November 16, 2023
On Community
A thing I think about sometimes is how, about 15 years ago, there used to be these gatherings of people associated with publishing or who were publishing-adjacent—most of which I did not attend, though when I did, I usually felt like a numpty—after which there would be ecstatic posts on Twitter saying things like, “If they’d dropped a bomb on The Ferret and the Firkin tonight, there’d be no one left in Canadian books!” How, at the time, I even thought this was true, and there was something reassuring in that, in the world and its subsections being so knowable, contained (and the solipsism to boot!).
And I’m not sure exactly what has changed since then—if the world actually has become more complicated, fragmented, if social media is the culprit, or if social media has only made it clear that life was never so tidy, that no single community could ever be so defined or fit in a pub (in Toronto, no less!). Or maybe it’s just that I’ve gotten older and have seen for myself that community and belonging and understanding is a bigger, weirder, harder project that I ever knew, and sometimes the amorphousness of it all, of everything, causes me incredible anxiety.
And that amorphousness—of community, of the idea of community, of the way we talk about “the [FILL IN THE BLANK] community—is the subject Casey Plett takes on in her book On Community, part of the Field Notes series of long essays inspired by big ideas. A book that, like all my favourite nonfiction, not just managed to articulate my preoccupations—my anxiety around community’s amorphousness; how the idea of community can paint over complexity; how perpetually difficult community is, even with its rewards; ideas of belonging and who doesn’t belong; policing borders and what you lose when you don’t, and what you lose when you do; and so much more—but to connect the dots between them in a way I didn’t see coming.
Plett brings a fascinating personal perspective to her essay as a trans woman (ie a member of “the trans community;” “the LGBTQ community;” [by the way, I think the first time I ever heard the absurdity of all this considered was—somewhere?—a laughable reference to “the fat community”]) and as a Mennonite who grew up connected to the communities in Manitoba from which her parents had come. Both are groups in which the idea of community is central, though it manifests in ways both good and bad (and similarly too—ideas of belonging or not, of excommunication, of who does the work and who reaps the rewards, of who gets called out, and whose transgressions remain unremarked upon).
From New York City to Windsor, Ontario; from Plett’s family’s stories and the books of Miriam Toews to her adventures couch-surfing across North American to promote queer small press titles; to whether the internet enhances connection or breaks it (she references characters in Toni Morrison’s Sula hating on the telephone because it meant nobody ever dropped by the house anymore); and the fact that any one community can be embody many different things at once; Plett’s essay is a thoughtful, rich and engaging unpacking of the complexity behind simplistic ideas, and a clear-eyed consideration of what really is a universal human experience.
November 13, 2023
Kiss the Red Stairs: The Holocaust, Once Removed, by Marsha Lederman
I think I learned about the Holocaust wrong. (It is possible that everybody has learned about the Holocaust wrong, no matter how they learned about it.) A decade and a half after Marsha Lederman did, I came of age in a public school system that had evolved to include the Holocaust in the curriculum, having read so many middle grade and YA novels about Holocaust experiences, and having taken at least one school trip to the Holocaust Museum in Toronto. I read about Nazis in so many books before I’d ever heard them spoken about in conversation, so much so that I remember being surprised when I realized they weren’t called “nazzies,” to rhyme to “snazzy.” When my family talked about the war, you see, we talked about “The Germans,” against whom both my grandfathers had fought in the Navy, and for the longest time—such a shamefully longest time—I’d understood that the whole purpose of the second world war, and my grandfathers’ service, had been liberation of the Jews. We were the good guys. It was all quite straightforward. Moreover, the stories I read in children’s books had all been sanitized, from the perspective of spunky kids who survived. Anne Frank and her fate, in my education, had been an outlier. And all of it, all of it, was in the past.
The problem with the way I learned about the Holocaust is that I still can’t quite believe that it happened, which is not to say that it didn’t—it did; I’ve been to Dachau; I also can’t believe that there are people who make a point of refuting these things—but just that the scale of it, the brutality, the evil, is still unfathomable to me. And I know that the difference between me and so many Jewish people is that, for them, it’s all too fathomable after all, a knowing they carry in their bones, one that’s literally part of their DNA.
Which is not to say that the way that many Jewish Canadian children learned about the Holocaust was necessarily the right one either. Beyond the DNA, and the fact of a tattoo on one’s mother’s arms, the conspicuous absence of grandparents, aunts and uncles and cousins—which were Lederman’s experience growing up in Toronto in the 1970s—she and her peers were made to watch upsetting films, were subject to terrifying exercises that trained them to imagine Nazis around every corner, experiences that Naomi Klein recounts from her own upbringing in her latest book Doppelganger and names not as acts of remembering, but instead acts of re-traumatization. (Klein also writes that “Our education did not ask us to probe the parts of ourselves that might be capable of inflicting great harm on others, and to figure out how to resist them. It asked us to be as outraged and indignant at what happened to our ancestors as if it had happened to us—and to stay in that state.”)
As someone who lives with anxiety and was on a list receiving the most alarming updates from my local Jewish community centre (of which I am a member) in the days after October 7, I am going to boldly assert that I understand a single percentage point of what my local Jewish community in general were going through at that time (some will disagree and that’s fine): it was scary and awful (and continues to be). And I’ve been thinking about that ever since, as well as about the very different contexts in which me and my Jewish neighbours are living, different contexts that were wholly invisible to me until now, contexts in which flags and phrases have entirely different meanings, the ideas of peace and ceasefire. October 7 itself, which to me is a single piece of a larger nightmare stretching back into the past and—devastatingly—into the future, and I can’t regard it as an atrocity onto itself because of how the brutality and loss of life has just been compounded every single day since then. (There was a line from Kate Atkinson’s new book that I was reading that very same week that struck a chord: “The old man was tired… Tired of the fear everywhere. It had been an opportunity to make the world anew, but they were, inevitably, failing.”)
I wanted to read Marsha Lederman’s Kiss the Red Stairs: The Holocaust, Once Removed. I’d already been called “an enemy of the Jewish people” in my DMs in the last couple of weeks, which tells you plenty about the level of fervour at which a lot of people are operating these days (I am definitely not an enemy of the Jewish people, and also the person declaring me as such wasn’t even Jewish, just nuts. Side note: I have a theory that no one who’s ever screamed at anybody on the internet to “educate yourself” has ever actually been smart.) Having felt an iota of the dread that so many were experiencing post October 7, I’ve been curious to gain a better understanding, and so Lederman’s celebrated memoir about growing up as the child of Holocaust survivors (her parents’ first home in Canada was just around the corner from my house) seemed like just the thing.
It’s such a good book. Lederman begins in the wake of a devastating divorce wondering if something in her parents’ experiences (both of their entire families were murdered; Lederman’s father managed to get false papers and spent the war in Germany hiding in plain sight while working as a farmhand; her mother had been at Auschwitz and worked as a slave labourer) had lodged itself in her psyche making sadness and despair her destiny, the rest of the memoir an act of repair as she learns about the science behind epigenetics and trauma, and also attempts to fill in the blanks in her family history, to come to terms with what her family had lived through in order to create a different kind of future for her son. She writes about the pervasiveness of antisemitism, however, and what it felt like to see neo-Nazis marching with their tiki-torches in Charlottesville in 2017. Not all of the horror resides just in memory—which was clear to so many people when the details of October 7 emerged, people stolen from their homes and families, the rest of the world quibbling about the details and just *how* exactly the babies had been murdered, as if that was what mattered. The parallels are uncanny, but then so they are as well to the devastation in Gaza ever since then, people cut off from power, water, and sanitation, more than ten thousand lives lost (a statistic I saw someone counter with the fact of high birthrates, a detail whose callousness blew my mind).
I think what was most wrong about how I learned about the Holocaust was the idea that it was a one-off, extraordinary in any way beyond its scale, and that there is a special category of humanity with the capacity to inflict such violence upon their fellow beings (although white people do tend to excel in this area.) And Lederman writes about this in her memoir, finding solidarity with descendants of enslaved African-Americans, Indigenous residential school survivors, and others. This kind of barbarism is not just part of the Jewish experience, but part of the human experience in general, and—at this moment of antisemitic and anti-Muslim rhetoric at such a disturbing high—we need to acknowledge that, and strive to be our better selves.
November 7, 2023
Roar, by Shelley Thompson
From its opening pages, Roar hooked me with its heart. Although if I’m being totally honest, I think I was truly hooked by the blurb from Sheree Fitch (whom I adore) on the back that reads like a Sheree Fitch verse: “Wow. Wow. Wow. I want to roar, READ THIS BOOK.” And I’m so glad I listened!
Roar is the debut novel from actor/director Shelley Thompson, based on her 2021 feature film Dawn, Her Dad, and the Tractor, the story of a family grieving the death of Miranda, its mother, as the younger child, once Donald, now Dawn, returns to their rural Nova Scotia community and the family farm after years of estrangement.
Elder sister Tammy has also come home from her life in Toronto, a prickly character to begin with, and she’s hurt to discover that Dawn, her sibling, now her sister, had absented her and her father from her story, all the while maintaining contact with their mother and actually being with her when she died. Tammy’s fiance Byron finds himself embroiled in the tension of the family drama, with a heightened awareness of the bigotry Dawn faces through his own experience as a Black man in their small town. Dawn’s father, John-Andrew, is at a remove from all of this by virtue of his reserve, but wanting to do good by his beloved wife and out of love for his child, he’s making small steps toward reconnecting with Dawn, although the road there is far from smooth.
The story moves between the perspectives of Dawn and her family (as well as some beautiful scenes from the haunting perspective of Miranda herself) to show how this family moves forward through these difficult days, grappling with the hurt of estrangement, difficulties around understanding Dawn’s transition, hate and bigotry from some corners of their community, and surprising love and acceptance from others. Dawn, who has always been herself, begins the task of refurbishing her mother’s old beloved tractor, this project reopening (and perchance healing) some of her father’s old wounds, and also finally bringing father and daughter together.
November 3, 2023
Four Books I Really Loved
These four books are going to have spots on my Favourite Books of the Year list for sure, so I want to make note of them them here, but (apart from Penance, which I read last weekend) they were also books just so thoroughly read for pleasure that I didn’t want the work of writing a proper review….
Penance, by Eliza Clark
I bought Penance after reading a review in the New York Times and I was so glad I did. Set in a desolate English seaside town (is there any other kind of English seaside town?) on the literal eve of Brexit, it’s the story of a teenage girl who is set on fire by a group of her peers, the novel framed as a Capote-esque true crime expose by a male author who has interviewed the girls involved in the incident, as well as the mother of the victim. Although by the end of the book, readers will be asking who isn’t the victim here, and while the dead girl hardly had it coming, this also isn’t a typical story of bullies gone homicidal—there are all kinds of dynamics at play, and there’s a centuries old curse, a legacy of witch trials, a haunted amusement park, and more, which made it a pretty satisfying read for near Halloween.
*
Games and Rituals, by Katherine Heiny
It’s possible that loving Katherine Heiny’s work could constitute a very large part of my literary identity if I let it, and a highlight of 2023 for me was that a new Heiny book was in it, just as I’d read everything else she’d written (and I guess it’s time to reread now). I didn’t love Games and Rituals as much as I did her earlier collection Single, Carefree, Mellow, but that’s a high bar, and I did love it enough to read an advanced copy during a snow storm in December and then buy a hardcover and read the whole thing again in April. All these months later, I’m still thinking about the story of the women dressed inadequately as she’s helping her husband’s ex-wife move, hauling boxes in the freezing cold, a woman she’d first encountered years before when the two of them worked a overnight suicide hotline together. Heiny gets compared to Laurie Colwin (I encountered her first as emcee of a literary event celebrated the reissue of Colwin’s work in 2021), but she also has Sue Miller vibes in mapping unconventional emotional terrain and reinvention of the family tree as family is made and remade. I love her.
*
The Rachel Incident, by Caroline O’Donoghue
I read this one over the August long weekend, partly on the beach, and it was incredible, twisty and full of surprises. It’s about an Irish journalist who lives in London covering Irish issues, their abortion referendum in particular, and she happens to be quite pregnant with her first child, all this the backdrop to a story of something that happened years before when she was a student in Cork and shared a house with her friend James, who’d been her colleague at a bookstore where they’d finagled a professor she’d had a crush on into holding a book launch for his academic book that really wasn’t of interest to anyone, but what happens that night changes the course of everybody’s life. A story of class, love, and friendship. I loved it.
*
Tom Lake, by Ann Patchett
I bought the hype, and the book lived up to it, but also I wasn’t resisting, and I think that’s key. A slow and cozy book, set during Covid lockdown. A mother’s three grown daughters return home to help with the family’s cherry harvest, and she tells them stories of her experiences playing Emily in productions of “Our Town,” the daughters still scarce believing that once upon a time, their mother was almost a movie star. This is a novel about mothers and daughters and their unknowability to each other in fundamental ways. It’s also an ode to Thornston Wilder’s “Our Town,” which I know absolutely nothing about (I think it’s quintessentially American…), and I enjoyed it anyway. Plus I found a used copy of “Our Town,” which I’m looking forward to reading soon.
October 19, 2023
Landbridge: life in fragments, by Y-Dang Troeung
“In the image of the land bridge, the ingenuity of refugee survival is laid bare alongside the scourge of permanent war. Backward from Cambodia to Laos, Vietnam and Korea, and forward to Afghanistan, Syria, and Yemen—how far can this bridge wind on?” —Y-Dang Troeung
This week was a sadly fitting week to read about war, about the terrible violence that human beings inflict on each other, what it means to survive it, what survival even looks like. And in the posthumous memoir by Y-Dang Troeung (a UBC Professor of English who died from pancreatic cancer in November 2022), survival looks like a life—a world—in pieces, in fragments, including letters to her young son, reflections on her experiences in Phnom Penh where she visits tourist attractions devoted to attempted genocide, contemplation of a tangle history of colonialism and Asian connections, news clippings from her own refugee family’s arrival in Canada in 1980 where they were personally greeted by Pierre Trudeau, this contrasted with images of his son—now Prime Minister—greeting refugees from Syria in 2015, and these are supposed to be happy endings, but the true experience runs much deeper and is more contemplated, and also war trauma never ends. Troeung shares photos from her family’s time in refugee camps, where she was born after her family’s survival of “Pol Pot Time,” the horrors branded on the psyches of her parents and her brothers, what it means to be just removed from that. She writes about growing up in Goderich, ON, and falling in love with the work of local writer Alice Munro, wondering if she’d ever see people like her and her family in any of Munro’s stories. “Now, over twenty years since I left Goderich, I have stopped waiting for stories like mine and my family’s to be written by the national artists. When, little by little, these stories do emerge, they come from refugees who write in poems and fragments. We, the children of refugees, let the stories we could never write drop through our fingers.”
October 18, 2023
Clara at the Door With a Revolver, by Carolyn Whitzman
A sad reality of my life is that there are more books than time, which means that many review copies that arrive on my doorstep don’t end up getting read (and for many of these, I was never the target audience anyway). And usually my calculation for what to keep and what to pass along works out fine, but it sure didn’t in the case of Carolyn Whitzman’s Clara at the Door With a Revolver, which I may have even received two copies of, but I don’t read a ton of nonfiction anyway, and never got around to which I was terribly sorry about once I’d attended the Toronto Arts and Letters Club’s panel for the Toronto Book Awards and listened to Whitzman read from and present about her book, which was a side project to her academic work on housing policy. Because the presentation was fantastic and Whitzman made clear that this story of a Black woman in 1890s’ Toronto who dressed in men’s clothing and famously carried a gun who managed to be acquitted by an (all white male, obviously) jury for the murder of a wealthy young man has a lot to tell readers about both its time and our own.
All of which primed me to be altogether ready to be hand-sold a copy of this book by the amazing Mary Fairhurst Breen (whose memoir I read awhile back!) at the Spacing Store on Saturday, and am I ever glad I bought it. I had my Covid booster on Saturday afternoon and spent a grey and blustery Sunday resting it off and speeding through this fast-paced story that’s gripping and fascinating, but also so rich with historical detail about, say, what life was like for a Black woman in 1890s Toronto, how the city’s robust newspaper scene (there were seven dailies) helped to define the stories they told, or that boathouses were notorious scenes of carnal activity (who knew!). There is also a cameo by Arthur Conan-Doyle, and lots about housing, and my suspician that Whitzman’s work would turn out to be fresh, engaging, vivid and relevant turned out to be spot on.
October 16, 2023
Cocktail, by Lisa Alward
I adored Lisa Alward’s Cocktail, a short story collection whose compelling sepia tones (both on the cover and within the text) manage not to undermine how fresh and vibrant each and every single story is. These are stories about houses and the secrets they hold, about fractured families and the limits of family life—the end of childhood, a marriage unravelled. In the title story, a woman looks back on her parents’ parties, and the strange guest who ended up in her bedroom. In “Old Growth,” a woman travels with her very-ex-husband to see the off-the-grid property he’s thinking of buying and contemplates the ways in which they’re forever connected. “Hawthorne Yellow” tells the story of a new mother whose paint stripping reveals haunting images beneath the layers (recalled in the book’s cover). “Orlando, 1974” begins, “My father says Stephen only threw up because of the Hawaiian pancakes and can still go to the Magic Kingdom (and Stephen’s stomach becomes this story’s Chekhov’s gun). The ex-husband from “Old Growth” is the protagonist of “Bear Country,” set a few years earlier, in which a father escapes his troubled son (and a difficult life) by flirting with a stranger. The mother of an adult son grapples with his connection to her ex-husband’s partner in “Hyacinth Girl.” In “Maeve,” a woman in a moms’ group probes the mysteries of another woman’s life. “Wise Men Say” is a love story of a different kind, as a woman reconnects with a partner she wasn’t kind to years ago and things don’t turn out the way she imagines. “Pomegranate” is a collectively narrated story of teenage girls and their hunger. “Bundle of Joy” was my very favourite story, one that’s agonizingly “cringe,” as the kids say, about Ruth, a mother who shares a difficult relationship with her adult daughter who has just given birth to a baby, and Ruth’s not quite good enough intentions gone oh-so-wrong as she struggles to connect. In “Little Girl Lost,” a woman encounters an artist and his daughter at two pivotal times in her life. And finally “How the Smoke Gets in Your Eyes,” a story that contains lifetimes about an elderly widow whose children don’t understand the decisions she made in her marriage, and all those things that seem like a small price to pay for love.
October 11, 2023
The Possibilities, by Yael Goldstein-Love
Considering that I am someone whose new novel contains the line, “The children we have make any other world impossible*,” a novel that’s world’s away from this one but also taps right into notions of postpartum and parental anxiety (ASKING FOR A FRIEND also contains the line, on its very first page, “Parenthood…was—if you were lucky—like friendship, a story without end. The alternative too awful to contemplate. But what this also meant, of course, was that it never stopped, there were no breaks from the possibility of something new and worse to worry about around every single corner.”) then you won’t be surprised to know that Yael Goldstein-Love’s THE POSSIBILITIES tapped into something real and fundamental in my own psyche, but it also hooked (and fascinated) me as a reader in a deep and most visceral way.
And if you’re also an anxious sort when it comes to parenting, then you will know what it means to “ride the possibilities,” what Goldstein-Love’s protagonist described as the “car swerve” feeling, where it seems like some disastrous outcome has just been averted by a hair’s breadth. (Another line from my novel—”And how do you measure that line between everything that could have happened and what actually did?**). An idea that becomes literalized in this fantastic (in all senses of the word) speculative/literary mashup in which new mom Hannah’s debilitating anxiety actually becomes a superpower as she has to voyage into the multiverse to search for her missing baby (who is missing because, for babies, the boundaries between worlds and possibilities are especially blurry and thin).
A Wrinkle In Time, by Madeline L’Engle, meets Rachel Cusk’s A Life’s Work? I adored this novel, which almost caused me to cancel Thanksgiving because all I wanted to do was sit down and read it straight to the end.
*This line was actually borrowed from my wise friend Rebecca Dolgoy
**The great thing about being a book blogger is that I get to quote extensively from my own book in reviews of other peoples’.
October 5, 2023
Wild Fires, by Sophie Jai
Sophie Jai’s debut novel Wild Fires (which is nominated for the 2023 Toronto Book Award, was shortlisted for the 2023 Kobo Emerging Author Award and Winner of 2023 Fred Kerner Award for Fiction) is a dizzying, mesmerizing puzzle of a novel, a container for a story about a container for a family, which is to say, a house. A three story house on an ordinary street in West Toronto that is home to the most of the Trinidad-Canadian Rampersad family, a house fled by narrator Cassandra years before to get away from the whispers, the secrets, the spectre of death—but of course, the last is inescapable, and Cassandra is called home after the death of her cousin whose entire life had been tragically touched by the deaths of his brother and his mother before him.
In the house on Florence Street, doors stay shut, mouths stay closed, secrets closely guarded, and Cassandra’s need to make sense of her family’s story—to have it to told to her, and to be able to understand it—is firmly resisted by her mother and her sisters, though these women find other outlets besides story for conveying their emotions, including rage and powerful, enormous grief. And so Cassandra has to find other more roundabout, indirect ways to get closer to what she wants to know, her family throwing up obstacles and diversions all the while, the house on Florence Street absolutely riddled with metaphorical trapdoors and landmines whose triggers are impossible to avoid.
Wild Fires is a wily text, a most compelling literary mystery, a novel whose heart seems elusive at first—with so much being, literally, unspeakable. But by having to a take a long and winding route into the house on Florence Street—there are no shortcuts here—the reader will find themselves so deeply invested and absorbed in this tale, and unable to forget it.
September 29, 2023
Rereading The Millstone
My official origin story as a Margaret Drabble devotee begins with the battered paperback copy of The Radiant Way I picked up from an Osaka bookshop back in in 2004, and fell in love with, and how I spend the new couple of years reading through her entire backlist (as well as new releases like The Sea Lady, The Red Queen, and The Dark Flood Rises). In 2020, I ventured to go back and reread all her novels in order, but the plan fast sputtered out because earliest Drabble was never my favourite anyway—I found the preoccupations of her characters terribly unfashionable, or perhaps it was just my ancient Penguin paperbacks. I reread the first two and then no more, until I partook to reread The Radiant Way again last winter, and found the reading experience just as glorious as it as twenty years ago (and the book somehow even more timely). And then, not long after, I reread A Natural Curiosity, which I didn’t love as much, but that was a high bar, and now I’ve gone and just reread Drabble’s third novel, The Millstone, after listening to a discussion about it on the Backlisted podcast, and now I want to get to Jerusalem the Golden next, so it seems I’m rereading them these books after all, just a little bit out of order.
My TRUE origin story as a Margaret Drabble devotee is a little bit different from that, however, as Drabble’s The Millstone was actually the first Drabble I ever read, before I even knew what a Margaret Drabble was. I even vividly recall reading it in late December 2001, the week between Christmas and New Year, back at my student apartment in Toronto, which was quiet because my roommates had not returned from their holidays. My elderly paperback (more about that in a moment) purchased for $3.00 at a secondhand store (likely Eliot’s on Yonge Street) because “Margaret Drabble” was a name I vaguely recognized, and because I’d started to realize how I’d wasted all my idle time in my undergraduate years reading writers called Thomas, and D.H., and F. Scott, and Ernest (and Morley and Robertson), and (apart from two ubiquitous Canadian examples) almost nobody with a name like “Margaret” at all.
And I am not sure that anybody has ever missed the point of a novel at all as I missed the point of The Millstone in 2001, but I am refusing to take full responsibility for this, and perhaps you’ll agree that I shouldn’t when I tell you about the particular edition of the novel I was reading, which wasn’t called The Millstone, or even A Touch of Love (which had been the title of the film based on the novel), but instead Thank You All Very Much, which had been the US title of the film, and the cover is atrocious, depicting nothing like anything that happens in the novel at all (and I actually I think that all of these titles are terrible).
The cover wasn’t even the worst of it though, instead the back cover copy, which I’ve pasted below. Clearly, someone else HAD missed the point of this novel as much as I had, which was whoever was employed to write the jacket copy. Clearly they didn’t quite know how to market this book, first published in 1965, about a young intellectual woman who becomes pregnant and opts to raise her child, to find herself and her place as a woman in society as a mother (but, most essentially, as nobody’s wife). But here’s how they put it on the back of my book, all of which describes the first 5 or so pages of the book, and no more, and also seems to be about another character altogether:
The Reluctant Virgin
Rosamund was a very now girl. She liked Fellini movies, underground novels, and more than one boyfriend at a time. Yet she was guilty of the most unpardonable twentieth-century sin: virginity.
Something had to be done.
But the more she didn’t do it, the more she read and heard about how she ought to do it. And when she finally did do it…she got caught.
So can you blame more for finding this novel remarkably unfashionable? A bit weird? What is my fault, however, is that I never made the connection that the only reason this whole plot takes place at all (and seems so old fashioned) is because it’s set in the 1960s, when abortion was illegal in Britain. Along similar lines, when I ended up pregnant by accident myself just a handful of months later (which I hadn’t seen coming in December, the tail end of a long era in which I’d be quizzed about sexual partners while donating blood, and just laugh and laugh) and had an abortion, it never occurred me that it hadn’t even been fifteen years since Canadian women had gained the right to abortion access. I was still very young, and to come of age in the 1990s in the western world was to see one’s own experience as outside of history.
I also think that I was too young and unschooled/earnest to realize just how funny this novel was, how ironic. Lines like, “My attempts at anything other than my work have always been abortive. My attempt at abortion, for instance, must be a quite classic illustration of something: of myself, if of nothing else.” Rosamund buys a bottle of gin with the plan to drink it to end her pregnancy, but then her friends come over and drink it all, and then (a bit drunk) she elects to take a very hot bath, but the gas heater didn’t work properly and she couldn’t get the temperature right, and the water ends up being freezing. Maybe I just didn’t go in for abortion humour in quite the same way in 2001.
I was also too young to fully get the meaning of a paragraph like this (and Drabble’s sentences are hard to parse! There are some parts I still don’t understand right now: “At times I had a vague and complicated sense that this pregnancy had been sent to me in order to reveal to me a scheme of things totally different from the scheme which I inhabited, totally removed from academic enthusiasms, social consciousness, etiolated undefined emotional connections, and the exercise of free will. It was as though for too long I had been living in one way, on one plane, and the way I had ignored had been forced thus abruptly and violently to assert itself. Really, it was a question of free will; up to this point in my life I had always had the illusion at least of choice and now for the first time I seemed to become aware of the operation of forces not totally explicable, and not therefore necessarily blinder, smaller, less kind or more ignorant than myself.”
The Millstone is not “old fashioned” (though the cover and copy surely are!), but instead a literary artifact of a particular moment in history, and a very social kind of novel too about class and gender, and the lives of educated women, and socialized medicine, and learning that one possesses a body, that one is a woman after all, and what that means, and all the other people such a distinction connects one to. (It’s also a terrifically funny novel about the literary scene, onto which Rosamund is an observer, as several of her friends are novelists, and the petty rivalries of that scene rang very true for me and made me feel better about my own plentiful foibles and insecurities.) I also now see that this book is beginning of my very favourite part of the Drabble canon, which is women who revel in the chaos of motherhood but who aren’t wives—Rosamund is a foremother of Liz Headleand and Kate Armstrong for sure. I also love that there are whole passages on jigsaw puzzles, which Rosamund takes up to pass the time and calm her brain, which I wouldn’t have noticed when I read this book in 2001, but Margaret Drabble hadn’t written her jigsaw puzzle memoir The Pattern in the Carpet then.
Though I must have reread this book at least once before, an experience of which I have no memory, and—unlike in 2001—there is no date on the inside page, but there instead a conspicuous bracket on page 97, on which Rosamund considers how—as an unmarried mother—nobody ever dares to say to her, “I bet you wouldn’t be without her now.” A paragraph that would have sang to me after my first child was born, words that reflected my truth: “And in many ways I thought that I would prefer to be without her, as one might reasonably prefer to lack beauty, or intelligence or riches or any other such sources of mixed blessing and pain. Things about live with a baby drove me into frenzies of weeping several times a week, and not only having milk on my clean jerseys. As so often in life, it was impossible to choose, even theoretically, between advantage and disadvantage, between profit and loss: I was up quite unmistakably against No Choice.”
Not old fashioned at all, I suppose, but instead a message from my future!
