November 7, 2024

Loved and Missed, by Susie Boyt

“If we had spoken then it would have been to apologise to each other endlessly and then to apologise for apologising…until there was a high tower of sorryness and of sorrow between us, in recognition that for some reason our lives were rather difficult compared to other people’s. Although, of course, we were well up to it because we were strong, because we were brave and intelligent, although if we were being completely honest, it was a bit much.”

I knew nothing about Susie Boyt or this novel going in, except LOVED AND MISSED had been recommended by a writer friend who said I’m enjoy it, and it was unusual for me to start reading a text this way, just me and the very first line, that first paragraph. But I was hooked, by this spare and pointed narrative voice, by Ruth, whose adult daughter Eleanor is an addict, and the novel profiles their engagement, the eggshells upon which Ruth has to walk in order to have access to her daughter, the bright face she puts on, not a single word that might ruffle or offend, and the reader has to go between the lines a bit to understand what the story is, because Ruth is careful, reticent. She gets on with things, as she does when she begins caring for Eleanor’s daughter Lily, the baby’s presence bringing warmth and purpose into Ruth’s world. She notes that her friends don’t look upon her with such pity now that she has her grandchild to care for, that there is some envy even, which doesn’t happen to Ruth very often, her personal life—single mum, troubled daughter—usually discussed by these friends in hushed tones.

Ruth is very aware of how she’s seen. She’s an experienced and capable high school teacher, and she notes the disconnect between of her professional success and her relationship with her own daughter, with Eleanor’s troubles. Although Lily is more of a tribute to her care, and the quiet narrative shows the joy and comfort Ruth takes in their domestic arrangements, in their closeness. The novel is slim, but follows Lily all the way into her teenage years, and nothing much actually happens, really, except the kind of daily care and gestures that happen all the time, that are what a life, a family, is made of. In Lily, Ruth finds a bit of redemption, her pattern with Eleanor not perpetuated…although the final chapters of the book show that the truth is more complicated, and older, deeper patterns are actually still at work. That there are secrets that Ruth carries close to her heart, and shame that goes unspoken.

This is a novel about love and care, their joys and disappointments, about friendship and motherhood, the people who carry us, the people who save us in ways they’ll never really understand. Strange and quiet and so so good.

November 7, 2024

Words that Are Getting Me Through

• They want you to feel powerless and to surrender and to let them trample everything and you are not going to let them. You are not giving up, and neither am I. The fact that we cannot save everything does not mean we cannot save anything and everything we can save is worth saving.
• And standing in my yard, soil under my fingers, unseasonably warm breeze on my skin, sun beaming warm light through the mulberry tree, I felt, suddenly, other emotions enter the chat: responsibility, tenderness, love, capability.
• It is true that people have lived through worse times, but they had to pass through something like this to get there. We have to look out for each other.
• This election was never going to save us, and so I have to believe that it was never going to doom us either.
• The US election didn’t go the way you hoped it would? Here’s what you control…and what you don’t.
• There are as many ways of helping and making change as there are people.
• It was an act of complete despair; a necessary one. It was December, and freezing cold, and we didn’t care. People stopped on the shore to stare at us, three women bobbing around like corks on the angry sea. My god, the impotent rage; the disbelief. We thought we might just be sunk. 
• I want it to be that I tried, cried, fought and rejoiced with my communities. And the only way to do that is to make sure I seek out joy as much as possible.

November 5, 2024

LIES I TOLD MY SISTER and WHO WILL BURY YOU?

Lies I Told My Sister, by Louise Ells

Louise Ells has become a friend since we “met” in 2019, after I read her story collection NOTES TOWARDS RECOVERY, and so it’s a real delight to be able to pick up her new book, the novel LIES I TOLD MY SISTER. The entire novel takes place over the night protagonist Lily spends with her younger sister Rose in a hospital emergency room after Rose’s husband is in a catastrophic car accident, the hours and the tension finally bringing to the surface years of secrets, resentments, and unspoken things.

The novel moves between the current moment in the ER in 2014 and incidents from the past—a traumatic loss from Lily’s childhood, a difficult marriage with painful struggles with pregnancy loss and infertility, Lily’s years living abroad when her husband was posted overseas, and the years the sisters lived much closer but were still worlds apart, each with secrets and pain in her life that the other would never know about. Until that night in the hospital, when the words are finally spoken.

It’s a tricky narrative set-up (how can one night contain an entire lifetime?) with so much of the novel told in flashbacks, but it works, mostly because Ells chooses to make the real journey Lily’s internal one as she finally faces her own reality, including the painful fact of her beloved second husband’s young-onset dementia. There’s a lot of love and forgiveness in this very moving story, and I enjoyed it all so much.

*

Who Will Bury You, by Chido Muchemwa

“Who will bury you?” demands Timo’s mother, the question woven throughout the story “This Will Break Your Mother’s Heart,” Timo “a late leaver, a decade behind all my friends who left straight after high school for the US, the UK, Australia, anywhere they’d have a better chance of thriving.” The story focusses on the distance between Zimbabwean Timo’s experiences in Toronto, the beginning of her first same-sex relationship, and Timo’s mother’s expectations of her daughter, conveyed mostly through stories of women at her church. “Don’t you think it’s time you started thinking about marriage, Timo? If you wait too long, who will bury you?”

Although Timo’s mother is also asking, “Who will bury ME?” With a child so far away, and the collection shows readers both sides of this exile, Zimbabweans far from home as their parents die or become lost to them in other ways. The collection begins with Timo and her mother, centred in Toronto, and then takes its reader back home to Zimbabwe, to other characters who are leaving their homes or preparing to leave, and characters who are left behind—in “Paradise,” Wiki maintains his family’s graves at the Paradise Cemetary.

In “The Snore Monitor,” Hamu finds work in a delicate job in Johannesburg. The next three stories are fascinating and involve the lore and history of the Kariba Dam, a major project from colonial Rhodesia. “Rugare” is the story of a boy whose big dreams don’t get him as far as he wants to go in Harare. And finally, “The Last of the Boys,” set in a Rhodesia beset by civil war and impossible choices as Zimbabweans waited on her verge of independence, as story especially resonant in such a moment of global strife and warfare. These are stories most specific, but universal at the very same time.

November 4, 2024

25 Hours

The day the clock falls back is my favourite day of the year—I’ve written about this over and over. How the extra hour is, of course, time to read in, which matters especially at a moment in which I seem incapable of reading less than five books at a time. It means that I woke up yesterday morning and proceeded to spend the next hour in bed, finishing THREE DIFFERENT BOOKS (and I’d just finished another the day before). And then after such a feat of completion, I started reading another book that was short enough and good enough—Susie Boyt’s LOVED AND MISSED—that I managed to read the whole thing in under 24 hours. And what a 24 hours it’s been. My family’s schedules obviously out of sync with the time change, which meant that dinner and all evening duties were concluded before 9pm, which is unheard of in my household. Everybody else was tired and went to sleep, but I just returned to reading, and the luxury of this time and this focus was such a pleasure to behold. (Again, it helped that I was reading a book that was so very excellent.)

One of the many book piled on my bedside table right now is Meditations for Mortals, by Oliver Burkeman, who writes in one reading about the reality of information overload. “How do you choose what to read?” somebody asked me recently in a DM, in the context of all the seemingly infinite books out there in the world, and the point of Burkeman’s book is the finite nature of human experience. And Burkeman offers the image of a river, how as readers what we do is dip into the current and pick out what we can, what we want to. No one is ever going to read all the things—there are not enough extra hours in the year, even though I’m doing my best to make a dent, for sure!—and nobody should feel bad for their failure to, and this was such a relaxing way to think about the stacks of books on various surfaces around my house that are constantly, dangerously, threatening to topple over.

October 31, 2024

Two Ace Picks for Halloween

On Saturday I read FOR EIGHT STRAIGHT HOURS as part of the Turning the Page on Cancer readathon, helping to raise a total of more than $66,000 (and counting!) for Rethink, improving outcomes so that women with metastatic breast cancer can live longer and better lives. And the readathon’s proximity to Halloween meant that, once again, I chose a couple of books with a seasonal theme, two books with basically nothing in common otherwise, except that they were both so good.

I read Suzy Krause for the first time this year with her latest novel, I THINK WE’VE BEEN HERE BEFORE, and decided to delve into her backlist when she posted that her second book, SORRY I MISSED YOU, is about a (possibly) haunted house, ghostings, and maybe even actual ghosts, and therefore the perfect Halloween reading for those who don’t REALLY want to be all that scared. Which it was, exactly, and the scariest parts of the story really were the characters’ grief and loneliness, but offset by the warmest, sweetest story of unlikely connection and community. SORRY I MISSED YOU is about three women who move into a triplex, each of whom imagines she is the intended recipient when a strange letter turns up in the mailbox, and that the sender is someone particularly from her past. Twisty and terrifically funny, this one reminded me of a Claire Pooley novel, and gorgeously underlined Krause’s amazing literary talent.

And then I picked up THAT NIGHT IN THE LIBRARY, by Eva Jurczyk, whose debut novel I loved, and who just landed a very sweet deal for new thriller 11TH ARRONDISSEMENT. THAT NIGHT… is her second book, a locked room mystery set in the depths of a library sub-basement as a group of students endeavour to reenact the Greek ritual of the Eleusinian Mysteries, but things go wrong soon after the students are locked in when one of them ends up dead, and then they’re all going down, one after the other, none of them knowing who among them—if anyone!—can be trusted…until the very end. This one is dark and twisted, really gory, and sprinkled with such delicious humour, perfect for fans of THE SECRET HISTORY (and I actually liked it better!).

October 29, 2024

300 Mason Jars, by Joanne Thomson

It’s curious that 300 Mason Jars is such a personal book, inspired by the author’s history, because it also feels like a book that was created just for me, the cosmos in a jar on the cover as familiar as the one on my kitchen table, but it’s the ordinariness of this image, and of the other quotidian objects preserved in the paintings on its pages—crochet hooks, sugar tongs, a pair of scissors, a yellow pencil, along with many plants and flowers—that has this effect. Joanne Thomson is telling her own family’s story through her series of paintings of objects in Mason jars, a riff on preservation that had me thinking about Mary Pratt’s own paintings of jars and scenes of domesticity, but this images will have viewers/readers recalling their own histories, whether their own families were Canadian settlers in the 20th century, as Thomson’s are, or if their stories are different and there would be other objects on display in their jars. There is a sense of play and whimsy to this project—”Mason jar with pliers”; each painting is accompanied by a short piece of verse—but also a real gravity to it, the project inspired by painful parts of her family’s story that Thomson’s ancestors didn’t talk about it, but she brings it to the light of day, light being the very point (Mary Pratt again!) and she imbues it all with such beauty. This book deserves a special spot on Canadian coffee tables, to be flipped through, and returned to, time and time again.

October 22, 2024

Ellen and the Lion

One of the most interesting things about raising kids in our neighbourhood has been our proximity to the Lillian H. Smith Library, home to the Osborne Collection of Early Children’s Books (which plays a cameo in my most recent novel!), and whose circulating collection was born out of the Toronto Library’s Boys and Girls House, the first dedicated children’s library in the British commonwealth. When the Lillian H. Smith Library opened on College Street in 1995 (named for the first head of Toronto Public Library’s Children’s Department), the Boys and Girls House collection moved in, which means that on the shelf with books by all the authors you might expect (Shirley Hughes, Jon Klassen, Ruth Ohi, Pat Hutchins, Ezra Jack Keats, Mo Willems) are some obscure vintage gems you might not find at other branches that haven’t been around since 1922, usually trippy 1960s picture books (SPECTACLES, by Ellen Raskin!), and the most legendary of all of these for me (I loved them so much I ended up ordering my own secondhand copies online) has been the two Crockett Johnson books (he of the HAROLD AND THE PURPLE CRAYON fame) about an imaginative girl called Ellen and her stuffed lion, each book a collection of stories, mostly text, and they’re so wonderful, tricky, and funny. Now that my youngest is 11 and we don’t read picture books together so often anymore, we do enjoy these stories and taking turns with the deadpan dialogue.

The bane of my existence, however, is that if you google ELLEN’S LION and the title of Mo Willems’ 2011 book HOORAY FOR AMANDA AND HER ALLIGATOR, the sole search result is the blog post I wrote in 2013 about how Willems was surely inspired by Johnson’s book. And all I want in the world is somebody else to talk about this with, the wit and warmth that these books have in common.

October 21, 2024

Death of Persephone, by Yvonne Blomer

I walked home reading this book on Saturday evening, the setting sun turning the tall buildings east of us golden, and it felt like the book was casting a spell. I was a woman walking in the city reading a book about women walking in the city, a riff on the myth of Persephone told through poetry structured as a detective story, and this book was doing it all, the plot, the language, the allusions, the truth of it. Blomer’s Persephone in Death of Persephone is Stephanie, a young woman who’s grown up in the tunnels beneath Montreal where her Uncle H. runs a souvlaki stand, her story punctuated by case notes from Detective Inspector Boca, investigating a series of violent deaths by young women throughout the city. Each poem taken on its own is a marvel, colours ever-changing when it’s held up to the light, but they come together to take on the rhythm of a gripping crime novel, a fierce feminist tale and who dunnit is misogyny. From “Violence is a bone in the body”: metatarsal, metacarpal, maxilla,/ mandible. How violence bites.”

October 18, 2024

The Rich People Have Gone Away, by Regina Porter

I had no idea what I was getting into when I started reading THE RICH PEOPLE HAVE GONE AWAY, a Covid-era novel by Regina Porter, a book that came to my attention via Maris Kreizman’s wonderful substack. A novel whose first section begins with an encyclopedia definition of “door”: “barrier of wood, stone, metal, glass, paper, leaves, or a combination of materials, installed to swing, fold, slide, or roll in order to close an opening to a room or building,” the novel’s following two sections beginning with similar definitions of “doorframe” and “threshold.” And Porter’s doorway/opening to the novel itself, (which is to say, her book’s first paragraph): “Mr. Harper takes sex in doorways. Halts new lovers at the threshold of his front door. Left hand on shoulder. Right hand on hip. He searches the ninth-floor hallway for furtive eyes before pressing the whole of himself in the tender nook of his lover’s ass.” I mean, what now?

Nothing is what it seems in THE RICH PEOPLE HAVE GONE AWAY, set in March 2020 as the world has shut down, neither Mr. Harper himself, who is Theo, presumed suspicious when his young pregnant (white) wife Darla (a bassoonist) disappears on a hike near their cottage in upstate New York, nor the teen in the Cardi B t-shirt who seems to be loitering in Theo’s Park Slope building, nor Darla herself with her secret skills in hotwiring vehicles, or her father, who perished on 9/11. Porter is also an award-winning playwright, and the novel’s playful heteroglossia has those skills on display, resulting in a dynamic and shapeshifting text, full of tricks but never cheap ones, missing white lady/GONE GIRL tropes turned inside out and on their noses, and it’s all so interesting. The narrative moving swiftly through that strange and harrowing season (the teen in the Cardi B shirt’s mother is hospitalized with Covid; she comes off her ventilator; she goes back on her ventilator…) to late spring, late May, the teen boy’s phone blowing up, Minneaopolis, another threshold. “Did you see it?” No resolution. A story without end, but that is also what makes the novel particularly satisfying.

October 16, 2024

Another Year of the TURNING THE PAGE ON CANCER Read-a-thon

Five years ago, I embarked upon my very first TURNING THE PAGE ON CANCER fundraiser, and was in love with founder Samantha Price Mitchell (in the photos above) right out of the gate. First, because she was just lovely, and brave, and honest, and awesome, but also because she dreamed up a cancer fundraiser for those of us who’d rather not run (some of my favourite parts of the population, to be honest), for those of us who love nothing better than sticking our heads in a book, and who’ve been training our whole lives for such a thing as a “read-a-thon.”

I met Sam through my friend Melanie, who was diagnosed with metastatic breast cancer in 2016, and who loved books as much as I do (we’d met online through Canada Reads in 2009!), connecting me with Turning the Page on Cancer, whose proceeds go toward Rethink, supporting research and better outcomes for women living with MBC through. Sam was also a book lover, and had just landed her dream job as a merchandiser at Indigo before her diagnosis, and I was so grateful to her for giving me this way to support my friend and raise money for a good cause. And through our online connection, Sam became a friend too, and I’m so happy to remain connected with her family and to be helping to carry her generous legacy on.

Sam died in July 2021. She was 30. Melanie died on the winter solstice that December. She was 45, a mother of three. Sam and Melanie both had so many books still to be read…

And so we’ll be reading for them, and if you’d like to join us, it’s not to late to sign up for your own read-a-thon. If the idea of spending EIGHT STRAIGHT HOURS READING is beyond your athletic abilities, then please donate to the campaign if you’re able.