June 21, 2024

What a Gathering!

Wednesday night was ✨✨MAGIC✨✨ Thank you to The Gather Society for making ASKING FOR A FRIEND part of your beautiful event at The Daughter Wine Bar that was all about nurturing women’s connections. I had the pleasure of saying a few words at the mic and mentioned all the connections that would be sparked during the evening, and also the fascinating hidden ways in which many of us were connected already—and during my book signing I got to discover a few of these, like Danielle from @thechefupstairs whose charity online cooking class was one of the highs of the pandemic lows for our family, and @stephstwist who it turns out is my neighbour and is opening her bakery just minutes from my house! (Plus my best friend of 30+ years was in attendance!) A whole bunch of brand new connections were fostered last night as well, and everyone went home with a copy of Jess and Clara’s story, which is all about the way events of a single evening can stitch two lives together. Erin, Emily and ESPECIALLY Kirsten @perfectlyimperfectsocial (who elevates to an art form being a human on the internet and whose support of my novel has been such a gift), once again, you made something extraordinary happen. I’m in awe, and so grateful.

June 21, 2024

Hello, City

During the pandemic, when nobody knew what was what, we’d stopped riding transit, and took over the empty streets of downtown on our bicycles, taking the St. George/Beverly bike lanes down to Queen, and then down Peter toward the waterfront, a mostly breezy journey except for the hill above Front Street where we’d cross over the railway tracks and around the Sky Dome, and then we’d arrive at the big plaza, where people never were, and we were able to ride on the sidewalks because no one else was using them, and that was pretty fun, even though nothing else was. And because we’d never cycled downtown before, I didn’t properly realize that it wasn’t always like this, that Peter Street was usually bananas, that my kids wouldn’t ordinarily be able to ride on the sidewalks as they pedal furiously to get up the hill, that the Sky Dome wasn’t actually a no man’s land. In the summer of 2022, when my kids were out of town, my husband and I rode our bikes all the way out to Woodbine Beach and back again, and needed to stop for a break at the Sky Dome before we’d hauled our bikes up the hill and over the bridge, and a Blue Jays game had just ended. People were everywhere, in their caps and their jerseys, and there was so much joy, and it was the first time in literally years that I’d found myself in a crowded space and not felt threatened. Remember, this was 2022, just post “Freedom” convoy, their clown cars and pick-up trucks still parading through the city, mean-spirited with loud honks and screaming slogans. Our city did not endure the siege that Ottawa did, but I still carry stress and fear from that time (and I have some ideas about where you might stick your hockey-stick flagpole). But that afternoon in the plaza behind that Sky Dome, the vibe was good, and it felt great to be part of the city again.

And now, almost 2 years later, those empty streets seem almost impossible to fathom, I’m back to riding public transit with ease, and the public transit vibe has returned to something resembling normal too after a scary period of violent incidents. Twice in the past week, I’ve found myself aboard a subway train crowded with Blue Jays fans—people of all ages, races, genders—and it’s been the nicest thing, a reminder of how far we’ve come. And while Toronto certainly has its challenges—don’t try driving anywhere; and a decade and a half of terrible mayors hasn’t helped—it just feels so good to be here, for this to be home. Vibrant streets and busy restaurants and gorgeous parks and winding trails and BIKE LANES and verduous trees and museums and theatres and bookstores and farmer’s markets and beaches, and people, so many people, all of us complicit in this same city project, and—especially after a hard few years—I’m just so happy to be part of it.

May 10, 2024

Peacocks in Public

Raise your hand if you too are unable to resist the compulsion to stop any stranger in public you see reading or even just carrying a book you love in order to let them know—in case they didn’t already—JUST how good that book actually is.

But never before has the experience been quite as rich and rewarding as when I accosted @livingbyn_designs on Saturday night as she walked down Queen West bearing her newly purchased copy of PEACOCKS OF INSTAGRAM, a book that is not only THE best titled title of 2024, but also everything you’d hope a book with such a great title would be, as I found out in February when I read it for a podcast interview with its author, the talented @deerajagopalan (whose BOOKSPO episode goes up next week!).

The best thing about meeting Nila with her copy of PEACOCKS OF INSTAGRAM Is that she met all of my enthusiasm for this terrific book, and then even exceeded it, positively overflowing with pride and happiness at her friend having produced a book so terrific that strangers will stop you in the street to exalt its praises. I mean, JUST LOOK AT THE EXPRESSION ON HER FACE? Have you ever seen anything as awesome and real?

Our encounter was such a celebration of books and friendship and gorgeous summer nights, and it made me so happy, not least at seeing this book in the world for the very first time. Congratulations on your pub date, @deerajagopalan! I can’t wait to read PEACOCKS OF INSTAGRAM (again)!

(I posted this to Instagram this week, but wanted to add it to my blog for posterity!)

April 29, 2024

On Being Chosen

I’ve had a very fun and action-packed couple of weeks literary-wise that continues with tomorrow’s trip to Waterloo to interview Iona Whishaw about her latest Lane Winslow book. And a highlight was Thursday’s Biblio Bash at the Toronto Reference Library, a gala event at which I was invited to be a guest author. I’d attended once before in 2017 when my first novel came out, and the whole experience was intense, awesome, very overwhelming—plus I got my makeup done at the drug store and told them the look I was going for was “very dramatic” and ended up resembling a drag queen, and I’m still traumatized, no offence to drag queens. This time I had the benefit of hindsight and hired someone excellent to do my makeup, plus I’m about 300 years older than I used to be (pandemic effect) which meant I behaved with aplomb, looked quite fantastic, and drank so little that I woke up in the morning without a hangover, but still had lots of fun. It was a very good night and the Toronto Public Library Foundation raised more than a million dollars.

But I was cognizant through the entire process too that a big part of the experience (and one of its chief appeals, beyond the stunning portraits) was the feeling of being chosen. An exclusive event, an opportunity to mingle with the fancy people and wear a floor length gown. And I’ve been reflecting on this a lot, how much of the reality of publishing is often about the experiences of being chosen, or otherwise. Finishing your book, signing with an agent, getting a book deal, getting an impressive book deal, a book deal with a big press, becoming a bestseller, sustaining bestsellerdom, continuing that success with your next book, winning prizes, getting reviewed in all the best places, being “picked” by Oprah, Heather, Reese or Jenna, and on and on and on. And even when you get chosen on one level, there are all kinds of tiers and ways to still feel like you’ve been chosen (or that you’re falling short) and it’s all so urgent and arbitrary and so little of it (as with most things) is actually within any of our own control. Who gets to matter, to be important, and the pressure—even if you happen to be one of the ones—of staying on top, remaining relevant.

And all of it—it’s excruciating. I spent most of last fall feeling like such a failure, my self-worth so undermined by my latest novel’s failure to launch in the way I had envisioned—and thinking into the future, in which I might no longer be able to publish books at all, to be once again un-chosen by a publisher, and on one level, the stakes are negligible here, life goes on, but on the other, this is my career, and the thought of failure is just devastating once one has built their entire sense of self around the identity of not just being a writer, but one of those rarest of cases—a successful one.

There is a line from the Dar Williams song, “As Cool as I Am“, that I think (ugh!) I’m going to continue to be reminded of for the rest of my life: “And then I go outside to join the others; I am the others.” (You can even get a t-shirt!). So much of my own yearning to be chosen, to be validated, is to be offered proof that I am special and have worth. And of course I am special and have worth, by virtue of my existence as a human being, just like you do, but how to deal with that desire for distinction, for proof that I am not merely one of the others—it’s something else I’m figuring out at the age of almost-45, along with how to look good at a gala.

To accept that I am the others is realize that my sense of value and self-worth is intrinsic, rather than extrinsic, and that often nobody else is going to be see it but me, which means that I really have to know it, or no one will.

To quote another line from “As Cool as I Am”: “Oh, and that’s not easy.”

It’s really not, it’s so much easier to be seen by others than to see our ourselves as we really are, warts and all, and not even just accept it, but hold that reality as something worthy and sacred. It’s so much easier to share a photo of myself looking stunning at an exclusive shindig and have hundreds of people LIKE it than to sit with myself and know that this is all I’ll ever be.

But I’m working on it, little by little, building up a solid core, something unimpeachable.

March 15, 2024

Routine Interrupted

This message is coming to you from outside of routine in a variety of ways, the first being that it’s not due until the end of the month, but I’m spreading things out so that, going forward, my Pickle Me This Digest (a monthly compendium of my blog posts) arrives in inboxes mid-month, my essays come at month-end, subscribers don’t get end up forgetting about me, or getting fed up with all my newsletters arriving at once.

Because it’s not been long since my last Pickle Me This digest, this newsletter is shorter than usual, which is probably for the best since—also outside of routine—it’s March Break and my children are on holiday. I’m fitting my work into half-days and adventuring with my kids in the afternoons. We’ve been to see the Nature’s Superheroes Exhibit at the Royal Botanical Gardens in Burlington, to Leslieville for Queen East shenanigans (including a visit to Queen Books!), and to the Aga Khan Museum for the Night in the Garden of Love exhibit (it was so great—and so easy to get to on transit from the 100A bus from Broadview Station!). We also went to see The Mighty Ducks at Paradise Theatre. It’s been the perfect combination of low-key and FUN. (My specialty is stay-cation visits to places that are never crowded… ever since that one time I went to the Science Centre on a PA Day, a day that will live on infamy and that my daughters will be addressing with their therapists well into the next century…)

The most essential element of my routine being interrupted, however, is that I received this message in my email inbox last Tuesday:

It turned out that a light fixture crashed down from the ceiling over the pool deck, shattering glass all over the deck and into the pool itself. (Thankfully no one was hurt.)

Notices of pool closures “until further notice” have destroyed me in the past (as I wrote here, I blame that on a period of precarious mental health and having recently read The Swimmers, by Julia Otsuka), but I’m in a fairly stable place these days and also have a closed-pool contingency plan, which is the nearly brand new and incredible Wellesley Pool, just twenty-some minutes away from my house by public transit. That I’d be working half-days, however, meant I wouldn’t be able to swim during the day (which is my usual plan) and so I resolved to get up early and head west on the subway before sunrise*…even though this is the week the clocks have sprung forward so it’s even earlier than early. (I have never been a morning person.)

*Okay, about fifteen minutes before sunrise, but still.

I love swimming, but I’ve never had occasion to discover if I loved it enough to wake up before sunrise and take a ride on the subway. My usual pool is very conveniently situated halfway between my house and my child’s school, which means I pick her up every afternoon with my hair wet (this is why they invented hats!) and I don’t have to go out of my way to swim at all.

But it turns out that going out of my way, as I have this week, has not just wonderful, but even magical? Leaving the house while the sky is indigo (though it gets lighter and lighter with every passing day—the sun rose three minutes earlier today than it did on Monday). Getting on the subway when everything is still quiet, the city buzzing with a calm and quiet hum. All the most terrific communal aspects of public transit without the rush hour stress and fuss, humans at their most wonderfully human, today with spilled milky coffee spreading across the train floor like a Jackson Pollock painting, passengers engaged in a delicate dance to avoid it. And then a walk down Sherbourne Street, which is never dull, and arrival at a pool where anybody who wants to is welcome to swim for the free. The water is much cooler than at my usual pool, and it’s been refreshing, along with the swimming itself, an investment of energy that always pays back in dividends, the goodness I feel in my body for the rest of the day.

It has been wonderful and magical to discover a little surplus time in my day, especially during this season of daylight austerity; to realize that a little trip across the city is closer than I think; to connect with a neighbourhood and people who are new to me; to find out that I really do like swimming that much. I really do!

And I look forward to a return to my regular routine on Monday when the pool is scheduled to open again (fingers crossed) but I’ve enjoyed my time outside it very very much.

February 26, 2024

Reading and Writing

If you receive my newsletter (February edition went out last week!), then you already know that I’ve had a rich and fulfilling month in terms of reading and writing, and creating. And if you don’t receive my newsletter, well, you’re now officially up to date, since you’re already here on my blog and my newsletter is a digested version of my blog posts and book reviews anyway. EXCEPT for my new creative project of writing a long form essay every month, of course. (Last month’s was about the delights of rereading Danielle Steele—have you read it yet?) I have taken exquisite pleasure in writing these pieces, and my next one will be arriving in inboxes on THURSDAY. It’s called “In Praise of Pieces: Commonplace Books, Friendship Quotes, and Our Bookless Book Club” and I’m really excited to share it with you. As with last month’s essay, and like next month’s, these essays will be available for all subscribers, and thereafter for paid subscribers only. As I wrote in my newsletter, “I entered into this enterprise with the lowest expectations, with the intention of finding a different way to be online and channelling my thoughts and ideas into long-form projects whose composition seemed like it might help to further mend my brain after more than a decade of fragmentation on social media. And let me tell you, it has felt so good to write these longer pieces, so rich and satisfying. And it has felt even better to have so many of you become paid subscribers to receive these pieces.” Thanks to everybody who has read, shared, or supported. Challenging myself in this way has been so satisfying. It has also meant that I got to spend part of last week rereading Katherine Heiny’s EARLY MORNING RISER, because my March essay is going to be all about her work and what it means to me.

If you’re not on my newsletter list yet, you can sign up here.

January 31, 2024

Ritual

This week, for the second year in a row, my friend and I met for afternoon tea during the final days of January to celebrate having made it through the darkest season. A ritual that’s come about quite naturally—last year we wanted to have tea together and both appreciated how nice it had been to have something to look forward to when the sky was grey and the earth was frozen. I made a point of making it happen again this year because she picked up the bill last time and I wanted to return the favour. And this time we pondered where we’d like to be next year when we do it again, how far we’ve come since last year when we’d sat in that same purple room.

A measurement of how I’ve come is that I didn’t post about the experience on Instagram, which for some people might be unremarkable, but not for me, who had begun to feel that if something hadn’t made it to my grid, it hadn’t actually truly happened, that the post itself was more important than the moment that post commemorated. Especially for afternoon tea, whose aesthetic that Instagram was created for, the algorithm rewarding accordingly.

And I haven’t always felt like this, in fact for a long time it was just the opposite. For a long time, it felt like Instagram actually inspired me to pay attention, to watch the light, for spots of beauty. And yes, there is something shallow-seeming in the Insta aesthetic, in the pursuit of it, but the end result was that there were always tulips on my table and I kept going to beautiful places, and my life was richer and better for those experiences, and others.

But last year I began to feel like I was living my life outside of time, that I was rarely in the moment, and I’d have to check my grid for confirmation of how and what life was, rather than feeling it in my bones. And even when I wasn’t online (I never use the internet on holiday), I felt like my mind was far from present, as though it was always steps behind me, never catching up. I felt as though I were performing my existence, going through the rituals, and the whole thing did look pretty good in photographs, but I didn’t feel great. The meaning drained right out of everything, empty rituals, things I had to do because those were the things I always do.

In the month since I’ve stepped back from obsessively documenting the minutiae of my existence, I’ve felt so much better. Although not always—there have been moments of panic. There’s been FOMO. I got a new hat and it felt weird not be performing my consumerism of a local small business. How weird is that, to perform hat-wearing instead of just, um, wearing a hat? I went to give blood on Saturday for the first time in 20 years and knew I’d be compelled to perform blood-donation, though it turned out not to be issue because my iron was too low. I think a lot of all this started in the pandemic too because performing good citizenship and (hopefully) setting an inspiring example for others had, literally, become a matter of life or death, and then it all got tangled up on my own weird and garbled sense of goodness and virtue. And yes, I always knew the basic truth, which was “ACTUALLY NOBODY CARES,” but then that was hardly a really comforting thought either then, was it?

If a woman has afternoon tea, and no one hears about it on Instagram, did it actually even happen? But it did, and I’m not so evolved that I can restrain myself from writing about it on my blog, but then, what else is a blog for?

January 25, 2024

The Writing is the Point

I texted my husband a few months ago with an idea I had for a new novel. He replied with a comment about how he was excited that I was excited about writing something new. “I bet you are, ha ha,” I wrote back, because he’d been the one to console me through my months of post-publication ennui, but he affirmed that he really meant it, because he knows that writing is a thing I do, even if it’s not a wise thing, and certainly not a financially lucrative thing, even if publication itself is not a destination that delivers me much in the way of satisfaction and contentment. And that is why I love him, and this is what love is, I think, someone who gives you permission to make bad choices that are the right choices, because even though they might know better, they also understand.

Towards the end of December, I was feeling paralyzed creatively, any confidence I’d felt in my abilities and expertise totally zapped by how hard it had been to publish my latest novel. I felt like a fraud. It was painful, and dispiriting, and I’m so grateful for the long break I took over the holidays, to retreat from the FOMO of the online world and take solace in actual real life people (to quote a certain Anna) and a huge pile of books, to feel my soul grow back, and begin to feel creative and inspired again.

In 2021, I hadn’t been without a project in years. I started Mitzi Bytes in 2014, I started Asking for a Friend in 2015, published Mitzi Bytes in 2017, and started Waiting for a Star to Fall in 2018. That makes for almost a decade with something creative waiting in my back pocket, an easy answer to the question, are you working on something new? Plus there was a global pandemic still going on and, though I didn’t know it at the time, I was well on my way to a mental health crisis that was going to break my brain, so it’s not so surprising that I was having some trouble thinking up a new idea for a book.

Somehow I broke through that pressure, however, and started writing a novel about a woman who has just left (exploded) her marriage and who begins a new life in a Toronto rooming house, a novel about a character I’d envisioned as a modern day Barbara Pym heroine. I had a framework for the novel, 12 chapters, each one taking place over a month, the entire novel the course of a year. The trouble started, however, when I’d reached 70,000 words and wasn’t even six months in, plus the problem of there being no plot. So I abandoned that project, and decided I would write a thriller, but then that fell apart, and then I fell apart. Speaking of paralyzed.

Imagine my surprise, however, when I reread the modern-day Pym book a year later…and realized it was really good? (It was really good because, though my crippling self-doubt of last fall would tell me otherwise, I’ve figured out a thing or two about writing novels, and also because I started writing it under the influence of Katherine Heiny, whose work has taught essential things about enlivening fiction and highlighting the absurdity of everyday life). I decided to abandon the 12 chapter framework, broke the chapters down into smaller pieces, conceded that a literary arc could be possible in a six month period, and just fell deeper and deeper in love with Clemence Lathbury and her world.

Last year I set to revising the manuscript, in between edits and revisions on Asking for a Friend, preparing for that book’s publication, and working with manuscript consultation clients…and I didn’t get much done. Something was missing, and I didn’t know what it was. I didn’t have the focus. Maybe there’d been nothing there there after all? But the bits of dabbling I was doing over the fall suggested otherwise. At the end of December, as I recovered from a difficult season and prepared to start creating again—remember, I had this idea for another new novel, this one a family saga—I set a goal of first getting Clemence’s story into fighting form by the end of January, if such a thing was even possible. Was it possible?

But reader, I did it! Yesterday I added the final link in the thread that had been missing from my narrative, and today I read the final chapter and the epilogue, and was just absolutely dazzled by the ending, which I’d forgotten altogether, and I was properly impressed with myself for pulling it off. I begin working with manuscript consultation clients for the next two months, but will commit to a read-through in April, after which point I will likely (!) send it off to my agent. The prospect of which terrifies me to no end, because while I think that my agent will like it, and that it’s the best book I’ve ever written (so fun! so smart! so full of humour and light!) I’m also the author of three poor-selling novels, which is not a stellar track record, and the deeper on gets on that path, the harder it becomes to change course. Sigh.

But right now, I’m choosing not to focus on that, instead to celebrate my win of getting to this finish light, amidst global crises, and mental health breakdowns: I have written another novel and I really really love it. I am also having fun putting together my new newsletter, and I’m recording the first interview for my new podcast tomorrow! And at some point in the next few months, I’m going to start writing that family saga, and maybe I won’t be able to pull it off, and maybe no one’s going to want to publish it even if I do, a challenge I’ll face if and when it arrives, but in the meantime I will do what I do, which is write, because I love to write, because the writing is the point.

January 15, 2024

One-On-One

Yesterday I sat on my couch beside a friend who scrolled and scrolled through the vacation photos on her phone, two weeks in Japan, and it occurred to me that I can’t remember the last time I partook in such an activity, and also how much it fulfilled me. How different it felt to see her trip and hear her stories, rather than just aimlessly scrolling through them on my own social media feeds, how such a thing stands for everything I’m yearning for right now, one-on-one contact, live and in person. I have found existing so much on a virtual realm overwhelming and confusing as I try to make sense of my connections to others, what’s required of me, and what I should expect in return. I am having the unsurprising revelation that maybe human beings are not meant to have 3700 friends—who knew? So going back to basics, and grateful for the ability to share meals together, visit in our homes, have conversations over tea and coffee, all those things that until 2020, it never would have occurred to me to take for granted. And how completely they can fill my soul.

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.