank you to everybody who’s reading and sharing.
