September 24, 2025

Hearts, by Hilma Wolitzer

I learned about Hearts, by Hilma Wolitzer (mother of Meg!), from a in the New York Times piece this summer on “18 Great Road Trip Books That Aren’t ‘On the Road’”, a feature that must have been a little inspired by The Road to Tender Hearts, by Annie Hartnett, one of my top reads of the season. The piece recommended Hearts for fans of Tiger Eyes, by Judy Blume; Fun Home, by Alison Bechdel; the work of Laurie Colwin. SIGN. ME. UP. Except then Wolitzer’s 1980 novel proved hard to come by, out of print, unavailable at the library. (You can buy it as an ebook though!) I ended up purchasing a secondhand copy from Alibris.com, springing a couple of bucks more for the hardcover “in good condition,” and am I ever glad I did, because it’s a First Edition, impeccably typeset, that COVER, and it’s a book I’m going to be cherishing for a really long time.

Hearts is the story of Linda Reissman, a dance teacher suddenly widowed from her husband of only six weeks who has to overcome her fear of driving in order to deliver her sullen 13-year-old stepdaughter, Robin, from their former home in New Jersey to her father’s relatives in Iowa, and who, along the journey, discovers she is pregnant. Linda is just 27, and has never—metaphorically or otherwise—occupied the driver’s seat in her own life. Once she’s dropped Robin off, she has vague dreams of arriving in California, but everything else about her future is still undefined, her pregnancy putting all that possibility into jeopardy.

It’s remarkable to be reading this novel now at a moment in which Linda’s abortion in Iowa would be illegal. While it’s devastating to consider just how far we’ve regressed in the 45 years since Hearts was first published, how much American women have lost, I suspect that Wolitzer is not completely surprised, because the signs of the unmaking progress are already there in 1980, less than a decade after Roe vs. Wade. The abortion clinic is swarmed by furious protesters, and a terrible act of violence takes place during Linda’s procedure. The law might be settled, but the people are not.

Hearts is set during a weird time in America that has strong parallels to right now, in addition to the abortion issue—the economy is a mess, oil prices are wild, the Middle East is in crisis. And this—along with Howard Johnsons and motel pools—is the backdrop as Linda and Robin undertake their journey, getting to something particular about the moment, but something essential too about the American Dream, and what it promises to women. Neither of them is especially prone to drama, and they spend a lot of their journey not talking, the narrative brisk and even, moving between their different perspectives, underlining how much they each get wrong about the other, and showing them growing closer as they make their way.

I loved this book, whose story felt as fresh and pristine as my gorgeous first edition, the kind of book I looked forward to picking up again all day once I’d started reading, a double coming-of-age story about womanhood and chosen family, funny, poignant, and real.

September 24, 2025

Gleanings

• “You don’t get the wisdom before you’ve lived it, you don’t get to jump ahead and think you can know all there is to know!”
• But is there a “there” there? Isn’t that old saying true, that the grass really IS greener? Wherever you go, whatever mountain you summit, you get a new view—a new destination, even if it’s not a higher mountain. Just, you know, more road. Someplace you’d rather be.
• In spite of everything or because of it, to be splendid, to not squander our gifts, to keep our joy, to use our imagination, to live urgently enchanted, to share poetic excellence, to practice our practice, to love and be wholehearted and divinely blissfully stupidly human — this is our task.
• What we really need to do, instead of switching off, is to find ways to care and stay tuned in. We need to manage this tuned-in newsy flow sensibly, while still hanging onto our health and (general) happiness and warding off overwhelm. I think we’re all grappling with this.
• The key, it seems to me, is to focus on shaping a life that you love and feel is a good-faith effort towards responding with urgency and congruency to the times we are living in, but not getting lost in the details or a sort of brittle perfectionism that ultimately alienates you from others, and even you from yourself.
• I know, I know. When you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras. Look around, use logic. I know. But I went straight to zebras; I always go straight to zebras. I thought, THERE IS A GHOST IN HERE AND IT THREW MY GUITAR ON THE FLOOR.
• I happily left almost ten years ago and did the (hardest) work to entrench myself in a new place, in the same ways because I always had the feeling I needed to keep moving forward. It’s a hard thing to explain, but I had the sense I wasn’t finished growing and I needed a bigger pot, so each opportunity that came to move to one, I took it. 
• Looking “away” from “news” on social media does not mean you’re “burying your head in the sand.” It means you’re engaging with human beings instead of road-raging avatars.
• There are four of us in this relationship, a kind of wild alchemy with no one in total control. And the outcome can be glorious and disastrous.
• This wasn’t community service. It was me getting high off the rush of being the useful expert, of being helpful to strangers on the internet, like the service writer/editor I once was. The very overfunctioning “I can help” behaviour that landed me on leave in the first place, now dressed up as “community care.”
• Time to pull out the winter blankets, the warm coats, though the sun is shining. How cold the water was as I swam my lengths, arms reaching forward, then back, my torso not quite straight. One of my last.
• Today, I’m distracted and very very tired. I hate this predictive text — in very faint letters, if I’m not typing at max speed or if the word is long, some AI program embedded in this app will add in the letters that it believes should finish my word or thought. And mostly it’s wrong! Even when it’s right, I perversely (personally, it just wrote!!!) want to write something different, original. I need to turn this feature off. It is not serving me or my imagination.

September 22, 2025

Bad Indians Book Club, by Patty Krawec

The moment of hideous social backlash which we’re all enduring right now is evidence of how furiously and violently some people cling to white supremacy and the colonial systems upon which this country and so many others were built, which only underlines the subversiveness of a book like Patty Krawec’s Bad Indians Book Club, a book that centres writers whose stories usually are told on the margins. It is a book that was born of a question, and then conversations that turned into a podcast, and as a result, the narrative is rich with connections—between writers, between readers, between books themselves—as Krawec maps a year of reading. “Rather than allowing us to stand on what we think is the stable ground of a singular expert, reading many books draws us into the mashkiig—the swamp—where the ideas in one book layer with the ideas in another.” She goes on to write, “Even if the centre of influence is one that we have come to respect and admire, the borderlands—or places where the influence of that centre extends and then layers with others—brings us to new ways of thinking and to possibly the creation of new centres.”

Krawac, who is an Anishnaabe/Ukrainian writer belonging to the Lac Seul First Nation who grew up in southern Ontario, writes about connecting with her Native family and ancestry in the 1990s, these connections informed by her ideas about Good Indians and Bad Indians, as understood by Hollywood films: “Good Indians: those who rescue white heroes so that they can in turn be saved. And…Bad Indians..: those who refuse to be rescued or to be saved themselves.” And over time, she can to be drawn to the Bad Indians who, she writes, “…offered me a vision of new worlds being born—worlds rooted in differences that bring balance and life , not differences that play out in hierarchies and power.” The first rule of Bad Indians Book Club, according to Krawec? “Always carry a book.”

And thus begins a journey into the wonders of reading, the questions books raise, and the connections we can make between stories—and between each other. Krawec refers to books by Indigenous, Black, and Jewish writers, and those by writers of other usually marginalized communities to construct a network of overlapping concerns and understanding, stories that inform each other, with characters like Nanaboozhoo and Ananzi. She refers to the books and writers from her podcast, and the panellists that presented those works, and supplements these with books that have occurred to her since the original conversations (including works as recent as Leanne Betasamoske Simpson’s Theory of Water, which just came out this spring, and which helped inspire her idea of writing from the mashkiig). As with the stories Krawec writes about, her narrative is more cyclical than linear, more layered than straightforward, as she organizes her Bad Indians reading list into themes—books about beginnings, about history, memoir, nonfiction, horror books, and speculative fiction.

How do we imagine a world that de-centres whiteness and colonialism? With kindness, humour, thoughtfulness, and curiosity (as well as acknowledgement that nobody will ever get it right all the time), Krawec shows the way, her citations an example of gratitude and generosity. I loved the way she cites writers’ racial and cultural identities when she refers them (because these things are central to people’s experience) all the while underlining how these identities can also be points of connection as we learn from and listen to each other instead of rigid lines of division.

As you might expect from a text that’s inspired by mashkiig, Bad Indians Book Club can be a dense read, thick with ideas and meaning, and it doesn’t read up quick, but you won’t want it to. It’s a book to be savoured and experienced, returned to again to let it change you, and for those of us with a bookish bent, reading it is a rich and wondrous pleasure.

September 18, 2025

Vic Book Sale 2025

Another year, another stack from the Victoria College Book Sale. Which was wonderful, but HOT and crowded, and I was very tired, and also nostalgic for the days when I had not yet acquired all the books by beloved authors like Margaret Drabble and Penelope Lively, when the pickings seemed easy. But that’s what makes it all the more miraculous to discover gems like the last remaining Sue Miller novel I have yet to read, and also Barbara Trapido (whose novels don’t turn up much in Canada). And a very hard-to-find Louise Fitzhugh novel, which is not a novel without problems, but any Louise Fitzhugh book is worth my time (I read a library copy years ago). Penelope Fitzgerald’s bio of her father and his brothers! Muriel Spark on Mary Shelley (WHAT???). A couple of Anita Brooker’s (one first edition!), an Elizabeth Bowen, and one more by Mary Hocking, whom I’ve read once before and I’m not completely sure I’m on board but we shall see…

September 17, 2025

Heads Up

Summer’s on its way out the door, but the sunshine is returning to my south-facing kitchen table. And the snapdragons continue to bloom.

September 17, 2025

Enthusiasms for September

Every month I round up my blog content in the Pickle Me This Digest. Admittedly, I’ve been summering hard lately so blog content is minimal, BUT I also make the digest extra worthwhile to subscribers by including a list of things to be excited about (ENTHUSIASMS) and this month’s is extra good. Check it out!

September 16, 2025

Lucky Night, by Eliza Kennedy

I was a different person ten years ago when I read and reviewed Eliza Kennedy’s novel I Take You, and praised its portrayal of a woman who dares to defy societal expectations of what a wife is supposed to be, how a woman is supposed to behave (in commercial fiction, no less!). Or maybe I was the exact same person but had not yet learned how much our society resists these narratives; how the patriarchy is determined to prevail, whatever it takes; and what a low tolerance commercial fiction readers tend to have for female protagonists who are, shall we say, imperfect candidates. For protagonists who blur the lines between right and wrong, who aren’t trying to make us like them, who know themselves if they know anything at all. (I published my own book with such a protagonist in 2017. The reception on Goodreads caught me by surprise, which seems so naive now.)

A decade later, I picked up Kennedy’s third novel, Lucky Night, about Jenny and Nick, both married (to other people) who’ve been having illicit trysts here and there for six years, but never have they managed to spend a whole night together. Until now, when Nick books them into a brand new luxury hotel in a Manhattan high rise, and their time together begins as expected, although not without hiccups—it’s a heady moment as they contemplate their situation (the novel moves between their two third-person perspectives, back and forth in scene) and also alarms keep going off in the building, glitches in the system, simply a distraction (and they’re assured that everything is fine).

Even without the alarms, things would be fraught for Nick and Jenny. What do they really mean to each other? And why does each of them find it impossible to say? After six years of relations, they’re still putting on masks for each other, still pretending to be people other than who they are, still resistant to admitting what they really mean to each other and what consequences that could mean for their marriages, their children, their entire lives. (Refreshingly, this is a not a novel about guilt or shame regarding adultery. Both Nick and Jenny have worked through those feelings, and Lucky Night is about something more complicated, more interesting. Kennedy cites Laura Kipnis’s Against Love in her acknowledgements, a book that’s described as “an indictment of the martial ideal”).

And then the stakes get kicked way up high when it turns out the building is on fire, and Jenny and Nick are stranded way up above the blaze, awaiting a rescue that may never come, their story a locked room thriller with a consideration of the minutiae of high rise fires and the dynamics of adultery, sex and love. Will the lovers get what they deserve? And what they deserve exactly, I suppose, depends on your perspective, something that each of them is aware of. And the novel’s author is surely aware of this too, but makes Lucky Night brave, propulsive, and interesting.

September 16, 2025

It’s a Love Story

My friend sent me a message on Monday: “How much is love really like driving a new Maserati down a dead end street?????” And it’s a good question, I think, one that underlines just how much Taylor Swift is a songwriter on par with Bruce Springsteen (which is saying a lot). The line that open Swift’s song “Red” from her 2012 album of the same name, and continues, “Faster than the wind, passionate as sin, ending so suddenly/ Loving him is like trying to change your mind/ Once you’re already flying through the free fall/ Like the colors in autumn, so bright, just before they lose it all.”

Fall is Taylor Swift season for me now. Okay, all the seasons are Taylor Swift seasons for me now—(Forever) winter, (Cruel) summer, spring a time of lavender hazes and purple pink skies, new beginnings. But oh, fall, the season of Evermore. Plaid shirt days, as we start the countdown back to December and also anticipate a brand new album forthcoming in just over two weeks. I can’t wait.

2025 marks ten years of me being a Swiftie, of us being a family of Swifties (with a short hiatus when Reputation came out, and we thought we didn’t like her anymore. [We were wrong]). Ten years ago this summer, my six-year-old daughter came home from day camp and told us she liked a song called “Bad Blood,” a song I’d never even heard of, although I’d heard of Taylor Swift—I heard “Love Story” for the first time on the radio in 2009 when I was driving to pick up a second-hand crib off Craigslist for her when she was a baby; I remember hearing “I Knew You Were Trouble” playing on the radio in a candy shop while I toted her in a carrier on my chest.

But Taylor Swift never really permeated my consciousness until “Bad Blood” and we bought the 1989 album, and my memories of that summer have that album as the soundtrack, my kids still so little, in carseats in the backseat. (Which reminds me of her lyric from “Cruel Summer,” “I’m drunk in the back of a car/ and I cried like a baby coming home from the bar.” And how my kids were so confused wondering why a baby was coming home from a bar, and what had happened at the bar that had upset the baby so much.) I loved it all, but especially fell in love with “Shake It Off” and the idea that my children might grow up with music in their minds saying, “It’s gonna be alright.”

Which has been what Taylor Swift has meant for me every since (Reputation era notwithstanding, although it grew on me). I remember listening to her Lover album in July 2020, and being so grateful for it as some light in the darkness. And then she went and dropped her Folklore and Evermore albums (on July 24 and December 11), both of them such gifts when everything was sad and hard, to get lost in her storytelling, characters like Dorothea; Rebecca Harkness; Marjorie; Betty, Jame, the narrator of “August” (plus that notorious gossip, Inez). Every August since, I’ve spent the month humming lines about salt air and rusty doors. And now I think of summer’s turn into fall as the “August” to “Cardigan” transition. All of it so bittersweet, beautiful and ephemeral.

Last November was a nightmare, the results of the US presidential election terrifying for reasons that have come to pass, and I feel like it’s part of why everyone dove in a bit extra when Taylor Swift arrived in Toronto for her Eras tour dates over the course of that month. There has never been a more joyous, fun and creative time to experience Toronto, which came alive with (non-tortured) poets in the streets, Swift-themed pop-ups, a street temporarily renamed Taylor Swift Way, shops, restaurants and tourist destinations getting in on the Swiftie action. (Our Swiftie family took first prize in the Royal Ontario Museum’s Taylor Swift Scavenger Hunt, WHICH WAS NOT EASY, and we continue to celebrate this as one of our proudest accomplishments.) Tay-Ronto was pretty darn obnoxious to all the haters (and the liars and the dirty dirty cheats in this world who could have been getting down to this sick beat), I realize, but for the rest of us, it was a beautiful display of community and solidarity, and so much fun. It was music in my mind saying it’s gonna be alright.

So yes, I cried when her engagement news dropped. (I don’t claim to be sane or level-headed. The last ten years have broken me into pieces.) I love her. I love her happiness. I love how my daughters love her, and I love that we can love her together.

September 15, 2025

Ripeness, by Sarah Moss

This is not a review. I’m still piecing together my experience of reading RIPENESS, the latest novel by Sarah Moss (out now in Canada), whose work I fell in love with through her three short novels, GHOST WALL, SUMMERWATER, and THE FELL. Her most release is the memoir MY GOOD BRIGHT WOLF, about her childhood and more recent experiences with anorexia. And now RIPENESS, a novel-sized novel, but which rips apart convention regarding structure. The very first sentence is, “Yes, Edith says.” Quotation marks done away with, long long paragraphs, dialogue within those paragraphs, the novel comprising two sections whose relationship is hard to discern, except that they are both about Edith, one (in third person) set in the present where Edith is around 70, divorced, living a comfortable life in Ireland, and the other (first person) about Edith’s experience in the 1960s on the cusp of adulthood travelling to a villa in Italy to spend time with her older sister, a ballerina, who is waiting out the final weeks of an unwanted pregnancy.

How do these two sections knit together? The answers to that question are not straightforward, but they’re interesting, even if I’m not sure what they are yet. How does the story of her sister’s child connect to Edith’s friend’s discovery in the present that her mother had once given up a child long ago, a son who was raised in America and who is returning to Ireland, a place to which he feels he belongs? A place to which Edith, who is Edith, will never belong. Edith an exile who is the child of an exile, her mother a Jew who was the sole member of her family to survive the Holocaust when she was sent to the British midlands just in time. How does all this connect to the Ukrainian refugees who’ve made their homes in Ireland, and the less familiar-seeming refugees from other places whom Edith’s neighbours resent and wave placards against?

There is all this and so much more, so much ripeness—the fruits on the trees in Italy, the very pregnant Lydia, Edith at the beginning of her experience just before she goes to study at Oxford. There is no sex for young Edith, but plenty for Edith in the present day (she utters the first line in the midst of it). A study of maternal ambivalence, of bodies, of citizenship, of youth, and age, and fathoming unfathomable things. RIPENESS is a novel about saying YES, and also saying no, sometimes. About life, and consequences, and I need to read it again in order to fully understand it, but the point is that I want to.

September 10, 2025

A Sense of Things Beyond, by Renée Belliveau

Who gets to remember in war? Who gets to be remembered? And how does that remembering perpetuate the very narratives that makes war possible (and often likely) in the first place? These questions and more are at heart of A Sense of Things Beyond, the second novel by Renée Belliveau, whose fiction is informed by her work as an archivist, and who I had the good luck of being able to work with in the early stages of this book. It tells the story of two people in the early 1920s who are struggling to move forward from their experiences in WW1, especially since those experiences fail to conform with the simplistic and conventional narratives of war and all its glory.

Rose was a nurse who worked on the front lines, who enlisted from her home in Toronto with pride at lending her skills to a cause she believed in, along with her fellow Canadians fighting on the side of righteousness. For Frederick, who Rose has met once before (his brother is married to her sister), things are more complicated. He’s studying languages in Berlin when Archduke Franz Ferdinand is assassinated, and has come to think of Germany as his home, which means he stays too long once war is declared and spends the duration as a civilian detainee at the Ruhleben internment camp, an experience with its own trauma inherent, but nobody around him sees it that way afterwards. Some even think he got off easy because he never had to fight, and he makes his case even less sympathetic by refusing to demonize the Germans as an enemy. He’d been there when the war ended, saw the people of Berlin starving and suffering, and he refuses to mark a line between “us” and “them.”

Which makes sense to Rose, who has seen what war does to bodies, who knows it happens to bodies on both sides, who has seen the mud and seen the death, and knows that stories of heroism are mostly just myths. She has seen also the way that stories like hers have been left out of the narrative, and stories of colonial soldiers who were people of colour, and has lost faith that people like her beloved nephew died for a reason. And so when she connects with Frederick at his home in Nova Scotia while she’s visiting her sister’s family, a romance grows between them, and both of them are force to face the hard experiences they’ve been trying not to think about since war ended. And only once they’ve finally done that can Rose and Frederick begin to face a future, maybe even one together…

This is a novel that brings history to life, that brings untold stories into consciousness, and complicates the way we think about war and remembrance. At a moment when military conflict is all too common (and more dangerous than ever), we need stories like this one to remind us of what it is to be human.