April 14, 2022
Mountains Beyond Mountains
“The world is infinitely complicated. You don’t have to catch up to the complexity; it will inevitably catch up with you. It will bury you with considerations, contextualizations, and unintended consequences. But if, in the midst of the rubble, you can resist explaining away your earliest moral instincts, then you will have preserved something good and true. You might make some people’s lives more livable, more beautiful even. You might make some people uncomfortable. You might feel sad in a sad world. You might feel mad in a maddening world. It’s not an easy way to be—especially if you travel between cultures and classes like Farmer did—but there’s succor in the resistance. It’s the best way I know to stay human.” Courtney E. Martin
I’ve been reading a lot lately, and not writing down nearly enough about any of that (which is FINE, really, because the reading is the point) but I wanted to note something about the wonderful experience I had reading Tracy Kidder’s Mountains Beyond Mountains, a 2003 biography of Paul Former, a global health pioneer whose untimely death shook his community in February.
I’d first learned about him through Courtney Martin’s newsletter, and then a couple of days later, CBC Ideas replayed their conversation with him while I was driving in the car, and I knew this was somebody I wanted to learn more about.
I am preoccupied these days with learning how to be properly human in the world, but also doing so without assuming political posturing, which had been my strategy in the difficult couple of years before the pandemic, a strategy that seemed less and less effective once things got really complicated and I began to understand that politics is inherently divisive and inadequate to meet the challenges of our current moment, which requires all hands on deck. And of course, this is impossible. So what to do in the face of that? And Paul Farmer’s life is an answer to that question. (Not THE answer. Kidder writes wonderfully about how Farmer is not a model to follow. Just an example that pushing against the impossible is possible.)
I signed up for a reading group Courtney Martin was running and had two days to read this 300 page book before then, which I knew would be challenge, but it turned out not to be, because I couldn’t put it down. Farmer’s origin story, the story of his childhood, is extraordinary—Martin writes a lot about consciously raising our children and Farmer’s story made me think about the unlikely formula for raising a human being into him, which involves a peripatetic childhood living, variously, on a boat and a school bus. And that he died young (he was in his early sixties) made me think about how fortunate it was that he seemed to emerge fully formed, his worldview solid by his early twenties, and he knew what he wanted to do with his life, working as an anthropologist and a physician. (The idea too about Farmer not being THE answer to the question. It makes me think about Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez too being posited as THE answer—these are both extraordinarily brilliant individuals. Most people can’t live up these standards. But surely there is something we can learn from them all the same?)
Farmer couldn’t fix it all, he couldn’t heal everyone, but he went out of his way to help a whole bunch of people in his life, determining that every single life was worth trying to save. Which didn’t always make sense to others—what was the point of saving a handful of others when so many others are suffering? And yet. His story a metaphor of the rest of us attesting to the value of keeping going, of keeping trying, even when it seems it doesn’t matter. But it does. The trying and the outcome, all of it.
April 11, 2022
4 Great Essay Collections
Run Towards the Danger, by Sarah Polley
I’ve read a run of great essay collections lately, which kicked off with actor/director Sarah Polley’s bestselling new release. It was a book I regarded curiously, at first, because the premise was strange: six essays about various experiences from Polley’s life, in which an adult perspective circles back on childhood trauma. Polley is a former child actor and now an acclaimed film director and writer, and I wondered if the whole project might be a gimmick, but then I kept hearing from reader after reader about how excellent the book actually is. And they were right. I loved this one, its searing, visceral writing, its willingness to complicate, to circle back and around, its acknowledgement of darkness and light, often in the very same place. Brave, original, and interesting, Polley writes about growing up too soon after the death of her mother, about stage fright, exploitation as a child actor, about carrying the story of her experience abuse by a notorious celebrity, about a complicated pregnancy and introduction to motherhood. Polley has had a remarkable life and she owns both her privilege and her trials at once, demonstrating that our experiences and our perceptions of experiences are multitudinous and ever subject to change.
Spílexm, by Nicola I. Campbell
Celebrated children’s book author Nicola I. Campbell’s Spílexm (which means “remembered stories” in the language spoken by Nlaka’pamux in British Columbia) is a beautiful collection weaving poetry, memoir, journals and letters to tell her story of becoming as Nlaka’pamux, Sylix, and Metis, and the daughter/granddaughter/etc of residential school survivors. This is a story of grief and survival, and a testament to the remarkable powers of love, family ties and personal will to overcome trauma and design a better future for one’s self, and Campbell imagines the same for Indigenous people across Turtle Island. My favourite parts of the story are those where she writes about canoe racing, discovering her own power and the power of community. This is such a generous and achingly beautiful offering to the world.
Send Me Into the Woods Alone, by Erin Pepler
While this collection is subtitled “Essays on Motherhood,” it too is a story of becoming, a story of womanhood and daughterhood, and personhood. Truly it’s a smorgasbord of goodness, essays recounting a difficult pregnancy, the details of labour (that one is called “A Million Hands in One Vagina”), and onward through the years. At the beginning I wondered if these essays might suffer a bit from the desire to be relatable and inclusive at the expense of specificity, but such concerns fell away as Pepler delves into her own story and writes with such candour about her struggles with anxiety, and about how her own family experiences growing up inform her parenting now, for better or for worse. The collection is tremendously moving, but also very funny—I kept reading parts aloud to whoever happened to be in the room with me. Like motherhood itself, Send Me Into The Woods Alone is equal-parts light and dark, joy and misery, another writer who’s unafraid to be complicated and tell the truth.
I Came All This Way to Meet You, by Jami Attenberg
And finally this collection by American novelist Attenberg, the story of her Midwestern roots, her years in New York, and finding home in New Orleans, an unlikely outcome for someone who spent years couch-surfing, which turned into years staying in friends’ spare rooms as their lives stabilized but hers didn’t for such a long time. Coming later to writing, put off by an assault in her first year of undergraduate studies, a story she tells in connection to the testimony of Christine Blasey Ford about how Supreme Court nominee had sexually assaulted her years before. Attenberg writes, “Why do we believe these men are the best when they are the worst? Why do we hold on to them?” In this collection, Attenberg writes her process of coming to own her story and her voice, all of this underlined her her persistence in staying true to her art through the ups and downs of the writing life and her determination to succeed as a writer.
March 28, 2022
The School of Mirrors, by Eva Stachniak
Last week, I read the same novel all week long, a novel set in 18th century France, no less, neither of which is my usual speed, but my friend Eva Stachniak is such a magnificent author that it was only a pleasure spending time with her latest, The School of Mirrors.
The story begins with Veronique, a young girl taken from her destitute family to be trained as courtesan to a Polish Count. But it turns out that the Count is actually the King of France, the girls discarded when he tires of them, all of this orchestrated by the King’s mistress and a network of other figures at Versailles.
Young Veronique soon becomes pregnant, and is taken away to give birth in secret, her child taken from her, and Marie-Louise overcomes a lonely and difficult childhood to study midwifery and pursue one of the vocations available for women. As with the girls of Deer Park, from whom Veronique’s story is imagined, the story of these midwives is taken from life.
By the dawn of the French Revolution, Marie-Louise is married to a radical lawyer pushing to make France into a Republic, and she keeps quiet about the story of her own origins, which she knows so little of anyway. But as the politics of the moment grow more and more intense, the consequences of Marie-Louise’s ties of Versailles become much more fraught. When she finally reconnects with her mother, who is poor and suffering from dementia after such a difficult life, the list of secrets she’s having to keep is growing ever longer.
“‘The present circumstances’ were growing worse. Hortense would come home from the market furious. There was no spring lettuce. Leeks had vanished. Vendors pushed wiltered carrots on her and when she protested told her not to be too picky if she wished to be served at all. Her regular cheese merchant tried to charge her almost double what he charged last week so she had to go elsewhere. Bread had gone up in price again. People said it was because of vagrants, though what vagrants could have to do with the disappearance of leeks or the price of bread was still a mystery. Try saying that at the market though. You get spat on. Or pushed into the mud. A young fellow got beaten up because a fishmonger called him a king’s spy. No one minded their own business anymore. Everyone had an opinion to defend. The more outrageous the better. People no longer talked, but yelled. Where was it all heading? Where would it end?”
The School of Mirrors
I wondered, upon reflecting on this book, if it’s not a case of “history repeating” as much as “this is how it always is.” The instability, drive for revolution and change, and also appetite for war, and how while women are never the drivers of any of this, they’re the ones left to pick up the pieces, to keep things going, to put food on the table, delivering the babies, delivering the future, birth and death being their business, always.
Stachniak’s writing is wonderful, the characters gorgeously rendered, and the era brought to life in terrific fashion. The School of Mirrors is an excellent read, providing fascinating insight into the experiences of women and their proximity to power, and meaningful connections to right now.
March 21, 2022
Rafael Has Pretty Eyes, by Elaine McCluskey
No one writes voice quite like Elaine McCluskey, and not just one voice, but all the voices, ranging from the news reporter just laid off after twenty-five years, to the canine companion of man whose brain damage to the front cortex has caused an unfortunate condition termed Witzelsucht, a bouncer with concussion symptoms, or the man whose story begins, “I am at a Toast ‘n’ Roast for my mother’s fourth husband, Wayne. Wayne, of course, is a dud. Who else do you get on the fourth attempt: Idris Elba?” And later on in the same story, “It’s Never What You Think It Is,” which opens McCluskey’s latest collection Rafael Has Pretty Eyes, the character notes that he’s convinced “that life is one inside joke after another and that people fall into two categories: the people who believe Trailer Park Boys is real and the ones who don’t, and I no longer know where I fit because last night I saw Bubbles driving a Masterati Quattraporte with smoked windows on the Waverley Road in Dartmouth and it seemed quite normal to me.”
I have loved Elaine McCluskey’s work for ten years now, as a search through my blog archives proves, ever since I first read her debut collection The Watermelon Social, and got hooked on this writer who, with a single sentence, can break my heart and make me laugh until I cry all at once. She writes about oddballs with such a remarkable immediacy that they’re relatable, and with such incredible specificity too (“a Masterati Quattraporte with smoked windows on the Waverley Road in Dartmouth,” for example) that she blows my mind with her acuity.
(Upon reading her latest, it also occurs to me that I love McCluskey’s work for the same reason I love Katherine Heiny’s, which might be the highest literary compliment I’m capable of giving.)
McCluskey writes about people who’ve fallen through the cracks, people who are hanging on just barely, suffering evictions, breakups, or being held hostage at gunpoint. The extraordinary side of ordinary—the radio DJ who’s come down in the world and makes his living now at a pay day loan outlet, the local city councillor for whom it’s all about to fall apart. Characters who seem like anybody you might pass on the street, rendered vivid by the power of McCluskey’s narrative voice, and then the story takes off, ending up in a place where you never imagined it going. (“Life is just one extended series of anecdotes strung together until they kill you.”)
I loved this book. Perfect for anyone who thinks the Trailer Park Boys are real or otherwise, and even those who aren’t always drawn to short stories, because these are short stories that underline why such things are worth reading.
March 15, 2022
Looking for Jane, by Heather Marshall
What people who haven’t thought much don’t tend to know is that abortion is not the opposite of adoption, or infertility, or miscarriage, or motherhood, or even choosing not to have children at all, and also there are plenty of people who’ve experienced two or more of these things, and that these things don’t even exist on some kind of moral spectrum, but instead, they’re a vivid constellation of lived experiences, and what I love about Heather Marshall’s extraordinary Looking for Jane is the way the story connects them all, making plain what so many women already know but still might not have the courage to put into words even almost 35 years after abortion was made legal in Canada.
Because the abortion rights activists didn’t win this fight just for themselves. This fight and this victory was for their daughters, and their daughters’ daughters. To make sure a horrible cycle was broken, and the next generation would be better off than their own. To leave these women a world where no one can tell them that they don’t own their own bodies. Where they don’t need to hang themselves or try to slit their wrists in a bathtub just to know what it feels like to have control. It all comes down to having the right to make the choice.
—Looking for Jane
What a radical thing this novel is, even with its old-fashioned cover with an image of a woman from behind, with its sepia tones suggesting this would be a safe bet for your great-aunt’s book club. Because it definitely is—your great aunt knows something about reproductive justice that those of us who came of age after the Morgantaler Decision of 1988 might always have taken for granted, never knowing a time when pregnant people weren’t free to make their own reproductive choices. Her generation will remember a time when pregnant girls were sent to “homes” where they lived—steeped in a shame they’d carry for the rest of their lives—until their babies were born, and then subsequently adopted. Or else the girls got married in a hurry and had to drop out of school, leave their jobs, give up on their dreams, and maybe it would all turn out to be worth it, but how do you ever know?
Looking for Jane begins with a letter that was never received, a letter that a mother wrote to her daughter, to be opened after her death, informing that daughter that she had actually been adopted, and that her birth mother had not willingly given her up for adoption after all. The letter finds its way into the hands of Angela, who is currently mourning two miscarriages and trying again via IVF for a pregnancy to create the family she and her wife have been dreaming of. Angela is adopted herself, and so the letter she finds proves especially resonant, and she begins determined to track down the woman who was intended to receive it almost a decade ago.
And then the book takes its reader back to 1961, the bad old days, when Evelyn Taylor finds herself removed to a maternity home and all her choices and autonomy removed from her in that process, and she’s unable to advocate for herself when she decides she wants to keep her baby, after she learns that babies being born at the home are actually being sold. The rules at the home are cruel, dehumanizing, and serve the patriarchal power of the Catholic Church—and this experience is what inspires Dr. Evelyn Taylor, almost years later, to have pursued a medical career, trained with Dr. Henry Morgantaler in Montreal, and be risking everything to provide pregnant women with abortions. She joins the Abortion Caravan protest in Ottawa in 1970—read my starred review of Karin Wells’ spectacular book on the subject, and how wonderful to see this story be rendered in fiction, because this is a part of history that every Canadian should know—helping deliver a coffin to the Prime Minister’s doorstep as a symbol of the more than one thousand Canadian women who died each year after illegal abortions, and then joins the protest in the House of Commons, women shutting down parliament after chaining themselves to their seats.
Ten years after that, Nancy Mitchell accompanies her cousin for an illegal abortion (legal abortions in Canada in 1980 had to be permitted by a panel of doctors, which meant decisions were arbitrary and no doubt race and class factored in big time, as both things continue to make abortion more or less accessible for pregnant people today) which goes very wrong, and so when Nancy finds herself with an unwanted pregnancy not long after, she is careful to find an abortion via an underground network of providers whose work was safe and reputable—and whose clinics would be the target of police raids. And this is how Nancy connects with Dr. Taylor, and comes to volunteer at her clinic at great personal risk, continuing to do so until 1988 when abortion was legalized and providers didn’t need to hide anymore.
But of course the fight wasn’t over, as anyone who’s paying attention knows well. Abortion providers are threatened with violence to this day. In 1992, Dr. Henry Morgantaler’s clinic in Toronto was firebombed at its location just around the corner from my where I live now, and I knew absolutely nothing about any of this ten years later when Dr. Morgantaler performed my own abortion, when it never even occurred to me not to take my access to abortion for granted, or to consider how hard my foremothers had fought for it. Because I’d never read a book like Marshall’s, a book that connects the dots, which spells out the patriarchal forces intent on keep women from having freedom over their own destinies, underlining just how much reproductive freedom underlines our personal foundations.
(There’s more to it too—a long history of forced sterilization of Indigenous and racialized women, the “sixties scoop,” by which Indigenous children were taken from their cultures and adopted into white families, the foster care system which keeps too many racialized women from raising their own kids. Marshall’s book is definitely the history of whiteness and reproductive justice, and that’s just the tip of the iceberg.)
I loved this novel, and also that it’s one of the bestselling titles in Canada right now, because it’s a daring and radical text dressed up as a women’s book club pick. It’s a moving and absorbing read, heartbreaking and infuriating in places, unabashedly Canadian in the most interesting way, but also universal at once.
March 10, 2022
The Music Game, by Stéfanie Clermont, translated by JC Sutcliffe
‘”Three shadows are bending over each other around a table,” Celine begins… “They are old, young, it doesn’t matter. A hand moves and the number three blurs. Maybe there are actually four of them, or even more. A hand comes out of the shade, rests between the black coats. The glasses on the table are also lanterns. They don’t touch them. They’re too busy with plotting.”‘
I’d held off on picking up Stéfanie Clermont’s award-winning first book, The Music Game, which just came out last month in English translation by JC Sutcliffe, because it’s been a tough time and I’ve been wary of anything too bleak—this is a collection of linked stories loosely structured around a suicide after all. But it turned out to not be a painful read, in spite of a whole lot of pain and longing at its core, because fundamentally, The Music Game is just interesting. Pitched to me as a book for fans of Sally Rooney, or else a modern version of The Big Chill, both of which were enough to pique my interest, and I enjoyed it very much.
This is the story of three friends who, like the book’s author, are Franco-Ontarian, growing up around Ottawa. The collection more cyclical than linear, moving back and forth between their teenage years and then their lives a decade or so on, and encompassing the stories of other friends and roommates and voices, underlining the surprising ways that lives overlap and also that the past is never truly behind us.
Clermont’s characters work dead-end jobs, struggle to complete their theses, argue about politics, look for roommates, get tattoos, experience gender fluidity, escape dangerous relationships, have creepy cousins and stepdads, take to the streets, and rue their parents’ bourgeois values all the while they spend weekends at their country house. They grow up too fast, but can’t seem to move on, all the while trying to plot their way through a culture and even a counterculture that seems to have set them for failure. Staying connected, and falling out of touch, and giving up, and also persisting.
And maybe when I say the book is cyclical, what I really mean it that it’s a web, with strange, uncanny and surprising connections, weird gaps, and a whole lot of questions, and each of these characters (caught in it? spinning it?) read as wondrously alive and real, achingly messy and complicated.
March 7, 2022
The Swimmers, by Julie Otsuka
“Most days, at the pool, we are able to leave our troubles on land behind. Failed painters become elegant breaststrokers. Untenured professors slice, shark-like, through the water, with breathtaking speed. The newly divorced HR manager grabs a faded red Styrofoam board and kicks with impunity. The downsized ad man floats otter-like on his back as he stares up at the clouds on the painted pale blue ceiling, thinking, for the first time all day long, of nothing. Let it go. Worriers stop worrying. Bereaved widows cease to grieve. Out-of-work actors unable to get traction above ground glide effortlessly down the fast lane, in their element, at last. I’ve arrived! And for a brief interlude we are at home in the world. Bad moods lift, tics disappear, memories are reawakened, migraines dissolve, and slowly, slowly, the chatter in our minds begins to subside as stroke after stroke, length after length, we swim. And when we are finished with our laps we hoist ourselves up out of the pool, dripping and refreshed, are equilibrium restored, ready to face another day on land.” —The Swimmers, by Julie Otsuka
The most perfect encapsulation of a pool swim community I’ve ever encountered in a book. And then on page 77, the story shifts, becomes about one woman’s experience with dementia (and her daughter), and the pool is left behind, and how these pieces fit together is still something of an unsolved puzzle for me, but I am satisfied by the wondering so much.
March 1, 2022
Sorrow and Bliss, by Meg Mason
Meg Mason’s novel Sorrow and Bliss is as wide ranging as its title suggests, ostensibly the story of one woman’s experience over decades with an unspecified mental illness, which is to say that it’s also a novel about family, relationships, work, intergenerational trauma, growing, learning, falling, stopping. It’s about mothers and sisters, cousins and aunts, one particularly loathsome ex-husband, and pregnancy and motherhood, and medicine, and mental health, and about Martha’s marriage, to Patrick who has loved her since she was 14, a solid home that Martha has finally managed to burn down.
I loved this book, even though it was also a series of gut punches, so terrifically heartbreaking, but also wondrously funny, and Martha’s point of view is why we stick around as readers, and why those who love her have persisted for so long, so matter her propensity to be difficult. Except that point of view is so fixed that Martha can’t really see how others see her, and isn’t very perceptive of their situations either, in particularly her husband whom she’s never properly regarded as a fully developed character, but instead just another player in the drama of Martha’s life.
This is a novel that channels Woolf, and Didion, and Where’d You Go Bernadette?, but also manages to be itself in the most refreshingly original way. So breezy (this is Martha’s charm, see) that the reader can almost forget the emotional stakes of it all, which is so much, and therein lies the novel’s power.
February 25, 2022
The Sentence, by Louise Erdrich
“Even one person of a certain magnetism in this time can seize the energy and cause a maelstrom to form around each sentence they utter. One person can create a giant hurricane of unreality that feels like reality.
‘That’s what’s happening,’ she said. ‘Just look around.’
I didn’t have to. I felt like I could see everything—hatred valor, cruelty, mercy. It was all over the news and in the hospitals and all over me. Watching and waiting…had turned me inside out.”
I loved this extraordinary novel so completely, The Sentence a fiction made up of all kinds of pieces from the world, its characters including its author, Louise Erdrich herself, who flits in and out of the text, and with Birchbark Books, the independent bookshop Erdrich owns in Minneapolis, the backdrop for much of the story.
Set between November 2019 and November 2020, the novel’s protagonist is Tookie, an Indigenous woman struggling with returning to ordinary life after an incarceration, and who, on one of her shifts at Birchbark Books, is one of the first staff members to discern that the store is haunted by one very specific ghost, namely that of their most charmingly annoying customer, a white woman called Flora who had been an enthusiast for all things Indigenous.
As the trouble with Flora’s ghost escalates—she keeps knocking books onto the floor—much else is going on, of course—it’s 2020 after all. Tookie’s husband’s daughter—with whom Tookie has always had a fractious relationship—turns up with a newborn baby son. And then Louise takes off on a new book tour in mid-February, as news of a novel coronarvirus is becoming ever closer and closer to home, and I had such a visceral reaction to this part of the novel, back when everyone was wiping down surfaces and proceeding “out of an excess of caution.” Erdrich captures it so well, the looming dread, the incredible unknown, and the unfathomable way that time kept passing.
The bookshop closes to customers and Tookie and her colleagues find their work deemed “essential”, and so they spend their days socially distanced and packing up online orders, which arrive in surprising numbers. (Another visceral reaction for me was recalling that sad forever spring, and how wonderful and uplifting it was to have an order of books from local indies landing on our doorstep…) And Flora, or her ghost, at least, is still there, her presence becoming more urgent, beginning to seem dangerous.
But danger is everywhere after the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis that May, killed by police at the store where Tookie’s husband goes sometimes. The city erupts in rage and violence (the chapter is called “Minneapolis Goddamn”), explosive and uncontainable, and Tookie fears for her loved ones and for the future, her own impressions and experiences of police violence kept close to her chest, but here and there they burble to the surface and recall her own sentence in prison, and are complicated by the fact that her husband is a former officer. But still she feels with all those grieving Black mothers, and she knows the names of the men who’ve gone before, and she knows too that Indigenous people are just as likely to be murdered by the police, but you’re probably not going to hear about it, these crimes happening in more remote places where people aren’t happening by with cellphone cameras.
This book is everything. Comedy, tragedy, current events, recommended reading list (it’s so gloriously bookish!), ghost story, love story, a story of community, and also a harrowing tale of individual survival and resilience, and I just loved it so much, and it found it to be a comfort in the light of our own tumultuous moment, reminding me of all the things that really matter and the spectacular possibilities of books.
February 14, 2022
Free Love, by Tessa Hadley
Free Love was in the air—I’d heard about the book’s release in the UK, and anticipated a delay before it becoming available in Canada, but there it was, on sale February 1, and so I ordered it. Before the book arrived, another friend was already posting about it on Instagram with a rave review, and then the day I finally started reading, another friend sent along an email telling me that it was one of the best books they’d read lately and that I really must pick it up, and I do so love being told what to do when I’m doing it already.
Tessa Hadley is newish to me. I’ve read her novels The Past and Late in the Day in the last few years, and really enjoyed them, and have been looking for other copies of her books in bookshops ever since, but they’re not widely available here in Canada. It’s also true that while I enjoyed both books, they didn’t leave overwhelming impressions on me and I can’t remember much about either one except that they had atmosphere. And I think that’s actually the point.
Because Free Love too is an atmospheric novel, a book full of tension and interiority instead of wildly swinging plot. And even when the plot does swing with housewife Phyllis abandoning her suburban life to pursue a relationship with the bohemian son of a family friend, or even before that when fate conspires to bring this unlikely couple together in the first place, kissing beside a garden pond on the hunt for an errant sandal, the earth barely shakes and life continues on, seasons changing, floors requiring sweeping, dinners making. Everything is changed, but also nothing at all—but then about two thirds of the way through there comes a revelation that blows everything apart, and has me texting the friend who’s read it already “OMG I JUST GOT TO THE PLOT TWIST!”
But it’s not in fact the plot twist that matters at all really, instead the rhythms and patterns of daily life, both before and after, that Hadley manages to capture so beautifully, the way that life goes on, and on—if you’re lucky—no matter your choices. Every moment itself is a narrative leap.
