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January 3, 2024

New Year’s Gleanings!

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January 2, 2024

Returning to Myself

Something I’m grateful for is the way that selfies and Instagram have taught me to make friends with my face, with my appearance, which is no small thing when you’re a woman in your mid-40s (and I kind of wished I’d been able to do as much when I was youthful and 600% gorgeous but had no idea of the latter). For a very long time, I’d see pictures of my self and feel bad about not looking the way I thought I looked in my head. But once selfies became a thing, the face in the photo became familiar, somebody I recognized, even if she looked a little bit odd or the light was unflattering, but who doesn’t look odd, sometimes? How tedious to be the woman who freaks out about appearing in photos with the same face she walks around in the world with all the time.

There was also so much that was gratifying about Instagram’s algorithm’s favouring of faces, and bodies. The whole matter feeling particularly subversive since my face and body defy conventional beauty standards in some ways, and so I’d get to celebrate myself, to feel empowered and good inside my own skin, as though I was the one making the rules instead of catering to somebody else’s standard, and I was, I think, for a while.

Or maybe I never was, I don’t know. What I do know, however, is that at some point it started to feel not good. That whenever I needed the dopamine hit of engagement with my posts, I’d post a photo of my face, and the LIKES would start coming. And is that any way to treat my friend? Something that started off feeling empowering and meaningful becoming a cheap kind of gesture, and I became conscious of that. I became conscious of everything, this performance of my self, my life, my tea cups, even. I did not like it anymore.

Instagram wasn’t a performance, in the beginning. Or if it was, I didn’t notice, because it was serving me, and the LIKES came easily, so I didn’t have to think of them. (There were never so many, but numbers aren’t the kind of data my mind clings to.) I’ve spent the last 23 years putting elements of my life on the internet, and so social media feels natural to me, and I’ve always been able to use it in my own way, creating my own template instead of contorting myself in order to fit into somebody else’s, which is part of the reason why I’ll always be obscure, but it’s also entirely the reason I’m still here.

But last fall, it stopped feeling good to me. Partly it was became I was working so hard to try to sell my book (which is to say, to try to sell myself) and the book wasn’t selling. And—not unrelated—I was stuck in a rut in general, doing all these things both in my actual life and on the internet simply because these were things I always did, and while it’s true that rituals add meaning to existence, it’s possible to ritual so much that the life gets sucked out of them. The small ceremony of #TodaysTeacup began to feel rote. Posting my face began to feel rote. And then, even worse, I was doing all these things by rote and getting less engagement than I’d ever seen before, and it made me feel really bad about myself and about everything, and what even is the point of that?

Last year I struggled a lot to feel present in the moment. I think a lot of it was anticipation about my book release, so much set upon that event that every moment before it just felt like counting down the days. In the summer I swam to the middle of the lake in my favourite place in the whole world, and it just didn’t feel like my head was there, which was terrible since immersion in that lake, in that moment, in any moment, really, is so essential to my mental health. Similar to Instagram, it felt I was performing my experience, doing the things I do because these are the things I do, rather than consciously deliberately doing them.

By mid-December, I was pretty miserable. I actually diagnosed myself with a low grade depression, but I think I was just getting my period. Or maybe I was actually depressed after all, but getting off Instagram did the trick of fixing what was ailing me. Instantaneously. I think I’d been exhausted from the effort of trying to promote my book inside my little sphere of influence, like a crazy maniacal tap-dance that absolutely no one on the planet cared about, and once I got to stop dancing, it felt like such a relief. No longer scrolling past everybody else’s literary end-of-year triumphs, all the while my novel hadn’t garnered a single review. (And yes, I know that there are many writers who’d be grateful for the opportunity/exposure/sales I’ve been lucky to have, which is part of the reason talking about this at all is hard, but…that’s not the point?). Being able to just take a mug down from the cupboard without thinking about it. Heading out with friends and family and not taking a single photo, or if I did, not showing it to anybody. Noticing something beautiful, and not needing to share that beauty in order for it to true. Merely living a day, instead of feeling like I had to document it—and there was nothing mere about it. It was so restorative, and meaningful, and felt like I’d got a part of my life back that was only just for me.

And this is what I’m hoping of more of in this new year, to return to myself, to connect with the moment, to live more offline, and live differently on it. To spend less of my time striving for external validation (so much of which is superficial) and more time doing things that are meaningful to me.

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December 31, 2023

204!

For a long time, or at least as long as I’ve been keeping track of books I’ve read, I’ve had a vague desire to reach the milestone of 200 books read in a single year, a milestone that proved elusive again and again as I clocked in around 175 books year after year, more or less. But 2023 began, in these terms, most promisingly, as I managed to read more than 20 titles in the month of January (thanks to a week of holidays after New Year’s, and a few short titles [Annie Erneaux, hello!]). And I’ve been able to build on that momentum ever since, my goal looking more possible than ever by mid-December, and so I decided to buckle down and get ‘er done while partaking in my absolutely favourite holiday reading ritual, which is finally getting around to all the random titles on my shelf I’ve been acquiring from secondhand bookshops and little free libraries and other serendipitous places over the past few months. My other reading goal, in addition to achieving that 200 books milestone, is curating a book stack that’s weird and surprising and looks like nobody else’s. And I did it! In fact, I did both its, and take a look at this book stack that has filled my days over the past two weeks as I’ve done almost nothing else but read, aside from some delightful holiday fun with my family. (Signs I’ve perhaps stayed too close to home include a journey up to Dupont Street yesterday, for which I decided it was necessary to take a train.)

I love this book stack, the last books I’ll have read in the year 2023, such a rando stack of titles:

  • White Noise, bought secondhand after an essay in the New York Times about its relevance to our current moment, which was absolutely true, but also I didn’t love it so much, and also it’s one of so many books that I read in my 20s and didn’t understand was mostly supposed to be funny.
  • Jewels, because what is a rando book stack without actual Danielle Steel. January 2024 will herald the launch of my substack, which will replace my newsletter, but be much of the same, except for a featured essay every month for paid subscribers, and the first one will be about Jewels—and you’ll be able to read it whether you’re paid or not because I’ve decided to make the first three essays free.
  • Small Things Like These, because novellas are necessary when you’re scrambling to finally reach your goal of reading 200 books in a year for the first time ever, plus it was for sale by a new bookseller at one of my favourite cafes, and a Christmas book to boot. I loved it.
  • Business as Usual, an epistolary novel about a young woman making a career in a London department store during the 1930s, a gift from my friend Nathalie, and I found it ridiculously delightful. (Epistolary novels are also good when you’re trying to rack up an impressive number of reads.)
  • Our Town, which I’d never read or seen performed (I think you have to be American for that…) but was interested in after reading Ann Patchett’s Tom Lake, as Patchett herself intended with her novel. Also a play, very short, you know where I’m going with this.
  • The Colour of Water, which I found for $2 after reading MacBride’s latest, The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store. This 1996 memoir is so remarkable, and connects interestingly to the novel.
  • Agua Viva, by Clarice Lispector, whose strange books I can appreciate because they’re short, and I actually liked this one a lot, though it’s not completely my cup of tea.
  • Treasure Island!!!, which I’d been wanting to read for years. I think this one used to be Nathalie’s too, and I stole it when sorting books donated for our school book sale. It was totally bonkers and nutty and I will probably never think about it again, but it was fun and horrifying, which is an unusual combination.
  • Time Will Darken It. I just love William Maxwell so so very much and look forward to making my way through all this books. I love their subtlety, their play with form, their tenderness, how well he writes women and also how beautifully he writes men. (The bad thing about immersing one’s self in old books, however, is the frequency with which “the n-word” appears, and this was the first in the stack, would not be the last. For someone for whom that word is deeply personal and as wounding as that weapon-word could be intended, reading old books must be an absolute minefield.)
  • A Cupboard Full of Coats, purchased secondhand in cottage-country this summer. I’d loved Edward’s second novel, which I was turned onto after her interview with Donna Bailey Nurse. Her debut was nominated for the Booker Prize and I found it enormously moving, strange and surprising.
  • The Mind Has Mountains was one of two books I purchased at the Victoria College Book sale by Mary Hocking, an author I’d never heard of, and it was so weird and interesting…though I eventually ran out of patience. It’s part horror story, part bureaucratic tale of the reorganization of municipal government. Published in 1974. Hocking has always been sort of obscure, I think, though I managed to find a Facebook group called “Mary Hocking readers” and I became its 35th member.
  • Black Faces, White Faces, another Little Free Library find. Jane Gardam’s first book for adults, about British expatriates in Jamaica. I loved it.
  • The World Below, which I read all day on Christmas (my children having received video games, you see). I love Sue Miller SO MUCH and this might be my favourite of all of hers that I have read. Adored it. Even better, I found a beautiful new edition of her novel Family Pictures at the used bookstore yesterday, which means I still have more Sue Miller before me.
  • Emotionally Weird was a Kate Atkinson book I read before I (and the world) properly understood what Kate Atkinson was, but after I’d fallen in love with her brilliant debut Behind the Scenes at the Museum AND I DID NOT LIKE IT and gave my copy away. It was too precocious for its own good. But having read so so much more Kate Atkinson since and having a better idea of what her literary project was in general, I wanted to revisit it, and guess what: I STILL DID NOT LIKE IT. Even brilliant writers miss the mark sometimes.
  • The Wren, the Wren. I got this book for Christmas. Truly a book to be savoured, Anne Enright’s best yet? I loved it so much.
  • Have His Carcase was a Harriet Vane/Peter Wimsey mystery and it’s so so wonderful but should also be 100 pages shorter, but maybe I’m just saying that because I didn’t actually care about precisely how the mystery was solved—there was about fifteen pages devoted to decoding a letter, deciphering broken down in mind-numbing detail. Either you like this stuff or you don’t, but if you’re the latter, there is always skimming, thank goodness, and so I also had a very good time.
  • Tracks, which I bought at a yard sale in October, Erdrich’s third novel, rich and compelling.
  • And finally, After the Fire, which I stole from a cottage library the summer before last (or maybe I actually rescued it, because it had become a habitat for mildew). I liked many things about it, and Jane Rule is a really interesting writer, but it also had mildew growing in it in a metaphoric way. Still, I am really glad I read it, especially since I found inside it a bookmark from Long House Books, which I’d never heard of, but which was located just metres from my house at 497 Bloor Street West, and—according to this blog post—stocked exclusively Canadian titles, which is such a wonderful idea (and not the least bit limiting).

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December 13, 2023

Books That Won My Heart This Year

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… (Read the rest)

Morse Code for Romantics, by Anne Baldo

For this is a book that is so steeped in summer, a collection of stories with sand between their toes, set along the shores of Lake Erie, scrappy cottages and rundown motels. With lines like “We don’t know it yet but we will never be bigger, or more real, than we are right here this summer. We will keep fading and shrinking, in small ways, forever always, after this.” (Read the rest)

This is the House That Luke Built, by Violet Browne

I love this book, just as heartbreaking as it is hilarious, full of gorgeous prose, and gutsy women, and so much love, even in the face of so much loss, maybe especially. Rose’s struggles to raise her kids and make a better life for herself are harrowing and awesome, and the flame that continues to burn for the husband she lost is sustaining, transformative, unforgettable…. (Read the rest)

Birnam Wood, by Eleanor Catton

But reader, I sped through it in two days. This book! This book! Speaking of plot… Like making one’s way through the weeds and the bramble, and then suddenly there I was at the heart of things and the novel was unputdownable. (Read the rest)

Penance, by Eliza Clark

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… (Read the rest)

The Light of Eternal Spring, by Angel Di Zhang

“My mother died of a broken heart, or so the letter said.” And this is the spectacular opening line of Angel Di Zhang’s dazzlingly dreamy debut novel, The Light of Eternal Spring, a story of love and loss, a story of finding and belonging, about seeing and knowing, all the gaps between what we remember and what really happened, and the curious nature of space and time. (Read the rest)

Soil: The Story of a Black Mother’s Garden, by Camille T. Dungy

This is a memoir about the labour (and setbacks) in cultivating diversity in our gardens, and beyond them. It’s also a story of receiving a Guggenheim grant to write a book whose progress is stopped up by the Covid-19 Pandemic and a ten-year-old child whose home schooling requires supervision…. (Read the rest)

The Clarion, by Nina Dunic

I really loved The Clarion, a strangely shaped novel about loneliness and connection, a quiet story of two siblings launched into the world from a difficult childhood whose adult trajectories (told in alternating chapters) are very different, the narrative reflecting that. (Read the rest)

The Observer, by Marina Endicott

Oh, how I loved this quiet, meditative book, which was not about quiet or meditative things, but instead about violence, abuse, trauma, PTSD, deprivation, loneliness, and LOVE… (Read the rest)

The Possibilities, by Yael Goldstein-Love

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… (Read the rest)

Strange Loops, by Liz Harmer

Exquisite and propulsive are the first two words that spring to mind when I think about Liz Harmer’s latest novel, Strange Loops, which I read this weekend and found virtually unputdownable… (Read the rest)

We Meant Well, by Erum Shazia Hasan

We Meant Well is a novel of ideas (as well as part of a developing canon of works by Canadian writers about the complicated reality of NGOs), but also a terrific, fast paced, plot driven work that’s horrifying, fascinating, and absolutely gripping at once. (Read the rest)

Games and Rituals, by Katherine Heiny

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. (Read the rest)

Gin, Turpentine, Pennyroyal, Rue, by Christine Higdon

Gin, Turpentine, Pennyroyal, Rue manages to be everything all at once: action-packed, artful, playful, timely, timeless, weighty, light, compelling historical fiction that maps so beautifully onto right now…. (Read the rest)

Pebble & Dove, by Amy Jones

Tangled histories, family secrets, a kitschy backdrop, one spectacular marine mammal, and so much love—Pebble & Dove has everything, including crackling prose and an unforgettable story that will grab your heart. This is Amy Jones’s best novel yet, and I could not have loved it more. (Read the rest)

Doppelganger, by Naomi Klein

In Doppelganger, Naomi Klein comes as closer as I’ve ever seen anyone come to explaining just what the heck is going on here, connecting the dots on a vast canvas, making sense of the nonsensical, in a way that will be familiar to anyone who’s read Klein’s work before, but also weaving in elements of memoir that are new to her work and which add a real sense of humanity to these stories in which so many of our fellow humans have come to seem almost alien. (Read the rest)

Yellowface, by R.M. Kuang

So, I can’t say I’d necessarily recommend R.M. Kuang’s Yellowface to anyone else who has a new novel coming out in 28 days, because it’s just a little too on the nose, a satire that’s so real about the pressures and cutthroat competition of the publishing industry, the high stakes and low odds which “have made it impossible for white and nonwhite authors alike [emphasis mine] to succeed…” (Read the rest)

Wait Softly Brother, by Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer

The pieces of Wait Softly Brother culminate in the richest and most satisfying kind of story, a deep literary mystery. On dwellings, and dwelling, and wells and welling. So so excellent. (Read the rest)

I Have Some Questions for You, by Rebecca Makkai

What a marvelous, absorbing, complicated world of a book this is, a literary mystery, and a mirror. (Read the rest)

The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store, by James McBride

The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store, set in a Pennsylvania community that’s home to Black Americans and Jewish European immigrants, is just as strange and wonderful, a story to get lost in. A novel I’m finding it hard to find words to describe, arriving at “spectacular,” with emphasis on “spectacle,” because there’s just so much going on here…. (Read the rest)

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… A story of class, love, and friendship. I loved it. (Read the rest)

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…. Read the rest)

The Damages, by Genevieve Scott

As with the best books inspired by #MeToo, Scott doesn’t come to neat conclusions, but instead engages with the mess of it all, teasing out the multitudinous threads, asking questions instead of claiming to have all the answers. A terrific read… (Read the rest)

What Remains of Elsie Jane, by Chelsea Wakelyn

Chelsea Wakelyn’s debut novel WHAT REMAINS OF ELSIE-JANE reads a bit like Joan Didion’s THE YEAR OF MAGICAL THINKING, but narrated by someone who is not a cool customer, instead a human being wracked with pain and grief and lust and longing after the death of a partner from drug poisoning, a loss that has left Elsie Jane with a backyard full of weeds, an addiction to dating apps, and two small children who need feeding and caring day-after-day, and Elsie Jane is hanging on, just barely. (Read the rest)

Denison Avenue, by Christina Wong and Daniel Innes

What I loved about this book was how it told the story of a changing Toronto from the perspective of a person of colour, a person who speaks very little English (in the book, Wong writes her dialogue in the Toisan dialect), which is a perspective I’ve never heard before. And similarly, though elderly women collecting bottles and cans are as ubiquitous in my neighbourhood as they are in Innes’s drawings, I’ve spent very little time considering these women’s perspectives, what brought them here, why they’re doing this—for Cho Sum, it’s to earn a bit of money, and give shape to her days, and for exercise. In so many ways, for me, Denison Avenue was absolutely a revelation… (Read the rest)

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December 12, 2023

AFAF Giveaway!

AFAFanovel week continues with a #giveaway that’s TOTEally awesome.

The stockings are hung by the chimney with care…along with a cute bookish tote bag from @esquared.designs!

For a chance to win that bag, with a signed copy of ASKING FOR A FRIEND tucked inside, leave a comment and tell me what book you’re looking forward to cozying up with over the holidays…. 🇨🇦🇺🇸addresses only. Good luck!

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December 11, 2023

AFAF on the Red Fern Book Review Podcast!

Welcome to #AFAFanovel WEEK, five whole days of fun new things to share—including a very cool giveaway coming tomorrow! Stay tuned… But TODAY I am thrilled to bring you my conversation with Amy Mair on the wonderful @redfernbookreview podcast, in which I talk about my novel, slander #CanLit, and recommend five very good books for the readers on your holiday gift list. Thank you, Amy, for having me! (And if I had been cognizant that you were recording video, I probably wouldn’t have chosen my children’s bedroom as our recording studio. Apologies!) Listen on Apple Podcasts (and you can find our conversation on Spotify and Youtube too!).

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December 7, 2023

We Meant Well, by Erum Shazia Hasan

“The fire became its own story. The great fire. People spoke of it as a temporal event, “before the fire,” “after the fire.” It wasn’t linked to anything other than to itself and time. There was never any blame, only mention of misfortune. Everything happened in such fragmented pieces that seldom were connector strings drawn between events. It was its own monster. People would talk of where they were during the fire. They recounted the miracles, the people who survived. They relived the losses. They have anniversaries. And time kept going. The fire had nothing to do with the Todds and the Toms, their umbrellas and baseball caps, or the fact that a mass movement of people had been forced, increasing risks and pressure in a small dense location. It had nothing to do with the fact that my mutual funds back home, which I’d set up when I was eighteen, had investments in the mining company that Todd worked for. No, the fire was what it was. An unfortunate event. Like Lele’s rape.”

Erum Shazia Hasan’s WE MEANT WELL (longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize) begins with a phone call in the middle of the night received by Maya at her home in Los Angeles. There is an emergency in the unnamed African country to which Maya has been tied to for years through her work in International Aid, work she is yearning to leave behind for a fresh and less complicated start so that she might be able to be more present (both physically and otherwise) for her husband and young daughter. But it’s work that has changed her, and so has the place, Likanni, creating what seems like an unbridgeable distance between Maya and those who’ve never known the struggles of life in the Global South—her husband in particular, a high flying corporate lawyer. Who, Maya is aware, is having an affair, just one of the reasons—she realizes—he so easily lets her leave again, but she also knows that he knows that she’d be going regardless, because Likanni—and the ways that life there seems real in a way that her sanitized American existence so rarely does—has become a compulsion that’s unshakable.

The stakes are always so high—maybe that’s it? And perhaps they’ve never been higher than now as a colleague has been accused of raping a local woman who’s worked in their charity’s office. And now Maya has arrived to deescalate the situation, to smooth things over to keep their donors happy while also maintaining trust from the community, with whom she’s always had strong ties through her work. The matter boiling down to a simple he said/she said situation—but of course there has never been anything simple about that, WE MEANT WELL examining the space between all things (B)lack and white, a space embodied by Maya herself as brown-skinned woman, an American adopted as an infant from Bangladesh, a person who ever benefits from white privilege in a place like Likanni.

WE MEANT WELL is a novel of ideas (as well as part of a developing canon of works by Canadian writers about the complicated reality of NGOs), but also a terrific, fast paced, plot driven work that’s horrifying, fascinating, and absolutely gripping at once.

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December 6, 2023

No Strong Feelings

I got out of the pool on Monday in the company of this woman I’d always considered part-mermaid. She doesn’t swim as much as bob around in the pool with the most contented look on her face, a contented look I understand, because this is swimming, but on Monday she wasn’t content at all, instead she was furious. There was all this hair floating around the pool, she said, and she was right, it was gross, a clump had wrapped around my wrist while I was doing the back-crawl, and the woman was imploring me to send a letter of complaint, demanding that rules regarding long hair being tied back be better enforced, and I promised her I would, but I never will, because I just don’t care, and I felt that freedom as I left her, of not being burdened by unnecessary rage. Of all the problems in the world, I considered, if this one’s the worst, we’re pretty lucky, and later I was talking to my husband—who’s a member of the gym as well—about how we always hear people complaining about the facilities and we just can’t believe it, because this is the first time we’ve ever belonged to a gym where people don’t break into lockers and where no one is going to steal your boots.

No strong feelings. I think about this a lot. I’ve written before about how a decade on Twitter trained my brain to only have strong feelings, very unnecessary rage, and how my brain broke in the end, and it’s been a long, slow journey back to something more like mental equilibrium. And then I think about what would happen if nobody ever had strong feelings at all, and I can’t help but decide that would be a bad thing, because it’s strong feelings that make way for new possibilities, and the alternative is apathy.

But what if it isn’t always? What if no strong feelings also means really understanding?

On Monday evening, after dinner, I stumbled into the most nightmarish internet rabbit hole, the comments of a substack where people are still going on about the open letter and #UBCAccountable, and defending the right to due process, and it was absolutely loony, absolutely no reflection or understanding of a broader context, everybody so self-righteous. And it made me think back to 2017 Feminist Twitter (which was part of the Twitter that broke my brain) and how everything was over the top there, and how its critics were not always wrong, but about how their critique turned them into the mirror image of what they were opposing. Pick a side, get louder, there are more of us than you.

I would like to send a metaphoric bouquet of flowers to everyone who manages to find young and earnest progressive online lefties sometimes annoying without turning into a fundamentalist reactionary. What a remarkable achievement, with so many others cut down in their prime. And yes, obviously I’d ended up in this rabbit hole because my brain was being fried by somebody else’s narrow, fundamentalist views about Israel and Palestine expressed on Facebook, and one link leading to another. Let’s just say that there were a lot of strong feelings, but absolutely zero understanding or curiosity about another point of view.

I’ve never signed an open letter. I remember when the UBC Open Letter went around way back when, there was a Tweet by some dipshit about how they were absolutely humbled to be signed on to a letter amidst so many CanLit greats, and that encapsulated it exactly, the desire of so many people (particularly writers, never a most secure lot) to belong, be a member of a team, to be on “the right side of history,” even. I am always suspicious of anyone anyway who’s claiming to be humbled, because let me tell you, every time I have truly been humbled, I’ve certainly never tweeted about it, having been much too busy lying on the floor. (You would think that part of the job description of being a writer is knowing what words mean?) I am have also grown suspicious of anyone who is claiming to be on the right side of history, mostly because everybody things they’re on the right side of history, and I’m just not sure that history actually works like that. (I think it’s safe to say that all sides of history have their own nefarious characters.)

I’ve never signed an open letter, because I’m just not sure that the open letter discourse is productive in the end. (And because Open Letters have a habit of breeding out of control, like guppies. They get unruly. It’s just not great.) I’ve never signed an open letter for the same reason I’ve realized I am not comfortable with street protests, which is the fear of losing myself in a body of people. Some of this, I think, is due to me coming to terms with my anxiety, something still fairly recent that I’m working through, and perhaps at some point I’ll change my mind about that, but not right now.

(This is not necessarily a critique of protests and open letters. And there are other ways to stand up for what I believe in, and I have not ceased those actions. But I need to find a way to use my voice and make a difference that is true to my experience and also sustainable, instead of doing whatever whoever is yelling on social media the loudest is telling me to do, in a lifelong quest to be seen as good.)

There is something about “the mob,” but not in the way that the critics of 2017 Feminist Twitter imagined it. I think you fight the mob not by fighting the mob, but by fighting that impulse inside yourself*, the impulse toward rage, toward othering, instead of listening and understanding. And understanding not for the sake of agreement—it would be a very sorry world if everybody felt the same—but for the sake of understanding in itself, the exercise of making sense of somebody else’s point of view.

Which is a long way to come in a post that begins with floating clumps of hair, but such is a the way of a blog.

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December 5, 2023

Gleanings

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December 5, 2023

The Clarion, by Nina Dunic

I really loved The Clarion, a strangely shaped novel about loneliness and connection, a quiet story of two siblings launched into the world from a difficult childhood whose adult trajectories (told in alternating chapters) are very different, the narrative reflecting that. Peter’s world is small, and his story takes place over a handful of days, beginning with a monumental one as he auditions for a spot playing trumpet in a part time gig at a local restaurant. Peter is an unlikely performer—he’s nondescript, unassuming, and while he plays the notes, discerning listeners can tell that he doesn’t feel them. He works behind the scenes in a restaurant kitchen—a job his sister got him—and finds connection and release at a local bar whose DJ’s tracks are mesmerizing and allow Peter to be absorbed into the crowd, to become part of something larger than himself.

Whereas his sister Stasi feels she is too much of the world, and has lost herself within it, in serving its goals and spending so much of her life caring for first her troubled mother, and then her brother. Striving to succeed in the corporate world, the hollowness of all this becoming apparent when she’s passed up for a promotion. Her story—reflective of its larger scale—take place over several weeks as she contemplates her grief and listlessness, tries out therapy, and continues an affair that threatens to put her domestic life at risk, all the while just as lonely and lost as her brother is.

Are we all different or are we the same, is a question the novel returns to several times, a question of nature versus nurture, and the idea of a clarion call haunts the story too, a longing for a song to summon everyone, a common humanity. And the beauty of this book are the fleeting moments of connection where such a thing almost seems possible. However meagre, and also everything.

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