June 16, 2025
As Long as There are Stars Above You
When I was little, any time I spent not wondering just what exactly was going on on Meat Loaf’s Bat Out Hell album, I was likely listening to The Beach Boys, and understanding everything. And I don’t mean it as a rebuke to Brian Wilson’s talent and genius that his music managed to speak to me on a visceral level when I was a toddler—lines like, “There’s a world where I can go/ And tell my secrets to/ In my room.” “Wouldn’t it be nice if we were older, then we wouldn’t have to wait so long?” “I’m getting bugged driving up and down the same old strip” [on my Big Wheel]. The Beach Boys sang songs about being true to your school, about wanting to go home. “And we’ll have fun fun fun til her Daddy takes the t-bird away.” When The Beach Boys sang, I felt like they were telling my story, even though I was landlocked in the middle of the continent and still years away from a driver’s license, with no understanding yet that a t-bird was not, in fact, a kind of bird. Or even what a bushy blonde hairdo looked like.
When I was little, I thought The Beach Boys was this obscure band that only me and my family knew about, their music playing on the boombox we had on our boat. I remember mentioning them once to one of my contemporaries—I was about six at the time—and her correcting me: They were called the BEASTIE boys. But not at my house they weren’t. My very first concert was The Beach Boys live at Copps Coliseum in Hamilton, Ontario, when I was about six years old, though I don’t think Brian Wilson was touring with them by then. When they returned to the pop charts in 1998 with “Kokomo” on the soundtrack from the movie Cocktail, we were ecstatic. I can’t help but think that a small part of the reason I’ve never done drugs is because “Drugs” was always the explanation my dad gave me for the more unlistenable Beach Boys songs, compared to their lush tones and gorgeous harmonies. I mean, what if I did LSD and ended up trapped inside “The Elements: Fire (Mrs. O’Leary’s Cow)”?
The Beach Boys would also make way for my own adolescent zeitgeist, the harmonies of Brian Wilson’s daughters, Wendy and Carnie, along with Chynna Philips, whose songs are as much part of my musical DNA as their parents’, underlining the dadness of it all. So it seems fitting to have passed Father’s Day this year thinking about and listening to Brian Wilson, who died just a few days before. He was the dad’s dad, and his good vibrations will keep on vibrating even now that he’s gone.
June 12, 2025
Always the Smugness
As always, it’s the smugness that gets me in the end. If only I hadn’t valued my superiority as somebody who’d never click on one of those LOCAL STORE CLOSING AFTER SEVENTEEN YEARS EVERYTHING MUST GO ads or buy a sack dress that turned out to be an actual sack. I knew enough not to buy soft pants that looked like hard pants, or tea that tastes like birthday cake. I could tell that the leather was really pleather and that the softest blanket other was anything but. I thought I was savvy, and I even was, a little bit. When the ad caught my eye—a basket for the bbq so that veggies don’t fall through the grill, just in time for Father’s Day—I googled the company in question. Where were they located? They had a street address in Edmonton. And possibly the red flag should have been the text I received from my bank after I made the credit card payment asking if I had actually made this purchase. But of course I had, and so I okayed it, and the transaction went through. SO SO STUPID. What was I thinking? $50 for a wire basket? Yes, it occurs to me now that the price is a little high. And then I got my shipping notification this morning—my $50 wire basket is on its way from ACTUAL WUHAN. But this was a reputable company, right? Um, no, there is another company with a similar name. The company that I’d just sent $50 to for a wire basket has social media accounts that are a month old and have no customer engagement. The address in Edmonton turned out to be for the Chinese dropshipping company will be handling the transport of my no doubt piece-of-crap FIFTY DOLLAR BASKET. I feel very dumb. Meta is a terrible company. And hopefully I’ve learned my lesson and will never do anything quite this idiotic again. [Editor’s note: she totally will do something this idiotic again, but hopefully not this precise thing.)
June 11, 2025
How to Lose Your Mother, by Molly Jong-Fast
I saw myself in Molly Jong-Fast’s memoir, How to Lose Your Mother, specifically the part where she writes about how strangers project onto her their feelings about her novelist mother, a burden that she has born in good spirits, all things considered. When I published an essay about her mother’s iconic 1973 novel Fear of Flying way back when, I tagged Jong-Fast in a Twitter post, and I think she even shared it. Although in the years since, Jong-Fast has come to mean an awful lot to me as a person in her own right, in the last five years that I’ve been listening to her podcast, which continues to be a balm to my anxiety and has helped me make (some) sense of the chaos of our era, but then it turns out that making sense of chaos is something Molly Jong-Fast has been doing for a very long time.
And this novel is a document of that process, a memoir of her childhood born to famous artistic parents for whom “parenting” was not a verb, and of the neglect she experienced as her mother chased fame and ignored her addictions, and also a memoir of Jong-Fast’s very difficult year as her mother’s dementia advanced and Jong-Fast’s husband was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, among other heartbreaks and calamities. Sober since age 19, Jong-Fast has designed a very different life from her mother’s, marrying at 24 and finding joy as the parent to three children, and now as her mother begins to decline (and her stepfather is dying from Parkinson’s concurrently), Jong-Fast resents the time she’s forced to spent caring for parents whom she feels never cared for her.
I really appreciated this honest portrayal of the realities of eldercare, and Jong-Fast’s awareness of her limits, her refusal to be a martyr. I also love the complexity of the mother-daughter relationship she constructs, that it’s all love all the same, even with the failures of mother and daughter both at various points in the relationship. That love is a multitudinous thing, but also that person has the right to own their own soul, their own story, which was the point of Fear of Flying after all, a lesson that perhaps is just one of many gifts (along with the burdens) that Molly Jong-Fast inherited from her imperfect mother.
June 10, 2025
The World So Wide, by Zilla Jones
St. Georges, Grenada. October 1982. Celebrated Canadian opera singer Felicity Alexander has arrived in her mother-country to be part of a showcase of Grenadian talent put on by the Caribbean nation’s revolutionary government whose Marxist doctrine is seen as a threat by the US. Although Felicity’s own reasons for being there are personal—almost 20 years before she had been at university in London with the man who is now Prime Minister of Grenada, and with his deputy, who’d been Felicity’s lover. And soon after her arrival, a rival of the Prime Minister attempts a coup, Felicity being roped into the crew who is put under house arrest, and all the while rumours are swirling that the United States is about to invade.
Zilla Jones’ debut novel, The World So Wide, moves between the tense days under house arrest and Zilla’s experience growing up on Winnipeg, her immigrant mother reserved in her affecting but working hard to give her talented daughter the musical education she deserves, which leads to Felicity receiving a scholarship to the Guildhall School of Music in London, UK. More than anything else, Felicity is intent on her career success, and has no compunction about pursuing it, or liberating herself from her religious mother’s expectations, and also having sex whenever she cares to, which is very subversive for a woman in the 1960s, and especially for a Black woman. Once she gets to England, Felicity also finds that her Blackness is under debate in the company of other students from Caribbean in a way it had never been in Canada, where she was always firmly othered. Never really belonging anywhere properly, she becomes more determined to create a singular place in the world for herself.
Felicity knows exactly who she is, and does not bend to convention, which expects her to submit to marriage and motherhood. As befits an opera singer, her emotions and desires in the novel are outsized, larger than life, which makes for compelling and dramatic reading, the only drawback that secondary characters can seem slight in comparison, their own emotions and desires flattened. The novel does a terrific job, however, of using her personal story to bring history (albeit fictionalized) to life, illuminating the fascinating story of Grenada’s revolutionary government, which deserves to be better known.
June 9, 2025
Theory of Water, by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson
Both the big and small pictures in Leanne Betasamosake Simpson Theory of Water meant a lot to me, although the entire book is underlined by the understanding that the micro and macro are the very same, and that we can’t make a distinction, certainly not in the case of water, which flows and flows, escaping containment. Water is inherently connection, sometimes in the most surprising ways imperceptible to the naked eye. Simpson’s own connection to water comes from skiing, from water in winter, and she introduces me to the concept of “sintering,” which is when a snowflake forms bonds with other snowflakes to create “the fabric of a snowpack.” One thing leading to another, ordinary and miraculous at once.
The waterways that Simpson writes about are the rivers and lakes most familiar to me from growing up in Peterborough, and spending my summers on lakes in the Trent Severn System, and it occurs to me how little I really got to know these lakes and rivers. How I took for granted (or barely thought about) the few places where Jackson Creek had been allowed to surface in downtown Peterborough (and never made the connection between its burial and the massive floods that occurred in 2004), and never considered how the lock system, which permitted my family to so easily pass from Sturgeon to Cameron and then to Balsam lakes, changed and damaged the eco-system, destroying the wild rice on which Indigenous peoples had based their economy. Simpson writes about the eels that used to come from the Sargasso Sea and populate the Great Lakes and lakes in the Kawarthas and beyond until the St. Lawrence Seaway made their passage impossible. She writes about how giving waterways over to commerce and capitalism has been corrupting, and the necessity of a different kind of future.
So many answers to questions about what this land is and who we need to become to live well here are found in littoral places, shorelines whose boundaries are neither here nor there, hard to map, bursting with biodiversity and possibility, the places where life happens. We are not just of the water, but water is literally so much of what we are, and exploring this idea is key to a livable future.
June 6, 2025
My Grade 5 Science Project
Marc Garneau has died, the former MP and first Canadian in space, less well known for doing my Grade 5 science project when we somehow mailed him a cassette tape on which I asked him to record answers to my questions about being an astronaut—AND HE DID IT! And sent me photos and CanadARM stickers to use in my display, and it was the only science project I ever did that won a prize. What a thoroughly decent human being.
June 3, 2025
Consider Yourself Kissed, by Jessica Stanley
I periodically wonder if, had I’d lived through any other period from my thirties into my mid-forties, I might look less ravaged by time right now. If I might resemble that woman I was in photographs until around 2013, whose hair was dark brown, her skin unlined, decidedly youthful. And while I have absolutely no complaints about my grey hair and wrinkles (I like how I look and I’ve known too many women who would have given anything to win their grey hair and wrinkles, but didn’t get the chance), I do wonder if the last decade and a bit has been just a bit EXTRA in terms of things that might age one seemingly overnight.
And this is the period that Jessica Stanley documents in her novel Consider Yourself Kissed, the story of a marriage set right close to the eye of the storm—Coralie is a Australian expat who falls in love with divorced dad and political journalist Adam after she rescues his small daughter when she falls into a London pond, and dropped into his world Coralie finds herself BELONGING for perhaps the first time in her life, after a peripatetic childhood, ensconced in a life that is rich and full. But maybe too full? Is there such a thing?
Against a tumultuous decade in British politics (during which Adam’s star only rises), including Brexit and the nightmare of five different Tory Prime Ministers, capped off with a worldwide pandemic, we see Coralie trying to balance the demands of motherhood and marriage with her own career, and failing enough that she feels pretty bad about all of it, all the while neglecting the creative dreams she stuffed in a drawer when she met her husband who had ambition enough for both of them.
Consider Yourself Kissed (the title comes from how a character in Mary McCarthy’s THE GROUP signs letters to his girlfriend, a literary nod to perfunctory love) reminds me of Nora Ephron’s Heartburn, which is pretty much the highest praise a critic can offer to a comic novel bridging the political and domestic. It’s a that book that shows how women ARE that bridge, making the lives of seemingly important men possible, mapping out quotidian details while their husbands are charting epic tales and being celebrated, while these wives stay quiet in the background. Except that Coralie reaches a point where she just can’t do it anymore, which is the moment we find her at when the novel begins, and to explain how she got there, she has to go back to the beginning…
Charming, funny, touching, and so engaging it’s almost exhausting (because WHAT A TIME IT’S BEEN), Consider Yourself Kissed is a complicated love story, and absolutely a delight.
June 2, 2025
16 and 12
We’re deep in the heart of birthday season at our house, these two turning the mind-blowing ages of 16 and 12, and filling that house with noise, music, make-up residue, murder mysteries and graphic novels, Stardew Valley sounds, random socks in strange places, and an array of candy wrappers. It continues to be one of the nicest parts of my existence to live a life that overlaps with theirs, and I cherish all the togetherness because it won’t be too long before I have to miss it, which will be a happy part of the story too, I GUESS. But in the meantime, I just feel very lucky that they seem to like my company most of the time, and consent to tag along on adventures. I also feel lucky that they like each other very much, and are kind to each other, especially since we basically only had a second child because we wanted to the big one to have somebody to share carnival rides with. You can’t plan a lot of things in life, but thankfully this one thing worked out, and that I get to hang out with the two best people I’ve ever met is just the sweetest bonus, better than anything I ever could have imagined, their goodness beyond my wildest dreams.
June 2, 2025
Happy Birthday, Barbara Pym
It was 12 years ago today that I baked a Victoria sponge cake in honour of Barbara Pym’s centenary, and also because I was almost 42 weeks pregnant and had time on my hands. I went into labour shortly thereafter, which would have made for a better story had my labour not subsequently stalled with my baby born three days later by c-section instead of the home birth we’d planned with a shared birthday with the extraordinary Miss Pym. But Pym having a day of her own is most fitting, in retrospect, and I’m rereading all her novels this year just to be reminded of this (before my own Barbara Pym-inspired novel is published early next year!). This weekend I reread Jane & Prudence, her third novel, which received mixed reviews upon publication in 1953, and as I was reading the first two thirds, I was all set to explain how this was a second-rate Pym novel (her characters are a little too silly, it’s a reworking of a novel she’d written in the 1930s and perhaps less fresh for that, the set-up is artificial) but then at some point the novel won over entirely and I loved it as much as I loved everything Pym wrote. It’s an Emma-aware story of matchmaking gone awry, so-called matchmaker in question Jane, an unconventional vicar’s wife (she’s got an Oxford degree and no affinity for domestic tasks), who tries to arrange a relationship between her former student, 29-year-old Prudence, and her new neighbour in the village she and her husband have just moved to, the perhaps dastardly widower Fabian Driver. But then fate has other plans. Jane & Prudence is not the place to start with Pym, but the novel is not to be missed either.
May 30, 2025
Babies
When I joined Singing Mamas in January, the fact that it was a group where women could bring their children was not the draw for me. I signed up in spite of this arrangement, really, having had it confirmed that plenty of people in the group would not be coming with kids. And I’ve got nothing against kids, I have even given birth to a couple of my own, and have spent more than my fair share of time in places that could double for the set of Romper Room, but these aren’t the spaces I am drawn to anymore.
Which makes it even more of surprise then, just how much spending time in the presence of babies has meant to me these last five months. These last few months as I’ve been working through a lot of things, living against a tense and unstable political backdrop, trying to make positive shifts to my ideas of community and connection, trying to be softer, more understanding. And perhaps the babies have pushed me in this direction more than anything else, helping me, teaching me. Each of them such a complete and funny little human in their own way, huge headed, gummy smiles, rolling over as a primary form of transportation. They eat, they poop, they cry, they laugh, they stare at the ceiling in wonder, and their regard in any manner (yesterday one of them tried to eat my shoe) feels like a gift.
And the more time I spend in the babies’ company, I realize what my fellow humans fundamentally are, all of us vulnerable creatures with big soft heads. That it’s funny how we all wear pants. That we are good, and we are worthy of love and care. And we have these weird amazing bodies that we’re not really in charge of, and that it’s a big deal to stand, and that everyone falls down sometimes, and there are so many fluids that it’s impossible contain. That we get hungry, and giddy, and sometimes we just have to sleep. That even being very serious is hilarious, especially if you have no hair.
They remind me of how much we need each other, and how much love there is to go around.
