July 26, 2023
Girlfriend on Mars, by Deborah Willis
The premise sounds like a gimmick: Kevin is a failed screenwriter who now ekes out a vague living as a film extra while growing pot in his Vancouver basement apartment, the enterprise—until lately—overseen by his highly capable girlfriend, Amber, the two of them a couple since high school, after which they managed to escape the confinements of their hometown in Northern Ontario (as well as Amber’s dashed dreams of Olympic glory after an injury ends her gymnastics career, the freight of her evangelical upbringing, and Kevin’s overbearing troubled mother) for a new life on the west coast. But that new life never proceeded according to plan, and now Amber is gone, having won a spot on a reality show whose contestants are vying for a one-way-trip to Mars—and it turns out that Amber stands a mighty good chance of winning, of escaping Earth and all the doom inherent in its future. And escaping Kevin too, but he’s just not willing to give up on her yet.
Girlfriend on Mars—Deborah Willis’s first novel following her Giller-longlisted story collection The Dark and Other Love Stories—is really funny, a whip-smart satire, and also intensely moving, even in its more ridiculous moments, because these characters caught in an awfully silly situation have arrived on the page with perfectly tuned back stories providing real emotional heft to a story that otherwise might be so light as to be weightless. This was a story that had me turning its pages with no idea how and where it might possibly end, and a little warily too because I worried these characters existential dread could be a trigger for my own anxiety, but it all came together in a way that was sad, gorgeous and perfect. I heartily recommend!
June 26, 2023
Leaving Wisdom, by Sharon Butala
Leaving Wisdom is the latest from Sharon Butala, author of over twenty books of fiction and nonfiction whose vision of the Canadian west has always made me think of her in the company of Joan Didion, and she continues to remap her familiar terrain in this story of aging and coming to terms with one’s history (and history in general) set in the fictional Saskatchewan town that her protagonist, Judith, decides to the return to in a post-concussion fog.
The concussion occurs after a fall at what was supposed to be Judith’s retirement lunch after a long career as social worker in child protection/family services. In the days that follow, Judith’s brain is confused, her head aches, and she’s overwhelmed by considering the threads of her life, in particular her four daughters, who all continue to occupy her attention in different ways, her two late husbands, and the family she left behind as a teenager when she fled their piety and the suffocating small town of Wisdom, a place in which she realizes she has unfinished business still and so she decides she must return.
Once re-established in Wisdom, Judith tries to ease her way into a relationship with her estranged siblings, continues to worry about her daughters, and discovers her father’s own traumatic history in World War Two, which becomes connected in her mind to a local act of antisemitism. Meanwhile there are strange and troubling goings-on at the house next door which suggest one can never travel far enough to escape the world—let alone family histories and one’s own past.
Leaving Wisdom is quiet, thoughtful and utterly absorbing novel about families, aging, trauma and history, and how all of these factors happen to intersect.
June 26, 2023
Believe the Hype
Wow, did Ashley Audrain’s The Whispers live up to the hype, and then some. (Most sophomore novel don’t!) It was reminiscent of Lianne Moriarty’s Truly Madly Guilty, a book I LOVED, but then managed to turn into a literary creature all its own with such complicated, deeply imagined characters whose stories were interwoven in ways that never stopped surprising me. The plot is propulsive and rich with suspense, but also poses some fascinating questions about women’s choices and women’s lives, motherhood and infertility. Such a fantastic read.
June 21, 2023
My Own Blood: A Memoir of Special Needs Parenting, by Ashley Bristowe
“Anyone who claims that our society cares about people with special needs, families in crisis, mothers in general, or the exigencies of working parents can suck my strap-on. Individuals care, when there’s an inescapable or financial reason that makes it impossible not to. But society at large cares not a lick. I didn’t really know this before 2009.”
Ashley Bristowe’s memoir My Own Blood—just out in paperback—is a tough, brutal, emotional, excellent, impossible roller coaster of a read. I say “impossible” because I keep trying and failing to make sense of what was her reality for so many years (and continues to be in some ways), to tie her story in a tidy knot, and I can’t, which is fitting because my sense of impossibility about this story ain’t got nothing on what it must have been to live it.
When Bristowe’s second child is born in 2009 and diagnosed with a condition so rare that it doesn’t even have a proper name yet and only 76 other people had ever been diagnosed, her story diverges from the path she’d been expecting as her family grew—she and husband were freelancers, lived a creative and colourful life rich with travel and adventure. Frustrated by a lack of support for her son’s development in those crucial early years, and by continued entanglement in red tape and bureaucracy specially designed to keep families from accessing care and funding for which they’re eligible (and a medical system where authorities never admit to not knowing or having no answers, and instead are mostly fluent in the language of bullshit, which Bristowe is NOT HAVING), she finally finds the answers she’s looking for with a US establishment dedicating to fulfilling the potential of children with delays, disabilities, and brain injuries, whose officials believe it distinctly possible that, with years of intensive therapy, special diet, and more, that her son will be able to walk, to talk, to read—all those things that everyone has told Bristowe will never happen.
So in some ways this is a story of triumph, but in order to reach that triumph, Bristowe is forced to sacrifice everything—her career, her physical and mental health, many of her relationships, and general sense of well-being—to give her life over to Alexander’s treatments with a dedication that doesn’t always make sense to those around her. And so I’m not really sure that’s such a triumph after all—Bristowe writes so powerfully about her despair, her loneliness, her sense of absolute rage at systems that broke her and broke her again, but all the while she kept going, making clear that she’s an incredible force of a human, as well as an inspired and beautiful writer.
So was it worth it! YES! And NO! Because life isn’t tidy like that, is instead brutal, random, and totally unfair sometimes, where love and rage exist in equal measure (and there is so much love here). This is also a tricky book because as it rails against ableism and the low-expectations that our society has of the possibilities of disabled people’s lives (which conveniently correlates to how little we’re willing to invest in them), the idea of disability as something to be fixed is also something to trouble over, but I wonder if that’s just another way for some of us to pass the buck?
June 15, 2023
Some There Are Fearless, by Becca Babcock
I had such a visceral response and connection to Becca Babcock’s Some There Are Fearless, a novel that begins with the Chernobyl disaster in 1986 and concludes on January 8, 2020, as a Ukrainian plane is shot down in Iran, a day that lives as a portal in my own mind as “this very weird time,” which is fitting (and eerie, and interesting) for a novel that is all about fear, and anxiety, and our notions of controlling and mitigating risk.
Jess grows up in Cold Lake, AB, in the shadow of the Cold War, living just outside a military base. The Chernobyl meltdown absorbs her attention, and this preoccupation, coupled with her academic aptitude and her single mother’s push toward achievement, leads her toward training as an engineer and then a career with Maritime Energy in Nova Scotia retrofitting coal plants, with aspirations to one day work in the nuclear field and prevent disasters like Chernobyl’s from ever happening.
There are other cold wars in Jess’s life—her father has long been estranged from their family, her difficult mother’s fraught relationship with Jess’s brother fills their home with tension, and Jess’s own connection with her mother doesn’t get any easy once her brother leaves to go get a job in the oil fields, putting even more pressure on Jess to be the one who succeeds. She finds solace in the company of Adam, a fellow engineering student, however, and they begin to build a life together, although it’s not always easy for Jess to connect, but they establish compatibility and eventually they have a child, and I love the way that Babcock subverts expectations about how the emotionally distant Jess might be rocked by motherhood (and Jess subverts her own expectations too)—”How could love be spontaneously generated? How could a body feel so much, be so enraptured with another creature who, moments before, had only existed as a kernel and a germ, and who now, just now, breathed in the world, became the most precious thing in that entire world for her two parents? How?”
In a world with Three Mile Islands, and Fukushima Daiichi, it’s hard to relax—though Jess explains that the nearby Fukushima Daini Nuclear Power Plant managed to avoid the same catastrophe that its sister plant was unable to prevent after the devastating 2011 Earthquake. And the illusion that she is eventually freed from, the trajectory of her story—which artfully braids together different timelines—is her gradual understanding that she’s not actually responsible for keeping the world safe, and that she can’t actually keep ill fortune from arriving at her doorstep, as her relationship with Adam falls apart, and her daughter undergoes testing for an “uncertain shadow” on her MRI. Jess can’t help but wonder if it was caused by the guided tour she’d taken to the Chernobyl zone nine months before her daughter was born, a risk exposure that seemed minimal and worth it at the time, but how do you ever know?
As someone with a Cold War fascination who has spent the last 18 months learning to live well again after experiencing debilitating anxiety, Some There Are Fearless really resonated with my own preoccupations, with my own challenges of making my way, as a person and as a mother, through our own particular age of anxiety. Blending beautiful writing with history and science, Babcock has created a rich and satisfying depiction of what it is to live in a world that is rarely steady.
June 12, 2023
Denison Avenue, by Christina Wong and Daniel Innes
The nature of cities, of course, is that cities change (I wrote about this in my 2017 essay about Ann-Marie MacDonald’s ADULT ONSET, a book that maps on to this one in surprising and interesting ways), but anyone who loves that city or calls it home is going to struggle with that, or maybe that’s even just the baked-in nostalgia that comes from being alive. I’m well accustomed to stories and images of “Old Toronto,” the kinds of photos that get shared in Facebook groups with names like “Long-Gone Toronto,” the kinds of images that Kamal Al-Solaylee writes about in his 2014 essay “What You Don’t See When You Look Back,” about the whiteness of these vintage scenes: “The pictures depict a world where only white people roamed the streets or were allowed into the frame. I can’t help but conclude that the friends who post them would have preferred it if Toronto had stayed that way: small town, white, exclusive and free from people who look like me.”
But in their new book, DENISON AVENUE, Christina Wong and Daniel Innes are doing something different, and in more ways than one. First, the book itself, which is double sided, one side telling the story gorgeously in Wong’s prose and poetry fragments, and the other with panels showing Innes’s drawings of Toronto “now and then,” now being about ten years ago—when Honest Eds was sold and the Kromer Radio property on Bathurst was going to be developed into a WalMart—and then during the years before it with a thriving Chinatown and Kensington Market, before these areas had become ripe for development and working class people could live a decent life downtown.
Within Innes’s contemporary drawings, a figure appears pushing a cart along the sidewalk, picking up cans and bottles along the way, a figure I didn’t even notice the first time I flipped through the book, which is the point of the book, about what remains invisible, and who gets to be seen, and heard.
The woman in the drawings is Wong Cho Sum who immigrated to Canada in the 1960s and lived in a house with her husband on Denison Avenue until his death (when car sped past the streetcar doors on Dundas Street). Together they had built a steady and comfortable life with strong community ties, but in the wake of her husband’s death and the city’s changes (which are not bemoaned just because it’s change, but because these are changes that make life more difficult for Toronto’s poor and marginalized people, something Cho Sum has seen before as the city’s previous Chinatown was forced to move west when the area was redeveloped as New City Hall) she finds herself unmoored from the world around her.
To fill her days (or perhaps I mean her evenings and early mornings!) she begins collecting cans and bottles around local neighbourhoods, developing a route up and down streets that are familiar to me.
What I loved about this book was how it told the story of a changing Toronto from the perspective of a person of colour, a person who speaks very little English (in the book, Wong writes her dialogue in the Toisan dialect), which is a perspective I’ve never heard before. And similarly, though elderly women collecting bottles and cans are as ubiquitous in my neighbourhood as they are in Innes’s drawings, I’ve spent very little time considering these women’s perspectives, what brought them here, why they’re doing this—for Cho Sum, it’s to earn a bit of money, and give shape to her days, and for exercise. In so many ways, for me, Denison Avenue was absolutely a revelation.
And it was also just a tremendously moving story of strength and resilience, of love and courage, and friendship and community. (There is a swimming scene!! I just adored it.)
The nature of cities, of course, is that cities change, but in Denison Avenue, Wong and Innes manage to capture a unique view of the city as it was for just a moment, all the while making their readers consider what the city might become if we think about what it’s true heart is, which is to say the people who live here.
June 9, 2023
Soil: The Story of a Black Mother’s Garden, by Camille T. Dungy
With the essay collection Guidebook to Relative Strangers: Journeys Into Race, Motherhood, and History, Camille T. Dungy became one of my must-read authors, although I might have read her follow-up Soil: The Story of a Black Mother’s Garden anyway on the basis of that gorgeous cover (and oh my goodness, wait until you see the inside covers!!). Soil is a book about metaphors, but also about the thing itself and, to begin with, that this is the garden that Dungy designs and brings to life in the yard of her suburban home in Fort Collins, Colorado, a place where the propagation of native plants and a wild-looking garden is in defiance of home owner association standards about such thing as grass lengths, and Dungy and her family are part of the reason that culture begins to change.
This is a memoir about the labour (and setbacks) in cultivating diversity in our gardens, and beyond them. It’s also a story of receiving a Guggenheim grant to write a book whose progress is stopped up by the Covid-19 Pandemic and a ten-year-old child whose home schooling requires supervision. It’s about being a Black person and a Black mother in America in the wake of the 2016 election, whose fallout in a continuation of centuries of struggle and oppression, and what it feels like to be confronted by deaths of other Black people, those names like beads on a string over the past decade and more—Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd. Like a rosary.
She quotes her father’s response to a (white) reader’s question about how Dungy could consider herself an environmental writer when she spends so much time writing about African-American history. Her father (Dr. Claibourne Dungy) answers, “For us, there is no separation between the environment and social justice.” It’s not one thing or another, but instead everything connection, our environment home to the world we choose to build here, and also to the natural elements over which we have no domain (or at least cannot even imagine we do) and here Dungy writes of wildfires across the state of Colorado during that already miserable plague year, where neither indoor air nor outdoor was safe to breathe in the company of others, and disaster seemed perpetually just shy of the doorstep.
This is a book rich with love, wisdom, and humour, a book about neighbours, about community, about marriage and love, about trying to save truckloads of soil from blowing away in a windstorm. It’s about climate change, and weather, and history, and botany, and place, and travel and belonging, and longing, and grieving, and persisting. It’s about faith.
“Faith is the belief in things not seen. Or it is the hope that what has not yet materialized might, someday, manifest… One of the hallmarks of faith is to believe in a promise and—though the promise has yet to come to pass, and may never in my lifetime be fully fulfilled—to find a way to carry on. To discover and honour what HAS come to fruition.
I dig up a lot of awful history when I kneel in my garden, But, my god, a lot of beauty grows out of the soil as well.”
June 6, 2023
The Opportunist, by Elyse Friedman
There are all the book whose blurbs promise you they’re unputdownable, and then they were the books that are just impossible to put down, and Elyse Friedman’s The Opportunist is both. It’s the story of a woman estranged from her wealthy family whose brothers only get in touch because they want her to help get their elderly father’s fiancee—his twenty-seven-year-old nurse—out of the picture and preserve their inheritance. A single mom of a disabled daughter who ekes out a living working at a domestic violence shelter, Alana agrees to head back into the family fold because she’s promised enough money to buy her daughter an accessible mini-van. When she arrives at the family estate, however, her father’s gold-digger girlfriend turns out to be nothing like what she’d been led to expect, and more savvy than anybody is giving her credit for. Loyalties, much like the ground beneath these characters’ feet, are ever shifting, and just when the reader thinks they’ve got a handle on the situation, the next chapter reveals another unexpected twist, not to mention a whole new level of depravity. I’ve never seen Succession, but I think this excellent novel might fill the void its finale has left in the world of its fans. Taut and compelling, not to mention VERY FUNNY (the line about the orangutan!), The Opportunist is a glorious fuck-you to the patriarchy, and ends on a note as surprising as it’s glorious. Put this on your summer reading list right now.
