February 4, 2025
Olive Kitteridge and #WinterofStrout
As I wrote about in my January essay, 2025 is my #WinterofStrout, a project that was born by a comment a friend made in our group chat when we were once again marvelling about Elizabeth Strout’s Lucy Barton books, a proposal to (re)read them all, which I thought seemed like such a fantastic idea, mostly because there are many books by Strout I still had yet to read AND my initial encounters with her books had been such MISreadings. I first read Olive Kitteridge in 2013, and enjoyed it, but had avoided it for years before that thinking it was hokey and middlebrow, and in some ways I wasn’t even wrong, and I certainly wasn’t moved enough by it to pick up Strout’s 2019 follow-up Olive, Again, although that was probably because I’d read another novel by her, My Name is Lucy Barton, in 2016, and been so extraordinarily unmoved (and even desirous of my money back—the book seemed slight, unfinished, not enough).
I also didn’t properly understand how both books could be by the same author, or just who this Elizabeth Strout person was anyway, who invented characters with definitive names that usurped her own in reader consciousness. Not thinking very much about any of it at all, until I went back to Lucy in 2023 and found myself besotted. In some ways, still, My Name is Lucy Barton was not enough, okay (though I could make a good argument against that now, especially having seen it performed as a one woman show), but in connection with Strout’s other works—both those books with Lucy’s voice at the centre and others—there is so much life going on. “Strout’s books are less an exercise in narrative than one of character, and its variable layers, and the connections between them, and between places, ideas, and things.”
I love a reading project, the way these books give shape, structure, and context to my own ordinary experiences. My #WinterofStrout began with her debut novel, Amy & Isabelle, which I read in December and completely enjoyed, impressed by how Elizabeth Strout was Elizabeth Strout right out of the gate, fully formed, and thinking about that line from Lucy Barton about how everyone has just one story, really, and they keep telling it over and over, and that Strout’s for certain is mothers and daughters, mothers and daughters. Although this was less apparent in her second novel, Abide With Me, which read on Christmas Eve, this one a story about a father, a widower, whose troubled daughter would grow up to be Bob Burgess’s friend, social worker friend Katherine Caskey, who shows up in later Strout novels. Abide With Me is a novel about marriage, faith, despair, about the failures of community, about the unknowability of others’ experiences (which perhaps is Strout’s actual one story). About the spots of goodness that save us, the miracle of that in a world where so much is otherwise.
And then it was time for Olive Kitteridge, which I’d really been looking forward to, supposing that re-encountering that book in the broader context of Strout’s work would be fascinating—it won the Pulitzer Prize after all. I was prepared to be dazzled. And reader, I was not. Which is not to say that I didn’t love the book, that I didn’t see all the richness that was there, that I didn’t find the stories in the collection so extraordinarily moving. I did! I did! Everything I love about Strout’s point of view and her fascinations and preoccupations are perfectly on display here, but, I’d had this idea of Strout as an author who “doesn’t write novels so much as chart constellations, connecting points of light, moments of grace.” And really was quite sure that this skill would be on full display in this “novel in stories,” and I’d be able to understand her method better than when I first read the book so many years ago.
But it would turn out that Olive Kitteridge really is, as opposed to a chart of constellations, a short story collection, and not even “a novel in stories,” which Olive does not actually purport to be on my copy, but a collection of stories almost half of which had been published in various places between 1992 and 2007 (and it’s likely I even read that earliest story in its initial publication because it was published in Seventeen, which I was an avid reader at the time). Likely Olive herself was not even present in many of the stories’ original incarnations, the ones in which Olive exists in the background, but added as Strout put the Olive Kitteridge manuscript together, which is fine, but it’s just that I’d been expecting something more organic, something more like the magic of what happens when I meet Isabelle from Amy and Isabelle in the pages of Strout’s latest novel, Tell Me Everything, but again, that’s an awful lot to ask from a book.
February 3, 2025
When the Clock Broke, by John Ganz
Today I am nostalgic for last week, when I was delightfully ensconced within the pages of John Ganz’s When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s, an utterly whackadoodle story that begins with a chapter called “Swamp Creature,” about the bizarre politics of Louisiana stretching back to Napoleon, that state’s curious combination of anarchy and tyranny under figures like Huey Long, and from where David Duke emerges, freaky weirdo and KKK aficionado, in 1989 finishing first in an open primary for Louisiana’s 81st district, and would go on to serve in that state’s legislature.
Ostensibly, Ganz’s book documents the 1992 US Presidential election and its primaries (in which Duke would take part and be out of the running very early), beginning with Duke in Louisiana, finishing 300-some pages later in New York City in 1992 as crime boss John Gotti is convicted, a former state attorney named Rudolph Giuliani having brought down many prominent Mafia figures in that state—and yet all is not well, and the myth of Gotti continues to hold appeal. Americans are mistrustful of institutions, and for good reason—a decade of Reaganism has failed to benefit most families, deregulation has led to banks defaulting, a widespread recession, the rise of talk radio filling social gaps but leading to polarization, free trade seemingly taking away US jobs, police violence and devastating riots under an incredibly corrupt LAPD inflaming racial tensions, similar tensions between stoked between African-American and Jewish communities in New York City, and dividing allies on the left, not to mention the Ruby Ridge Standoff (during the which a N*zi salute is construed as an enthusiastic gesture, lest you think anything has ever been new), the Branch Davidian Siege in Waco, Texas, and other instances of extremism getting closer and closer to the American mainstream. Well known figures like Pat Buchanan and Ross Perot (who brings a Musk-ish energy to the scene) enter the chat here, two figures whose ubiquity at the time maybe undermined their strangeness, but man, they were strange, and they were only the tip of an iceberg of “paleoconservativism,” the moment that maintained that the problem with Nixon and Reagan is that they did not go far enough.
Ganz’s narrative moves at a swift pace, rich and sweeping, sparkling with memorable sentences (of Louisinana governor Edwin Edwards, he writes, “He was still a “Laissez les bons temps rouler” guy in the laissez-faire world of Reaganomics and austerity. He have have laissez-ed a little too bon of a temps.”) There is something comforting about the bonkers world he depicts, the way it gives our current moment essential context, how much less dangerous these forces are at the remove of history—and of course they were less dangerous then, still on the fringes.
But not as much on the fringes as I would have imagined. I wasn’t very old when all these events are taking place, but I remember them, their cast of characters, watching it stream on CNN, and how ordinary it all seemed from my vantage point. But that’s the way of course, how the path is laid, one thing leading to another, and the power of Ganz’s storytelling is that he doesn’t even need to make explicit the connections, the story does it for him. Donald Trump is a minor character throughout the whole book, but his presence looms large from his first appearance on page 41 when he shows on ABC News’ Primetime Live after in November 1989 just after David Duke does, Trump “ranting about Japanese investment on the US economy, under the headline, ‘Who Owns America?'”‘”
January 21, 2025
My Good Bright Wolf, by Sarah Moss
“You both had to live in a time and a place where people or at least women didn’t like themselves, or if they did, concealed their self-esteem with rigour.” —Sarah Moss, My Good Bright Wolf
My Good Bright Wolf, a memoir by Sarah Moss—the author of odd spare novels I’ve loved lately like Ghost Wall, Summerwater, and The Fell—is the kind of book that I keep talking about, and when I do, I’m served with the inevitable question, “What’s it about?” A question whose simple answer is that this is a memoir about anorexia, about how Moss’s eating disorder was born from a childhood of some depravity and would flare up again during the pandemic when she was in her mid-40s. A description that sounds interesting enough, though I confess I’d be unlikely to pick up such a book on those merits, and I only picked it up at all because Sarah Moss has become a must-read author for me, the kind of author whose books are never be “about” anything quite so straightforwardly as that.
Because her memoir is also about childhood, about being the child of parents who carry their own trauma, about the inheritance of pain, about how girls are taught to hate their unruly bodies and their unruly minds. It’s about escaping into books, and what she learned about life (and care and food and eating!) from Beatrix Potter’s tales, from Jane Eyre, Swallows and Amazons, Laura Ingalls Wilder, Little Women, Virginia Woolf, Mary Wollstonecraft, and more. It’s about growing up in a culture where you might have never met a woman who wasn’t suffering a diet, who ate what she wanted to, who didn’t hate her body, who had ever managed to be enough or not too much.
It’s a memoir about memory too, most of it written in the second person, the narration interspersed with commentary in italics by a character whose voice might well be that of the narrator’s mother, ever critiquing, undermining, suggestion it wasn’t bad as all that, that the problem was the narrator, all stories and her lies. Via these interjections and elsewhere, the narrator is hard on herself, though I admit I double down on that at times as a reader, the more contemporary parts of the memoir demonstrating the impossible mindset of someone with anorexia who refuses to relinquish their sense of control, making choices that put their life in peril. From the outside, the problem looks easy to fix, but Moss shows that the reality is much more complicated.
This is a very thoughtful memoir, a memoir about anorexia that even seems to avoid fat-phobia (the author lists Aubrey Gordon’s What We Don’t Talk About When We Talk About Fat and the podcast “Maintenance Phase” among the lists of resources), and anyone who ever had a female body or struggled with mental illness will relate to Moss’s story.
And anyone who doesn’t will still be enchanted all the same by the power of Moss’s writing and the rigorous thinking that is its underpinnings.
January 13, 2025
Like Mother, Like Mother, by Susan Rieger
Admittedly, it’s an odd book, Susan Rieger’s third novel, Like Mother, Like Mother, told almost entirely through through expository dialogue by characters who talk like people in golden age film, the protagonist dead in the opening sentence—”Lila Pereira died on the front page of The Washington Globe.” I wasn’t sure in the opening chapters that the writer would be able to pull this off at all, but soon I was in the thrall of Rieger’s rigorous prose and compelled by its energy, and the Ephron-esque punch punch punch of this story, which is an ode to the knots and tangles of family ties and also to the culture of journalism.
Lila Pereira may be dead, but Rieger resurrects her immediately to show her style, unique, brutal and awesome at once. When she was two, her mother had been taken taken away to die in an insane asylum, her children left to fend with their abusive father. Lila decides that she’d be just as ineffectual as a mother herself, and only consents to have children when she falls in love with and marries Joe Maier, who she knows will be a perfectly good mother himself and accepts her otherwise refusal of the maternal role. Which sounds good in theory, but Grace, their youngest daughter, resents her mother’s devotion to her work and absence from home, writing her pain into a roman a clef about a monstrous mother, which backfires when Lila dies not long after publication and Grace looks awfully unsympathetic.
After her mother’s death, Grace takes on the job of finding out what really happened to Lila’s mother all those years ago, using her own journalistic chops (not far from the tree) to uncover the mystery, and everything that happens after that is a pleasure to behold.
January 10, 2025
Chrystia, by Catherine Tsalikis
It was 2018 and I was riding the subway with my husband and kids toward Bloor/Yonge Station when I started eavesdropping on the family behind us who were discussing the ongoing postal strike, the parents asking smart questions and the kids (who were a little bit older than mine) asking smart questions back, all of them engaging with ideas. Intrigued, I turned around to spy on them, and will admit that the thing I noticed first was that the parents in this very smart family were schlumping about in track pants (ie they were about as well put together as I was). It wasn’t until we’d all disembarked from the train that I realized the mom in question was Chrystia Freeland (my Member of Parliament since 2015; her office sends me a card every Christmas, sometimes two by accident) and by then they’d disappeared up the escalator.
“As her friend,” wrote Katharine Lake Berz a few weeks ago in a Toronto Star about Freeland in the wake of her departure from the federal cabinet, “I have witnessed in her something vanishingly rare in public life: [Chrystia’s] character never wavers, whether she’s addressing world leaders or chatting about her children over coffee.” It was a description that resonated with my own fleeting impression of her in the wild, and which was only underlined by Catherine Tsalikis’s just-released biography.
Chrystia: From Peace River to Parliament Hill, was supposed to come out in February, but House of Anansi Press rushed it into onto shelves just before Christmas following Freeland’s unexpected announcement which led to the Prime Minister’s stament last week of his intentions to resign. And now some are hoping Freeland will step up for Liberal leadership; others crossing their fingers that she gives someone else a chance to go down with the ship before taking on the top job herself. What happens next is anyone’s guess but regardless, Freeland’s story is inspiring and fascinating, and this first book by Tsalikis—an international affairs journalist who became inspired to write this biography in 2020 when she was on parental leave with her first child—does a terrific job rectifying the dearth of stories about Canadian women in public life (as opposed to their quite happily self-mythologizing male counterparts).
Tsalikis traces Freedland’s origins from the stories of her grandparents, on the paternal side, a Scottish war bride who married a farmer from rural Alberta, and maternal, whose lives were defined by European war and turmoil in the first half of the 20th century and immigrated from Soviet Ukraine to Canada in 1948 after their daughter, Freeland’s mother, was born in a displaced persons camp. Freeland was born three weeks premature in 1968, just small enough to be tucked into a desk drawer when her mother—age 20, and finished her first year of law school—returned to work at her father-in-law’s law practice two weeks later. Freeland’s parents would later divorce, but her father’s rural Alberta roots and her mother’s Ukrainian nationalism (and progressive activism) would give their daughter’s character a strong definition. Her brightness shone from a young age, and Freeland would take part in a high school program in Italy, earn her undergraduate degree from Harvard, become labelled as a troublemaker by the KGB during a university exchange in the last days of Soviet Kyiv, and struggle just a little bit to balance the writing of her masters thesis at Oxford (where she was a Rhodes Scholar) with her reporting on the fall of the Soviet Union for the Financial Times.
Chrystia follows Freeland’s story through her years in journalism, her triumphs and professional misses, that unwavering character cited by her friend an absolute through-line, a trait which earns her much admiration and success, but also foes including Vladimir Putin and JAN WONG (who are the true main villains of this story). Tsalikis compiles her story from interviews with friends and former colleagues, and close family members (Freeland’s aunt and sister are key sources), as well as Freeland’s own journalism (she has THOUGHTS about Hillary Clinton as a potential presidential candidate in 2008), and profiles in magazines including Chatelaine and Toronto Life. The result is the portrait of a figure for whom loyalty is a fundamental trait, but who also is unafraid of standing up for what she feels is right, which has included the forces of democracy in the former USSR and as a counter to tyrants all around the world, which puts into context the recent events that didn’t make it into the book, making sense of why Freeland chose to step away from her former boss when she did.
What I loved most about this book, apart from learning the details of Freeland’s extraordinary life and also the finer grains of politics and diplomacy that I may not have understood as well during the years I was watching history unfold via a Twitter timeline, is Chrystia Freeland as an example of somebody who stands up tall before authoritarian forces (which is no small thing when you’re five foot two), how her courage and steadfastness have made her a force to be reckoned with, never to be underestimated. Chrystia Freeland is so far from an ordinary person (however she might ride the subway in such a guise) but there is a lot we can learn from her example about how to respond to our current moment, of how to be clear-eyed and fearless in the face of authoritarianism, and how we might live the values that we know to be true.
January 6, 2025
SPACE
Our Christmas tree was wonderful, lush and redolent until (almost) the very end, and once it was gone, we had so much space it was almost like getting a new room, and so we tidied it. Too many books, as always, so I got rid of a lot of them, and then freed up an entire shelf by relocating my encyclopedia set (circa 1987, Berlin Wall forever) to a space on top of another bookcase that had previously been occupied by crap and clutter. Which means SPACE, my books with room to breathe, my personal library with room to grow. And speaking of SPACE, here is ORBITAL, by Samantha Harvey, which (I will confess!) I was not much looking forward to reading because I’d read her previous novel DEAR THIEF—pitched as a fabulous novel that not enough people were reading, a mark of the state of publishing together—and I didn’t like it at all, perhaps because I don’t actually know the song “Famous Blue Raincoat” on which the novel is cleverly based. So when ORBITAL won the Booker Prize, I didn’t rush out and buy it, but requested it from the library instead, finally sitting down to read it over the holidays, and IT WAS SO GOOD. Yes, it’s me, as ever, with the least hot takes, but I adored this book, which is set on the international space station over the course of a single earth-day, and it really was a love song to our planet and to people and the possibilities when we choose to be our better selves. The image that has stuck on my mind is the floating astronauts at the window watching the earth down below, Harvey giving us the whiteness on the bottom of their very clean socks, which is a perspective I’d never even started to imagine. When I was finished reading, I pushed it onto my teen, who read it in an evening, and then her dad read it too, and we had to buy our own copy because we all loved it so much—and with the relocated encyclopedia there is even room to shelf it now. And I barely know about controversy the book was embroiled in either (it was targeted with bad reviews on Goodreads for supposedly glorifying Russia [um, it definitely does not]) because I’ve spent very little time on social media in the past month, which I’m not sorry about at all, a choice that has freed up mental SPACE for me to read and think and be, and I’m going to carry all that with me into a hopefully spacious new year.
December 5, 2024
The Mighty Red, by Louise Erdrich
I loved THE MIGHTY RED so much, one of those books I managed squeeze in before the calendar year is out, and I’m so glad I did, because it’s easily one of the most wonderful novels I’ve read in 2024. Like the river of its title—which originates in Minnesota and North Dakota, and flows north through Manitoba (where I’ve visited it in Winnipeg!), ultimately to Hudson’s Bay—this novel holds vast amounts of geological time, and history, and sediment, and strangeness, and ghosts, and kindness, and cruelty, and it flows and flows and flows. It begins with Crystal Frechette, who works the nightshift hauling sugarbeets and listening to talk radio, worrying about her daughter, Kismet, and perhaps she should be, because Kismet (who’s just finished high school) has found herself within the sights of Gary Geist, high school jock who’s still not over a recent local terrible tragedy that nobody ever talks about. Even though Kismet is sleeping with nerdy Hugo, Gary proves to be somehow irresistible and the two are married, which feels as wrong to Kismet as it should, but everything has been wrong for her family since her father absconded with the church renovation fund and her mother realized she’s on the verge of losing her house to a very dodgy mortgage. Light, quirky and breezy in places, The Mighty Red is also weighted with substance at the very same time, a story of the land, and the connections to it by Crystal and Kismet, who are Indigenous (Erdrich is a member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa), Gary’s mother whose family’s farm was lost a generation ago, farmers who are working on an industrial scale and seeing their soil being ruined by Round-Up, other farmers trying natural methods of controlling pests and organic farming, the whole story feeling a little bit Barbara Kingsolver, and I mean that in the best possible way. This is a story about love, and family, and books and reading, and gardens and weeding, and the 2008 economic crisis, which is also the story of how we got to 2024, and it’s really about everything, like the river at its heart. Awesome and eternal.
December 3, 2024
COLOURED TELEVISION, by Danzy Senna
TOO REAL is my main criticism of recent publishing satires like YELLOWFACE and now Danzy Senna’s COLOURED TELEVISION, just because it’s personal, strikes close the bone, offering a terrifying glimpse into the parts of my psyche I’d prefer not to look at. Apart from the trauma of that, however, I really liked this novel, even through witnessing its main character’s descent into disaster made me want to yell at the page, “Don’t do it.” COLOURED TELEVISION is a novel about race and class in America, about academia, about Hollywood, and marriage, and parenthood, and precarity, and about everything—possibly to a fault, but by design. After taking ten years of complete her magnum opus, a novel her artist husband has nicknamed “the Mulatto War & Peace,” Jane Gibson reconsiders the many life choices that has kept her family from reaching the middle class stability she longed for in her bohemian childhood. They’re currently spending a year house-sitting for a friend in the Hollywood Hills, and Jane’s been hoping selling her novel will finally turn their fortunes around. When this fails to transpire, she tells some fibs and steals a friend’s idea, hoping to pull off the plot twist and happy ending she’s been waiting for. Unsurprisingly, things do not go well. But they’re biting and funny and the book has real heart.
November 18, 2024
The Knowing, by Tanya Talaga
As opposed to “The Knowing”—which Tanya Talaga explains in her book of the same name is a sense among Indigenous people of the truth as to what happened to themselves and their relations as part of the genocidal residential schools system in Canada—there is the fact that I knew nothing. Not an excuse, a plea for absolution, just a fact, and so I came to this book most humbly, a book that began with Talaga’s journey for the details of what happened to Annie, her great-great-grandmother, buried in an unmarked grave off the QEW expressway in Toronto, on the former grounds of a psychiatric hospital. Through her own research, in conjunction with the work of so many others, Talaga is able to piece together the story of Annie and her family, one of colonization, subjugation, but also survival (though sometimes not), and her quest for facts and records is its own thread in this many-threaded work, the obstacles in her way (poor record keeping, destroyed documents, other unavailable, and more) telling their own story of colonial power which continues to this day.
November 14, 2024
Senescence: A Year in the Canadian Rockies, by Amal Alhomsi
SENSESCENCE: A YEAR IN THE CANADIAN ROCKIES, by Amal Alhomsi, is as much about a year in the Canadian Rockies as Annie Dillard’s first book was about a creek, which is to say that it is about that, but it’s also about everything, about seeing, and being, and (dis)connection to nature, all from the particular viewpoint of a Syrian writer based in Alberta’s Bow Valley, which is not one encountered enough in nature writing. A tiny book that you can slip in your coat pocket, this one was one gorgeous gift after another.
“On the bank of the Bow I was duped. The world seemed still until it wasn’t. What use is a root if the earth it’s embedded in keeps spinning. This motion without consent is dizzying. You open a book and blink a few times, and before you know it, you are now where Mongolia was. A sea sponge, after nestling in a good spot, will move two millimetres an hour simply by breathing. In the morning I inhaled and there was a terrible noise; currents and killdeer and cudweed against the wind. Now there’s a fire near, and ash is riding the air like snow. I have done nothing but breathe, and the noise is now numb. Smog has a silence like ice, like blood. I have done it again; I came here to test the waters, then I was knee-deep in time, then I was swallowed.”
