January 31, 2025
How I’m Taking Care
I used to spend so much time on the internet telling people what to do and how to be because it felt nice to believe that there was somehow a way to be immune to the struggles and foibles and terrible times that are (I’ve since realized) a pretty standard part of human experience, and also in lieu of feeling my feelings about how difficult and uncertain life can be.
This kind of didactic posturing was also the way that so many of us had been programmed to tell stories on online platforms anyway, and so that those stories were actually a manifestation of the very anxiety that these same platforms were continually fuelling in my addled brain would turn out to be somehow…awfully efficient? (LIFE HACK! HOW TO OPTIMIZE YOUR NEUROSES AND ALIENATE PEOPLE!)
So now I’ve become superstitious about dispensing any kind of advice, and the very idea of doing so makes me anxious. (What a knot this is!!)
But I’ve also been hearing from a lot of people who’ve been struggling lately, and I recognize where they are so much from where I was eight years ago, and where I would remain until I had a mental breakdown at the end of 2021. This would be my second experience of mental illness, after a bout of postpartum depression following the birth of my first child, which I didn’t recognize as depression at the time (even though everybody else did!).
In both situations, walking around perpetually weeping seemed (to me!) like a reasonable response to the difficulties/crises in the world around me at the time, both at large, and at small. “I don’t feel bad because there’s something wrong with me,” I insisted. “I feel bad because this is hard and things are terrible.” And while I wasn’t incorrect about the latter point, what I was missing was that the burden didn’t have to be so heavy. I wasn’t obligated to carry it all, and thinking that I had to had absolutely destroyed me.
Here is some of what helped me figure a lot of things out, and get me in a place of relative steadiness, where I’m so grateful to be right now.
- THERAPY: Therapy has changed my life, and given me the tools to meet this moment.
- SLEEP: My mental wellness is irrevocably connected to being well rested. When I am tired, everything is impossible and anxiety-inducing. And when I am anxious, sleep is really hard. What got me out of my crisis in 2021 was meds that calmed my brain and let me sleep, and ended my panic. (Also, don’t use your smartphone after 9pm or sooner than 30 minutes after you wake up in the morning)
- LET GO OF THE VIGILANCE: But even before I’d hit my crisis point, I’d got a glimpse of where I was going so wrong when I read an Instagram post from the writer Katherine May, who has spent a lot of time interrogating the ideas that got treated as dogma in progressive online spaces. That her message came as such a revelation (and relief) seems strange now, but it really shifted my thinking. She’d written about how none of us were obliged to watch over the whole world. Yes, there was a part of it that we were all responsible for, those things close to home, but this sense of needing to keep vigilance over our huge and wondrous planet is an awful lot to ask of an ordinary person. You don’t have to do it. Breathe, and let it go.
- MAKE FRIENDS WITH UNCERTAINTY: The vigilance had been important because it seemed like control. Turned out, I was not in control. (WHAT???) She’s a cliche, but reading Pema Chodran helped me find this less agonizing. As always, it’s a process.
- FAREWELL TO SOCIAL MEDIA: I watched the first entire Trump presidency unfold on my Twitter feed, refreshing over and over, and it made me terrified, furious, and powerlessly beholden to an app which was absolutely manipulating my feelings and emotions. I’m so angry about that now. When he won again in November, I took Instagram off my phone, and while I still download it to use once or twice a week, I delete it immediately after. Because these apps are not worthy of my attention and my being, and they are sending a no more meaningful news update than a glance out my window does. In fact, that glance may be truer and more essential than any app I’ve ever refreshed. I do not need everyone else’s feelings and anxieties in my brain, voices which drown out my own thoughts, with so much fear and speculation. It’s a terrible way to read the world, and not a meaningful form of engagement.
- REDISCOVER MY FOCUS: I am enjoying writing essays on Substack, and reading other people’s essays and blog posts in a variety of places, because all of this requires sustained focus, which is so much more satisfying and meaningful than the world in 280 characters. Same with reading actual books. (And hot tip, saying Farewell to Social Media frees up so much time for books!)
- FIND THE NEWS IN PLACES THAT DON’T MAKE ME FEEL TERRIBLE: Another hot tip, if I paid no attention to the news at all, the world would keep turning and we’d all be fine. But I’m also interested in the world, so I follow the news, but I follow in a measured fashion, with an awareness that often “the news” is somebody telling me what to think, and fear, and feel. I used to wake up every morning with my clock radio alarm playing CBC World Report, until opening my eyes to a daily soundtrack of sadness and disaster became untenable, and now I wake up to whatever song they’re playing on Classical FM instead. I read the news on paper at the weekends. I (somewhat obsessively!) listen to political podcasts that contextualize what’s going on. I receive the Guardian Weekly magazine in my mailbox once a week. I read newspapers online, but sparingly. I DO NOT READ THE COMMENTS. I don’t read Reddit Threads. I have enough trouble with my own anxiety, so don’t need everybody else’s. I also remind myself that my experience of being in the world is as real and meaningful as whatever stories The News is telling me. So are the stories on a site like Fix the News. (Listen here to founder Angus Hervey’s interview with Matt Galloway on CBC’s The Current)
- CONNECT WITH PEOPLE IN MEANINGFUL WAYS: Group chats. Get-togethers with friends. I’ve joined a singing group. I write my neighbourhood’s community newsletter. Participating in a fundraiser for my local food bank. Going to the movies. When people ask me to show up, I aspire to always say YES (unless I don’t want to).
- MAKE PLANS FOR FUN THINGS: Booking campsites for summer. Purchasing theatre tickets (do you know about the Stratford Festival’s Bravo Zone?) I go swimming every day because it’s my favourite thing. Pencilling coffee dates into the calendar. Things to look forward to. At my lowest, I’ve had trouble believing in such thing as a future, and so mapping mine out can actually me a wild and subversive thing
- DO WHAT YOU CAN: Pick a few places to put your money and time. (I am big on The Nature Conservancy of Canada, Action Canada, and The Toronto Public Library Foundation.) But remember again, you don’t have to hold it all.
(A song we sang yesterday at singing group)
January 29, 2025
Remarkable Debuts: What I Read on my Winter Vacation
Anita Brookner, Margaret Laurence, Elizabeth Strout (#WinterofStrout), Carol Shields, Barbara Pym, and more vintage treasures (including trigonometry?)
December marked the dawn of my Anita Brookner era, arriving with her first novel, published in 1981, appropriately titled The Debut (although only in North America—it was A Start in Life in her native UK). My copy was a Vintage Contemporaries edition obtained at the Vic College Book Sale, and when I started reading and loved it immediately—the opening line is “Dr. Weiss, at forty, knew that her life had been ruined by literature.”—this was the solution to a grave problem that had plagued me in 2024.
The problem being that I’d spent the last 20 years buying all the books in secondhand bookshops and now there was nothing left, save for The Pilot’s Wife, A Million Little Pieces, and a box of dusty National Geographics. How dispiriting to visit the Oxfam Bookshop in Lancaster, UK, last April and emerge with bubkes, especially after years of the seemingly infinite backlists of Laurie Colwin, Barbara Pym, Margaret Drabble, Penelopes Mortimer Lively and Fitzgerald, Alice Thomas Ellis, Jane Gardam, (most recently) Sue Miller, and so many favourites.
I don’t know why I’d never read Anita Brookner, especially since secondhand copies of her books are widely available. She hadn’t started out so long ago that the books aren’t still around, but not so recently either that they’d come back into vogue. She was prolific, publishing a novel annually for 22 years after beginning at age 53 (and she’d publish two more, in 2005 and 2009). She was also spoken of in the company of Barbara Pym, as Brookner similarly wrote mostly of women outside the conventions of marriage and motherhood.
But maybe I had been put off by how any comparison between the two writers always slighted Pym (“Brookner’s ambitions exceed those of Pym’s genteel novels of manners and place her outside that genre…” from the back of my copy of The Debut). I’d also been intimidated by Brookner’s author photo and how her hair was like a helmet, and I’d had this impression that she was a generation younger than she actually was (she was born in 1928), mostly because her author photos never changed or softened as she aged, and certainly her hair didn’t.
And then I discovered that I had read Anita Brooker before. After falling in love with The Debut, with its curious combination of humour, pathos and absurdity, and then buying and reading her 1997 novel The Visitors (a beautiful hardcover first edition, though I didn’t like it as much as The Debut; I read somewhere that Brookner’s books might have been stronger had she slowed down a bit, and maybe it’s true), I returned to the secondhand bookstore and bought two more Anita Brookners—thereby robbing myself of one of my great year-end pleasures, which is seeing my to-be-read shelf depleted, but here in my Brookner era it only grows. And that is fine.
One of these later purchases was Brookner’s Brief Lives which, I realized (via a keyword search in my blog archive), I’d read and reviewed more than a decade ago, along with her novel Look at Me the year before that, even declaring, “There is no charm to Anita Brookner, but this, of course, is why her books [are meant to] seem more literary.” Which sounds clever, but I can’t take credit, having no recollection of the book or even its reviewer, and also disagreeing with the assertion.
And isn’t this why rereading is essential? Because of the way that our selves are formed and reformed, and how the reader I was in my early 30s was unequipped to recognize Anita Brookner’s wry and subtle charms—oh my goodness, her Booker Prize-winning Hotel Du Lac, the book I picked up next and wholly adored!—which perhaps a reader has to be in at least her mid-40s to properly understand.
It would have been a tragedy if I had remembered not being fussed about Anita Brookner, and given up on her work altogether.
This is from my January essay on Substack. Paid subscribers can read the rest here. And, as always, if you’re a longtime blog reader and can’t manage the subscription, drop me a note and I will be all too happy provide you with a complimentary one!
January 29, 2025
Gleanings
- High on the list was the need to dust.
- I often think about the way, way back. During the times when they didn’t know, or maybe they did. Times when the settling in of the darkness, the long nights, the waning sun, the short days, the cold, would have induced fear, uncertainty, not knowing. Maybe they feared the darkness was permanent, that the sun, the light, was dying. Maybe they didn’t know if a ‘January’ or a ‘July‘ would come. Long before times when they had lights to turn on when the sun went down, when they couldn’t jump ahead to the next thing, when they simply had to sit and be in the dark.
- This is probably different for everyone, but for me, the 50,000 word count mark is a giant sigh of relief—actually, let me break it down for you, because I have a minute, and you have a minute (I bet), and I like writing about writing.
- Anyway, no jealousy, you always gotta banish that stuff. Does you NO good whatever. Instead, as always, do what you can with what you’ve got. Share that. Dream more dreams. Shine where you are.
- So to that end, here’s my wish for all of us this week: that going forward, we consider ways we can engage in active resistance based in militant nonviolence, we express love rooted in justice, and we remember that kindness is a power move.
- There’s nothing like a natural phenomena to bring a city to standstill and to turn our attention to the sky, to each other, and to ourselves. Even ones as everyday as sunsets feel like an invitation from the universe to pause and pay attention
- So, I went to the mountains. And as I stood in the thin air, the dry snow underfoot, with the wind pushing against me—finally, I found the woman who would climb a mountain in my story. I understood how it gave her shape.
- I’m going to stash a bunch of things I’ve written here, and see if the utterly disconnected can be connected, because webs webs webs you know.
- Edith Wharton was born 163 years ago today, on January 24, 1862, in New York City. I’ve been rereading her autobiography, A Backward Glance (1933), enjoying her descriptions of the books she read when she was young. Forbidden to read a novel without her mother’s permission, she writes that the “wide expanse of the classics, English, French and German” stretched before her instead, and she “plunged at will” into “that sea of wonders.”
- You are capable of less than you thought, but also more—in some strange, ineffable way. You are soft and weepy and sturdy as a tree, all at the same time. You are someone who learns by attraction and by necessity because you are human, just like everybody else. And that feels far less lonely than trying to pretend (even to yourself) like you’ve got it all under control.
- But Doomsday Book is not just a historical novel, and though at times I wondered about the value of the time-travel framing, by the end I appreciated the layers Willis had added through it. The most obvious one was just the point that, for all our advances in science and medicine, we are not immune from catastrophes, including ones caused by mutating viruses. A more subtle and thought-provoking one was the interplay between the science fiction aspects of time travel and the religious beliefs of the 14th-century people Kivrin encounters, especially the priest, Father Roche, who tends Kivrin in her initial illness and then labours beside her as one by one the others around them fall victim to the plague—until his turn comes as well.
- Down the hallway to the right was a thickly carpeted staircase with a fish tank tucked against the wall by the bottom stair. It was filled with shiny, darting Neon Tetras and other tropical fish and it hummed and bubbled in a very comforting manner. Beside the fish was the regular lounge room door and a bathroom beside that. We watched telly and ate meals in the regular lounge room, uncles and aunties, grandparents and parents and all of us kids together in various configurations, saying grace and sipping soup.
- one of the things I love about the pool is that it is where I can always find my inner life.
- Goodnight Moon is really a work of experimental poetry — a fact that’s largely unacknowledged culturally (and not just because of picture books’ general low literary standing). Goodnight Moon’s ubiquity has desensitized us to its strangeness. We take this book for granted. It’s part of the background, the bright green wallpaper of an American childhood.
- To summarize, that is how I spent yesterday. I took care of myself.
- how the light returns after a particularly dark time, little by little (see 9), and how clear the stars and planets are on the cold nights. We are stardust, maybe 97%, and this is our moment.
- Because it’s Fitzgerald writing I didn’t expect any goodness to be rewarded, or for the powerful and selfish to do anything but succeed in their bullying. And, well, I was right. I do find her quite bleak and cynical a lot of the time. Even though her writing is sharp, crisp, acidic and never sentimental, which can be refreshing. She has an eye for the ways in which people reveal who they are, and the ways in which privilege corrupts. The insularity of this small town, and the ways in which those with connections rule the roost, even if they are unworthy of it, is finely drawn here.
- As the cold and darkness have descended, the stalwart readers of our silent book club groups have turned in particular earnest to books to warm and brighten the way through … And yes, I said “groups” because between two meetings this past month – one virtual and one in-person – we had representation from all of midtown, east end and west end Toronto and also Mississauga, all neighbourhoods that have groups and venues in their locales. It’s wonderful how these groups intersect – and our reading and reading lists are the better for it.
- And so we live, all bumping into each other with our needs and judgements, rules and opinions, sufferings and irritations and joys.
- I wrote SPIDER because I DO like mischief, tricks, surprises, comedy, and biggish ideas that I feel kids are more capable of enjoying than many adults might assume.
January 21, 2025
My Good Bright Wolf, by Sarah Moss
“You both had to live in a time and a place where people or at least women didn’t like themselves, or if they did, concealed their self-esteem with rigour.” —Sarah Moss, My Good Bright Wolf
My Good Bright Wolf, a memoir by Sarah Moss—the author of odd spare novels I’ve loved lately like Ghost Wall, Summerwater, and The Fell—is the kind of book that I keep talking about, and when I do, I’m served with the inevitable question, “What’s it about?” A question whose simple answer is that this is a memoir about anorexia, about how Moss’s eating disorder was born from a childhood of some depravity and would flare up again during the pandemic when she was in her mid-40s. A description that sounds interesting enough, though I confess I’d be unlikely to pick up such a book on those merits, and I only picked it up at all because Sarah Moss has become a must-read author for me, the kind of author whose books are never be “about” anything quite so straightforwardly as that.
Because her memoir is also about childhood, about being the child of parents who carry their own trauma, about the inheritance of pain, about how girls are taught to hate their unruly bodies and their unruly minds. It’s about escaping into books, and what she learned about life (and care and food and eating!) from Beatrix Potter’s tales, from Jane Eyre, Swallows and Amazons, Laura Ingalls Wilder, Little Women, Virginia Woolf, Mary Wollstonecraft, and more. It’s about growing up in a culture where you might have never met a woman who wasn’t suffering a diet, who ate what she wanted to, who didn’t hate her body, who had ever managed to be enough or not too much.
It’s a memoir about memory too, most of it written in the second person, the narration interspersed with commentary in italics by a character whose voice might well be that of the narrator’s mother, ever critiquing, undermining, suggestion it wasn’t bad as all that, that the problem was the narrator, all stories and her lies. Via these interjections and elsewhere, the narrator is hard on herself, though I admit I double down on that at times as a reader, the more contemporary parts of the memoir demonstrating the impossible mindset of someone with anorexia who refuses to relinquish their sense of control, making choices that put their life in peril. From the outside, the problem looks easy to fix, but Moss shows that the reality is much more complicated.
This is a very thoughtful memoir, a memoir about anorexia that even seems to avoid fat-phobia (the author lists Aubrey Gordon’s What We Don’t Talk About When We Talk About Fat and the podcast “Maintenance Phase” among the lists of resources), and anyone who ever had a female body or struggled with mental illness will relate to Moss’s story.
And anyone who doesn’t will still be enchanted all the same by the power of Moss’s writing and the rigorous thinking that is its underpinnings.
January 20, 2025
Showing Up
I showed up like this eight years ago, and I’m not sorry I did, but there was a whole lot I still had yet to understand about the moment I was trying to meet. Which I really did think was just a moment, one grand obstacle to be overcome, I was so utterly convinced of my righteousness, and it felt like a grand performance, utterly infused with ego: LOOK AT ME ON THE RIGHT SIDE OF HISTORY. And I wasn’t wrong about that, necessarily, but my grasp of the shape of history definitely left something to be desired. I kept thinking, “LOOK, HOW THERE ARE MORE OF US THAN YOU!” but I have come to doubt if this is a particularly good argument, especially when a convoy of people who definitely don’t share my principles tried a similar tactic in 2022, albeit with violence, implicit and otherwise. Which made me think that maybe it’s a slippery slope in which I do not want to participate, and wonder what better ways there might be to rise up in opposition.
Anand Giridharadas writes: “The first Trump presidency was a time of great and often smug certitude. He was so wrong that the contrast made us right. He was so against democracy and justice and freedom that anything we did was self-evidently heavenly. But self-righteousness corrodes the soul and the mind. And the long posture of resistance and fury and perma-vigilance has turned many of us into certitude bots instead of people of curiosity. Democracy is all about curiosity, it depends on curiosity, because it is about you and I figuring each other out and then choosing the future together, instead of the king doing it for us. But the moral clarity triggered by Trump’s vacuous viciousness lulled many of us into a dogmatic slumber. Now I see and hear around me people who are getting into a posture of real rethinking, who are returning to curiosity, who are willing to ask real and hard questions about what many of us missed and didn’t see and may not see still. Their posture is not outward but inward.”
Today, I don’t have any answers. I don’t even have a placard, but what I do have is a conversation with Heather Marshall about her 2022 bestselling novel LOOKING FOR JANE, which keeps on showing up on the bestseller list after all this time, its themes of reproductive justice and bodily autonomy continuing to resonate. The conversation is for paid subscribers on my Substack page, but the preview is available for everybody is and it’s worth checking out. Listen here!
January 13, 2025
Like Mother, Like Mother, by Susan Rieger
Admittedly, it’s an odd book, Susan Rieger’s third novel, Like Mother, Like Mother, told almost entirely through through expository dialogue by characters who talk like people in golden age film, the protagonist dead in the opening sentence—”Lila Pereira died on the front page of The Washington Globe.” I wasn’t sure in the opening chapters that the writer would be able to pull this off at all, but soon I was in the thrall of Rieger’s rigorous prose and compelled by its energy, and the Ephron-esque punch punch punch of this story, which is an ode to the knots and tangles of family ties and also to the culture of journalism.
Lila Pereira may be dead, but Rieger resurrects her immediately to show her style, unique, brutal and awesome at once. When she was two, her mother had been taken taken away to die in an insane asylum, her children left to fend with their abusive father. Lila decides that she’d be just as ineffectual as a mother herself, and only consents to have children when she falls in love with and marries Joe Maier, who she knows will be a perfectly good mother himself and accepts her otherwise refusal of the maternal role. Which sounds good in theory, but Grace, their youngest daughter, resents her mother’s devotion to her work and absence from home, writing her pain into a roman a clef about a monstrous mother, which backfires when Lila dies not long after publication and Grace looks awfully unsympathetic.
After her mother’s death, Grace takes on the job of finding out what really happened to Lila’s mother all those years ago, using her own journalistic chops (not far from the tree) to uncover the mystery, and everything that happens after that is a pleasure to behold.
January 13, 2025
Ways To Read More in 2025
I’m of two minds about this post. First, I am allergic to the ways in which online writing has become so prescriptive, which means that online reading has become about emphasizing the ways in which we’re all doing it wrong and are in need of optimization. This is everything I’ve been turning away from as a writer and a reader, and what I’m abjectly refusing for this new year. If all this striving was turning us into happy and satisfied beings, I’d be okay with it, but it’s not. (A book I read last year that clarified this was Meditations for Mortals.)
HOWEVER (and this is self-serving as someone who earns a living from books and publishing and also dreams of a world in which literature occupies as much cultural attention as reality television) aspiring to read more is a resolution that’s different from trying to lose 15 lbs, develop an entirely different personality, or make a fortune in a multi-level marketing scheme. I also think it’s an aspiration that, if you’re realistic, fair and easy on yourself, really can make you a little bit better off.
Further, I read 214 books last year, which is more books in a year than I’ve ever read in my life, so I know what I’m talking about. And I’m sharing the number 214 because having read so many books in a year is actually the single most impressive thing about me; I don’t run marathons, I don’t have pretty fingernails, I last won a literary prize 20 years ago for a story that was terrible—so please just let me have this one thing. If your own reading goal ever seems paltry compared to mine, remember that comparison is the thief of joy and you do you… but how about doing you with a just a little bit more time for reading?
Here are my tips for how to find some.
1) Get Your Blood Checked
This was a game changer for me! I went to donate blood last January and was refused because my iron count was too low, which was not surprising since I’d spent the last six months (during which I was otherwise well) struggling to get out of bed in the morning, feeling very much like a hibernating bear. So I started taking iron supplements (Floradix, the vegetarian variety that doesn’t cause digestive issues) and waking up an hour earlier (um, not too early—I will never been an early riser) and I decided to spend this bonus time not getting out of my cozy bed, but picking up the book on my bedside instead. Which is so much time for reading, not to mention a really lovely way to start each day.
And so if you, like me, are not particularly youthful, and you’re one of those people whose eyes fall down every time you curl up with a book, getting bloodwork done might be something to consider.
2) Put Your Phone (Far) Away and Delete Socials
It’s much easier to wake up in the morning and pick up a book if your smartphone is out of reach. Mine charges overnight far away from my bedside, and I wouldn’t have it any other way. I’ve also deleted the only social media app (Instragram!) that had remained on my phone, which has freed up so much space in my mind and hours in my day. I still use social media on my desktop, and download Instagram once or twice a week to post and share other people’s posts in my stories (which I can’t do on the desktop) but I delete the app once I’ve finished.
And yes, it means I’m a little less connecting to the quotidian details of the 3000+ people I follow on Instagram, but maybe that’s okay…?
3) Find Your Desert Islands
Once your phone is out of reach, you’re on your way. I like to find opportunities to be stranded someplace with a book and nothing else for distraction. The bathtub is my favourite place for this, but so is the coffee shop at the block near where I drop my daughter off at an extracurricular every week for an hour and a half. Along those lines, going out for lunch with just a book for company is one of my favourite indulgences. If nothing else, I try to read between 9pm and 11pm every evening when nothing else is going on. If you tend to spend that time streaming television, maybe consider designating one night a week for reading instead? (I rarely watch TV, which I do think [in addition to my robust iron counts these days] is the most important answer to the question of how I find the time to read.)
4) Make It Easy
Reading doesn’t have to be a chore. It should actually be fun. And while some people’s idea of fun is Middlemarch or War & Peace, accepting the reality that you’re not such people (if you’re not such people) will go a long way toward having your reading habits take hold. Which is to say: read the kind of books that make you relish the turning of pages. Yes, reading widely and challenging yourself is a great way to read, but if you’re striving to read at all, making the experience purely a delight will help a lot. Read short books! Quit books you’re not enjoying. Ignore the books you think you should be reading. Don’t be afraid to trust your tastes and instincts, and to steer your own reading ship.
5) Build a Framework
And along those lines, I like a reading project. I’ve taken on a whole bunch of these this year (more to come in my January essay for paid subscribers), one of which is #WinterofStrout, as I go back and read every book Elizabeth Strout has ever published. I reread all of Madeleine L’Engle’s Austens series back in 2019. In March 2020, which I found it hard to read anything, I found my back to books by rereading Kate Atkinson’s Jackson Brodie books.
If there’s something that interests you, an author you’ve been meaning to get around to, any particular kind of book—books set in a certain place or time period, award-winners from a particular decade, a particular segment of the books already waiting on your to-be-read shelf, anything that might seem fun, and feel good and satisfying—steer your reading ship that-a-way, and let the literary magic happen as those books weave their way into your day-to-day life.
January 10, 2025
Chrystia, by Catherine Tsalikis
It was 2018 and I was riding the subway with my husband and kids toward Bloor/Yonge Station when I started eavesdropping on the family behind us who were discussing the ongoing postal strike, the parents asking smart questions and the kids (who were a little bit older than mine) asking smart questions back, all of them engaging with ideas. Intrigued, I turned around to spy on them, and will admit that the thing I noticed first was that the parents in this very smart family were schlumping about in track pants (ie they were about as well put together as I was). It wasn’t until we’d all disembarked from the train that I realized the mom in question was Chrystia Freeland (my Member of Parliament since 2015; her office sends me a card every Christmas, sometimes two by accident) and by then they’d disappeared up the escalator.
“As her friend,” wrote Katharine Lake Berz a few weeks ago in a Toronto Star about Freeland in the wake of her departure from the federal cabinet, “I have witnessed in her something vanishingly rare in public life: [Chrystia’s] character never wavers, whether she’s addressing world leaders or chatting about her children over coffee.” It was a description that resonated with my own fleeting impression of her in the wild, and which was only underlined by Catherine Tsalikis’s just-released biography.
Chrystia: From Peace River to Parliament Hill, was supposed to come out in February, but House of Anansi Press rushed it into onto shelves just before Christmas following Freeland’s unexpected announcement which led to the Prime Minister’s stament last week of his intentions to resign. And now some are hoping Freeland will step up for Liberal leadership; others crossing their fingers that she gives someone else a chance to go down with the ship before taking on the top job herself. What happens next is anyone’s guess but regardless, Freeland’s story is inspiring and fascinating, and this first book by Tsalikis—an international affairs journalist who became inspired to write this biography in 2020 when she was on parental leave with her first child—does a terrific job rectifying the dearth of stories about Canadian women in public life (as opposed to their quite happily self-mythologizing male counterparts).
Tsalikis traces Freedland’s origins from the stories of her grandparents, on the paternal side, a Scottish war bride who married a farmer from rural Alberta, and maternal, whose lives were defined by European war and turmoil in the first half of the 20th century and immigrated from Soviet Ukraine to Canada in 1948 after their daughter, Freeland’s mother, was born in a displaced persons camp. Freeland was born three weeks premature in 1968, just small enough to be tucked into a desk drawer when her mother—age 20, and finished her first year of law school—returned to work at her father-in-law’s law practice two weeks later. Freeland’s parents would later divorce, but her father’s rural Alberta roots and her mother’s Ukrainian nationalism (and progressive activism) would give their daughter’s character a strong definition. Her brightness shone from a young age, and Freeland would take part in a high school program in Italy, earn her undergraduate degree from Harvard, become labelled as a troublemaker by the KGB during a university exchange in the last days of Soviet Kyiv, and struggle just a little bit to balance the writing of her masters thesis at Oxford (where she was a Rhodes Scholar) with her reporting on the fall of the Soviet Union for the Financial Times.
Chrystia follows Freeland’s story through her years in journalism, her triumphs and professional misses, that unwavering character cited by her friend an absolute through-line, a trait which earns her much admiration and success, but also foes including Vladimir Putin and JAN WONG (who are the true main villains of this story). Tsalikis compiles her story from interviews with friends and former colleagues, and close family members (Freeland’s aunt and sister are key sources), as well as Freeland’s own journalism (she has THOUGHTS about Hillary Clinton as a potential presidential candidate in 2008), and profiles in magazines including Chatelaine and Toronto Life. The result is the portrait of a figure for whom loyalty is a fundamental trait, but who also is unafraid of standing up for what she feels is right, which has included the forces of democracy in the former USSR and as a counter to tyrants all around the world, which puts into context the recent events that didn’t make it into the book, making sense of why Freeland chose to step away from her former boss when she did.
What I loved most about this book, apart from learning the details of Freeland’s extraordinary life and also the finer grains of politics and diplomacy that I may not have understood as well during the years I was watching history unfold via a Twitter timeline, is Chrystia Freeland as an example of somebody who stands up tall before authoritarian forces (which is no small thing when you’re five foot two), how her courage and steadfastness have made her a force to be reckoned with, never to be underestimated. Chrystia Freeland is so far from an ordinary person (however she might ride the subway in such a guise) but there is a lot we can learn from her example about how to respond to our current moment, of how to be clear-eyed and fearless in the face of authoritarianism, and how we might live the values that we know to be true.
January 7, 2025
12 Essential Lessons for Writers from Bookspo Season 2
Bookspo Season 2 was a triumph in all kinds of ways, not least of which was that, in terms of listeners, it grew exponentially over the first season, hitting 4000 downloads by the season finale. Even more importantly, it featured a fantastic group of excellent books published in the second half of 2024 with a terrific range of genres and approaches, with authors celebrating the pleasures and joys of reading and creative inspiration. There is some amazing guidance for writers here, which you can scroll down to get a taste of.
Episode 1: Corinna Chong, Bad Land
The key to a slow-burn plot is building TENSION!
Episode 2: Ayelet Tsabari, Songs for the Brokenhearted
To dare to rewrite old and familiar stories is to be part of a long tradition.
Episode 3: Alice Zorn, Colours in Her Hands
Learn to trust your imagination.
Episode 4: Marissa Stapley, The Lightning Bottles
When you’re basing a character on a real person, it’s only when you let go of their reality in the world that they become truly real in your fiction.
Episode 5: Suzy Krause, I Think We’ve Been Here Before
It’s refreshing to reminded—both in writing and in life—that most people are fundamentally good and trying really hard.
Episode 6: Jennifer Whiteford, Make Me a Mixtape
Give yourself a kind of punk rock permission to create your own vision.
Episode 7: Anne Hawk, The Pages of the Sea
To sit down to write a novel is to be chasing something magical (which can take a long time!)
Episode 8: Kirti Bhadresa, An Astonishment of Stars
Just get started. One can build an entire work of fiction from a list poem! (Who knew??)
Episode 9: Richard Van Camp, Beast
Incredible things can happen when you raise the stakes for your characters.
Episode 10: Priya Ramsingh, The Elevator
A good book makes the reader really care about its characters.
Episode 11: Jenny Haysom, Keep
Fiction allows you to wear many hats and to take on different perspectives.
Episode 12, Andrew Forbes, The Diapause
When you’re writing, it’s useful to keep the books that inspire you close at hand.
January 6, 2025
SPACE
Our Christmas tree was wonderful, lush and redolent until (almost) the very end, and once it was gone, we had so much space it was almost like getting a new room, and so we tidied it. Too many books, as always, so I got rid of a lot of them, and then freed up an entire shelf by relocating my encyclopedia set (circa 1987, Berlin Wall forever) to a space on top of another bookcase that had previously been occupied by crap and clutter. Which means SPACE, my books with room to breathe, my personal library with room to grow. And speaking of SPACE, here is ORBITAL, by Samantha Harvey, which (I will confess!) I was not much looking forward to reading because I’d read her previous novel DEAR THIEF—pitched as a fabulous novel that not enough people were reading, a mark of the state of publishing together—and I didn’t like it at all, perhaps because I don’t actually know the song “Famous Blue Raincoat” on which the novel is cleverly based. So when ORBITAL won the Booker Prize, I didn’t rush out and buy it, but requested it from the library instead, finally sitting down to read it over the holidays, and IT WAS SO GOOD. Yes, it’s me, as ever, with the least hot takes, but I adored this book, which is set on the international space station over the course of a single earth-day, and it really was a love song to our planet and to people and the possibilities when we choose to be our better selves. The image that has stuck on my mind is the floating astronauts at the window watching the earth down below, Harvey giving us the whiteness on the bottom of their very clean socks, which is a perspective I’d never even started to imagine. When I was finished reading, I pushed it onto my teen, who read it in an evening, and then her dad read it too, and we had to buy our own copy because we all loved it so much—and with the relocated encyclopedia there is even room to shelf it now. And I barely know about controversy the book was embroiled in either (it was targeted with bad reviews on Goodreads for supposedly glorifying Russia [um, it definitely does not]) because I’ve spent very little time on social media in the past month, which I’m not sorry about at all, a choice that has freed up mental SPACE for me to read and think and be, and I’m going to carry all that with me into a hopefully spacious new year.
