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.
February 7, 2022
The Cure For Sleep, by Tanya Shadrick
“How I began to spend my time that season would enlarge my life in a way I would only understand later, looking back. At the water’s edge that very first day when I stepped out from the hidden and habitual along with my clothes, I couldn’t know that even a middle-aged mother swimming laps in a small town can send ripples through the universe. But it did.”
Tanya Shadrick’s memoir The Cure For Sleep: Memoir of a Late-Waking Life is a story of becoming, of wonder, awe and possibility. It’s a story of life after death, of creative fulfillment after motherhood, of fierce determination, and the triumph of artistic expression and human connection. Triumph that comes against the odds, for Shadrick grew up accustomed to hiding on the margins, shy and uncomfortable with her place in the world, the working class daughter of a broken marriage, rejected by her father, growing up in the shadow of her mother’s difficult second marriage. Shadrick makes it out of her hometown, however, attending university, where she falls in love with a boy who’s as comfortable retired from society as she is, and they make a life together whose foundation is books and ideas, questions and conversation. And then soon after the birth of their first child, a medical emergency after complications, Shadrick comes as close to dying as one can while still being able to tell the tale, and a vision in this moment causes her to re-imagine her place in the world, to find a way to live more boldly and grow through connection with others.
Shadrick writes about early motherhood as an expedition in a way that delightfully recalls Maria Mutch’s memoir Know the Night, challenging notions of maternal instinct as these were feelings she had to conjure by practice. After having told the story of her “First Life,” she begins to live her second one differently, venturing out to meet other mothers and finding connection there, the inverse of such a tiresome cliche, and together these women support one another and find new ways to make a village. Shadrick eventually leaves the security of her administrative job at the university she attended to begin collecting stories of people living out their last days in hospices. She also starts swimming during the hours she can find for herself, which proves most inspiring, and she eventually becomes an artist in residence at the swimming pool, writing what she calls “laps of longhand.” All these experiences leading Shadrick to become known by a woman called Lynne Roper, whose notes and diaries, after Roper’s death, are edited into a volume called Wild Woman Swimming, longlisted for the Wainwright Book Prize in 2019.
How does one build a life? How does one become an artist?
(And most pressing: what does one wear for such an occasion? Shadrick would recommended a headscarf and an apron.)
If you’ve ever been a human, you’ll intuit that Shadrick’s path is not straightforward. That her success does not extinguish her pain and longing that resulted from her father’s rejection. That her long and beautiful marriage does not continue without the complication of Shadrick falling in love with somebody else. That achieving one’s goals does not always (or ever?) deliver happily ever after, and a wife, a woman, a mother, is forever becoming, which is the best possible outcome, even if it means that such a thing as satisfaction is always out of reach.
I ordered The Cure For Sleep from the UK after following Shadrick for some time on Instagram (swimming connections, I think) and coming to appreciate her artistic vision, and the memoir was everything I’d hoped it would be. Rich and literary, complex and thought-provoking, challenging and absorbing at once.
January 28, 2022
All Is Well, by Katherine Walker
The premise of Katherine Walker’s debut novel, All is Well, hooked me immediately: Christine Wright, former special forces agent and a recovering alcoholic, is settling into her near career as church minister when things go wrong and she ends up with a body to dispose of.
There’s a novel I’ve certainly never read before.
There’s also the sentient candlestick with ties back to Julian of Norwich, the excellent women who do the behind-the-scenes work at the church, the deranged vegan nurse with a daughter named after pate, the military policeman who’s intent on bringing Christine down, and all of Christine’s own demons resulting from childhood trauma and a military operation in which three members of her team were killed.
I loved this book, which is heartfelt and hilarious. A little bit screwball, and more than a little mystical, kicking at the margins of plausibility, but it works, it’s so novel, and so cleverly executed. No matter how determined Christine is to be at a remove, to not let anybody glimpse her vulnerability, Walker writes her character’s way right into the reader’s heart and the emotion is real, if everything else becomes something of a farce as the church community begins to grow and change, manifesting into something extraordinary under Christine’s tenure, in spite of all her attempts to stay under the radar.
No doubt this is a novel wholly imagined but informed by its author’s experiences in the Royal Canadian Navy and as a graduate student in divinity, which results in a really thoughtful foundation to this comic novel. This is one of those “fasten your seat-belt and hold on” novels, because it all moves pretty fast, but All is Well is also a book that’s rich in meaning, about trauma, and healing, and the possibilities of redemption.
Don’t miss it.
January 17, 2022
Forever Birchwood, by Danielle Daniel
I could not have loved Danielle Daniel’s Forever Birchwood any better, her middle grade debut following her success as an author/illustrator with picture books including the award-winning Sometimes I Feel Like a Fox. (Daniel also published a memoir The Dependent in 2016; her first novel for adults, Daughters of the Deer, is coming in March; Danielle Daniel is no slouch!).
Forever Birchwood is a dream of a book, the perfect pick for anybody who ever longed to start a babysitting club or is still thinking about Judy Blume’s Just as Long As We’re Together. A nice dose of nostalgia for those of us who grew up reading those books brand new, Daniel’s novel is set during the 1980s during the week of Wolf’s thirteenth birthday as she and her three best friends begin to contemplate the possibility of changes ahead. Wolf is also close to her grandmother, who educates her about her Indigenous ancestors’ ties to the natural world, which makes Wolf feel extra devastated at the prospect of Birchwood, her friends’ clubhouse and the nature around it, being torn down to make way for a new subdivision. Even worse, Wolf’s real-estate mom is pro-development and she and her new boyfriend Roger are spearheading the project.
The most delightful part of this story, which features all the hallmarks of middle grade goodness, is its specificity. Set in Sudbury, Ontario, where Daniel was born and raised, the story takes on the unique aspects of Sudbury’s culture and landscape. Wolf and her friends are passionate about Sudbury’s regreening plan, reforestation and clean-up to counter decades of industrial pollution, which makes their attachment to wild places and the trees and animals there so much more precious. Sudbury’s mining industry, obviously, plays a big role in their characters lives—Wolf keeps special possessions in her grandfather’s old miners’ lunchbox. Mining is dangerous, perilous work, but it’s also the foundation their town is built on.
I don’t read tons of middle grade fiction, but Forever Birchwood is the kind of title that makes me question why that is. The story and characters show emotional complexity, the story’s packed with emotional heft, and while part of the appeal was definitely nostalgia, this novel has a unique and creative richness that is entirely its own.
I’m going to be interviewing Danielle Daniel at her book launch this Saturday. If you’d like to join us and pick up a copy from Another Story Books (and you should!) registration and purchasing information can be found right here.
January 12, 2022
Outside, by Sean McCammon
I’ve learned to be wary of stories about white guys finding themselves in Japan, particularly as someone who has lived in Japan myself, because I’ve met those guys (yikes!), but Sean McCammon’s debut novel Outside was a smart and soulful take on those tropes.
The novel weaves two narratives: the story of David’s first year teaching elementary school, and his urge to take his class outside and into wild spaces, which eventually leads to a devastating tragedy; and the story of David’s escape to Kyoto in the aftermath, where he’s strung out on pharmaceuticals, suffering from PTSD, broken and lost, and finds refuge in the company of a group of other travellers and Japanese people who eventually become his friends.
It’s a quiet narrative, but the reader is compelled through the story by the ominousness of what David is running from and the desire to discover what happened.
Outside is a story about teaching, learning, responsibility, grief, connection and human goodness. I especially like how McCammon gets at the peculiarities of gaijin culture without resorting to tired cliches—a tricky balance.
I really liked this book.
