October 4, 2008

Babylon Rolling by Amanda Boyden

“We choose New Orleans,” begins the prologue to Amanda Boyden’s second novel Babylon Rolling. “We choose to live Uptown on Orchid Street inside the big lasso of river, though we rarely look at it, churning brown, wide.” The novel’s employment in the prologue of first person plural narration suggesting already that this will be story composed of stories, of voices.

Babylon Rolling tells of a year in the lives of the residents of New Orleans’ Orchid Street, beginning from Hurricane Ivan to just before the devastation of Katrina. Such disparate characters, these neighbours, black and white (and Indian); young and old; long-time residents and newcomers; good people and people who’ve somehow found themselves in more than a spot of trouble.

Though the first-person plural narration ends with the prologue, its spirit continues in the construction of the chapters ensuing. Written in the third person, but very close and in the various singular voices of the characters, within these chapters one voice turns into another in the space of a paragraph break. No other divisions between them, here are the different voices of Orchid Street, one after another as these people go about their separate lives.

The danger of this sort of structure, of such a broad approach to a story (in terms of chronology and character) would be a tendency for glossing over substance. For these characters to be “voices” but little more, and certainly not people, for how do you fit another entire life into a novel that is already so crowded? Which might happen in the hands of a lesser writer, but it struck me soon as I was reading Babylon Rolling that something quite different was at work.

As I read the story of Ariel, the transplanted Minnesotan working overtime managing a New Orleans hotel. She is on the verge of being unfaithful to her husband, and then of course we meet her husband Ed whose own story has nothing to do with that (though of course it will come to, but not entirely). Ed who saves his elderly neighbour Roy after an accident, in which a local drug dealer is to blame and Roy’s wife is seriously injured. The drug dealer’s younger brother Daniel, aged 15, calling himself “Fearius”, and anxiously following in his brother’s footsteps. A hurricane is approaching (but no, not “that” one, not yet). Some will stay, some will go. One of the former being Philomenia whose cooking up something poison in her kitchen and whose grasp on reality is becoming more and more tenuous, though it’s pretty hard to tell.

The point being that none of these characters– like nobody ever in his or her life– is a peripheral character. Every one of them, including those who don’t get to speak so directly, able to claim a part of the prologue’s “we”. And it dawned on me as I read that Babylon Rolling isn’t actually a novel at all, but is a book of short stories all broken into pieces and put back together, a very different kind of puzzle. Which says something about the short story, I suppose, how its surprise appearance here so serves to elevate the novel. That these characters’ stories and lives run so deep, not just into each other but in and of themselves. That their stories stand for their own sakes, complementing as they rub shoulders (and they’re actual shoulders, blood and bone), and that rubbing of these shoulders can create an effect so incredibly rich.

So the structure of this novel is really quite remarkable, but even more so are the voices themselves. That Boyden can bring to life characters so different from herself and from each other as, for example, Philomenia Beauregard de Bruges (whose presence lends a touch of the Southern Gothic) and Daniel “Fearius” Harris (“But Fearius, he be patient. He learnt it. He waited to make fifteen full years of age inside juvey, waiting four months sitting in there.”) Fearius in particular a leap, a risk, that this author could imagine her way into the mind of a black fifteen year old drug dealer, but it is a leap that Boyden makes deftly. I was uneasy with Fearius’s voice at first, not for political reasons as much as grammatical ones, but I became accustomed to it soon, as much as all the others.

Boyden writes in her Acknowledgments that she started the novel in Toronto after having left New Orleans with Hurricane Katrina, which had “reduced our city, and me, to something whipped and dispossessed. I thought I might try to write a swan song for New Orleans.” The result being a song certainly, even if not so entirely swannish. Because, as her author bio notes, Boyden lives in New Orleans “still”. And the novel’s epilogue returns to that very same “we”, such collectivity a suggestion of hope amidst such destruction.

August 6, 2008

The Killing Circle by Andrew Pyper

Though at times maligned in literary realms, thrillers are remarkable for exemplifying just what books are capable of doing to us. For demonstrating the book’s incredible power, and how it is strange that we take for granted a stack of paper with printed symbols that is terrifying. Film is entirely different, I think, or at least bad movies are, which take full advantage of their ability to startle us. Whereas literature has to be more subtle. More subtle than even a good film, because writers have less at their disposal– only words. To create a mood, a grip, the twists and terror, and then to do all this, but write well also? For prose to be surprising and inspired, characters well rounded, scenes to be properly evoked, the story fresh and original, and unbearably real and unbearably awful, and all this has been Andrew Pyper’s marvelous feat in his new novel The Killing Circle.

This was a novel that kept me up very late one night, too terrified to turn off my light, and too impatient to wait until morning to see how it ended. The grip beginning with the novel’s prologue, with Patrick Rush, a single father, at a drive-in movie with his son. The son disappearing on his way back from the snack bar and, frantic with worry, Patrick looks for him admidst the maze of parked cars, in the light of the terrifying movie on the screen before him, snippets of sound audible as he rushes from car-to-car. Venturing further out into the farmer’s fields surrounding, with no sign of his son, and however urgent is all of this, Patrick is also somehow resigned: “I know who has done this,” he says. “Who has taken my son. I know its name.”

In the next chapter we’re taken back four years to when Patrick, an aspiring novelist and dissatisfied television critic, joins a creative writing circle. The circle comprising five other rather eccentric souls, and led by Conrad White– the novelist nobody has heard of–, Patrick quickly realizes there isn’t an abundance of talent among them. And yet the story by a member called Angela captures his attention. Angela, whose face “never sharpens into full focus, like an unfinished sculpture in which you can recognize the subject is human, but beyond this, taken at different points of view, it could be a representation of virtually anyone.”

Her story is a ghost story, the story of a girl haunted by “a terrible man who does terrible things”, and the story starts to get inside Patrick’s head. Or rather he plants himself inside of the story, if there is any difference between such situations. The story’s impact upon him only intensifying when a local serial killer’s crimes start taking on eerie connections to the narrative. Patrick begins suspecting a member of the circle may be responsible, sensing himself in danger, and setting himself up as a suspect as well.

The creative writing circle is an ingenious device here, in “reality” the work from such groups often blurring lines of fact and fiction (i.e. “Write what you know.”) The writers’ stories suggesting (or betraying?) odd biographical details, misconstruing perceptions, providing for inadvertent and inappropriate therapy sessions (as well as terrible fiction), and a strange misplaced intimacy. Friendship or rivalry? And no one is ever quite as they seem, sometimes you’re even hoping this is the case. An atmosphere that absolutely fosters Patrick’s Rush’s paranoia.

This blurring of fact and fiction continues throughout the book, explored by Pyper in a variety of ways, also highlighting how it is that scary stories come by their power. By being just possible enough that you’ve can’t disbelieve it, that there really might be a monster hiding under your bed. So heightened was the mood of this story, the depths of its realism, I considered the monster– I really did– and Patrick Rush’s own experience was analogous. Could there really be a shadow following him home through the alley, somebody at the window, footsteps on the stairs? He knows it sounds crazy, and yet…

This novel is functioning at levels I’ve not got a full sense of yet, meta-meta, and I am sure that a character is called “Conrad White” must be some kind of joke I just don’t have the punchline for. Also notable is the Toronto of the novel, as vivid and electrified as Maggie Helwig’s in Girls Fall Down, and as well featured as that in Katrina Onstad’s How Happy to Be. Satirizing literary and media culture, whilst on a deeper level exploring the limits and danger of imagination.

So much is also going on beyond the tension, the whodunit, the fear. Pyper’s novel an exploration of story, the nature of story and our lives as stories. Says Conrad White, “We avoid speaking of stories as stories for the same reason we avoid contemplating the inevitability of death. It can be unpleasant. It can hurt.” Patrick unwilling to admit his own story, perhaps still stunned by the death of his wife, and so in place of his story is a void of sorts. A void he fills by appropriating Angela’s story, that of “the terrible man who does terribly things.” The ramifications of this theft are manifold, and awful, becoming the motivation for whatever it was that snatched his son, leading Patrick into the darkest corners of both society and himself.

December 11, 2016

2016 Books of the Year

As always, I’ve failed in both my efforts to read everything I wanted to read in 2016 and also to keep my top ten to a number below twenty. Still, I think I’ve failed quite successfully here, and I’m really happy with how the year has read up. Thanks to the authors and readers who inspire me and make my reading life so much.

*

Rich and Pretty, by Rumaan Alam

“I loved its humour, its prose, its quietness and detail. I loved its subtle subversions—second abortions and pregnant women with a drink. I loved the difference between the two characters’ voices, how richly the two were delineated, and that the title is tongue-in-cheek—in a Mad Men fashion, Alam’s novel takes the idea of “types” of women and a binary approach to womanhood and complicates the idea entirely to show that women can be whole, flawed, inexplicable and fully realized people whose lives and experiences are worth writing about, thinking about. Which really shouldn’t be such a revelation, and this is still a completely excellent book for those of us who already know.”

*

The Mothers, by Brit Bennett

“Bennett nicely situates the personal against the political, Nadia’s experience with anti-abortion politicking by church members (although not so avidly—these are reasonable people) and also about how one’s convictions become flexible when an unwanted pregnancy is a fact instead of an idea. She shows how a woman can choose an abortion and know it’s the right choice, but still mourn what she’s lost and wonder at the could-have-beens. That an abortion, like a lot of things that happen to people over the course of their lives, is a complicated, multi-faceted thing.”

*

Busker, by Nisha Coleman

“I kept laughing out loud, which is a mark of literary achievement. Though I also cringed—as one who has never mastered air-kisses, I recoiled at Coleman’s recounting of her first bisous and how she actually made cheek contact. She writes about being asked to play her violin in a hair salon, but how her own unruly do caused a great upset when she arrived. Or the man she met who wanted to perform songs he’d written, which turned out to be “sex songs” with lyrics like, “The horny bull wants a bouncy ride.” And she meets a lot of men, Coleman, and in the beginning, being lonely, takes them up on their invitations, until she realizes that she’s setting herself up for a lot of awkward interactions. She longs for the company of women friends as well, but these kind of relationships are harder to find. Not to mention that at the beginning of her time in Paris, Coleman hardly speaks French.”

*

Becoming Lin, by Tricia Dower

“It’s a novel about the 1960s, about idealism and reality, about the narrow confines of a wife’s identity and that of a mother. Familiar themes, all of these if you’ve read books like Margaret Laurence’s The Fire Dwellersor watched Mad Men, but themes made fresh with the nuances of the novel’s point of view, the carefulness with which these ideas are examined. In Becoming Lin, the prose is mostly inconspicuous, but what grips the reader is the evolution of Lin’s consciousness, and the complexity that arises from the absence of polarities—unusual for a history of a decade so constructed of extremes.”

*

Experimental Film, by Gemma Files

“I spent Thanksgiving weekend—as summer turned into fall, the leaves turned into reds and oranges, as everything started to wither and die—reading Gemma Files’ Experimental Film, which was so fitting for the season. I absolutely loved it, and was not the only one to do so—the novel won the Shirley Jackson Award in the summer and the Sunburst Award for Excellence in Canadian Literature of the Fantastic in September. It’s a book about horror movies, and the history of Canadian cinema, and motherhood, and parenting a child with autism, and there are ghosts and it gets creepy, and it gave me bad dreams—which I mean as a testament to the book’s power.”

*

The Trespasser, by Tana French

I’d preordered The Trespasser, French’s first book since 2014, and it seems fitting that my year of Tana French should have a new release by her within it. (I was in Barbados when I learned this new book was forthcoming. Imagine my joy: that there would be another Tana French when the books in the Waitrose bag were done!). And it was everything I’d hoped it would be—a return to tradition of the first four books, a narrator on the edge who doesn’t know how close she is, a strange and tricky murder whose solution is not immediately in sight. I love her plots, her characters, her humour, and that I learn insults like “wankstain” (which shows up in two books). I love her complicated women and men, and their aloneness, and the awkward ways her characters connect with each other. I love her prose, her twists, and her portrayal of Ireland post-boom. Can you tell that I love everything?

*

Little Labours, by Rivka Galchen

“These fragments are preoccupied with the poster for a Keanu Reeves flop; the tiresome anecdotes we tell our friends about our babies presuming they’ll be interested (and once those friends have babies, they even actually are); a mention of the woman who drowned her five children; a horrible woman whom Galchen regularly encounters in her building’s elevator who has strong feelings she must articulate about her baby’s size; on head shapes, their remarkability and otherwise; about troubling proclivities toward orange; one piece beginning, “Literature has more dogs than babies, and also more abortions.”; about Frankenstein, Godzilla, Rumpelstiltskin, Lucille Ball, and The Tale of Genji (but not all in the same essay); about screen time, and what writers had children and who didn’t, and why writers’ children keep writing about closed office doors (and Galchen wonders why these doors are more troubling than the doors at Daddy’s work, downtown in a high rise building); about babies in art; and her complicated feelings about women’s writing and “women’s writing,” which she fascinatingly teases out.”

*

The Dancehall Years, by Joan Haggerty

“Joan Haggerty is an extraordinary writer, her prose Woolfian in its stream of consciousness, its immediacy. This is a saga sweeping four decades written in the present tense. And it’s true that when we talk about summer books, we sometimes mean that they’re a bit light in substance, but this is a different kind of summer book. It’s not difficult, and it’s got its own kind of lightness (strung together by summers as it is), but it’s not a “beach read.” Which isn’t to say it would be wonderful to read it at a beach, but still, it’s not the kind of novel that would blow away in the breeze.”

*

The Little Communist That Never Smiled, by Lola Lafon

“On the surface, Lola Lafon’s novel The Little Communist Who Never Smiled (translated from French by Nick Caistor) is a fictionalization of the life of Nadia Comaneci, but that (of course) is just a cover. What the book is really about is messaged in between the lines (or, quite literally, between the words). The Little Communist… is a book about the Cold War, the politicization of sport and womanhood, about deciphering codes and, fundamentally, this is a novel about punctuation.”

*

The Party Wall, by Catherine Leroux

“It’s always a good sign when the blank pages inside a book become riddled with notes and diagrams, as has been the case with my copy of the Governor-General’s Award/ Giller-nominated The Party Wall, by Catherine Laroux, prize-winner in its original French, translated into English by Lazer Lederhendler (Nikolski!). Not because the stories themselves in the novel are so difficult to figure out—in fact, they read beautifully with luminous prose (“Fall is approaching and the warmth of the South throbs on the horizon like a sack of gold at the foot of a rainbow”)—but because the challenge and the pleasure is discovering how all of it fits together. While the shape of most narratives is a horizontal line (with the inevitable bump for a climax), the shape of The Party Wall is multi-dimensional, arrows pointed in all four directions and connections that hold the whole thing fast.”

*

Birdie, by Tracey Lindberg

“Surprisingly, Birdie is not a heavy book, even with all the violence and tragedy. It’s as funny as it is sad, and more than that, it’s vibrant—powered by the voice of a woman who seemingly lies unconscious, which is kind of ironic, but there’s a lot going on inside Birdie’s mind, even as she’s got one half-opened eye on The Frugal Gourmet. As a character she’s rich and realized, and Lindberg never makes her a victim of her circumstances, her agency retained even in her lowest moments. Her very act of retreating into her mind, while passive from the outside, is a powerful gesture, and necessary for healing, for the possibility of a future.”

*

Double Teenage, by Joni Murphy

“It’s heavy, but it’s not. I read this book all day on Sunday, a few hours in the afternoon in my hammock. I devoured it, and loved the shape of the project—that this is a novel gesturing outwards, pointing to the world, using the world and its threads to build something new, offering structure, frameworks, where we hadn’t seen such a thing before. Daring to state that girlhood is significant, even if it’s a stage, and even if it’s a stage. I loved the poetry of Murphy’s prose, the power of her language. The power of the book full stop—it’s both the story of my life and also unlike anything I’ve ever read before.”

*

Frankie Styne and the Silver Man, by Kathy Page

“Frankie Styne is a new edition of Page’s novel, first published in 1993, and it put me in mind of my favourite Hilary Mantel novels, her first two, Every Day is Mothers Day and Vacant Possession, dark comedies about the dark edges of humanity and their successful attempts to outmaneuver meddling social workers. Page’s social worker is Annie Purvis, who we know first from the point of view of her client, Liz Meredith, who’s just been moved into a terrace house with her baby. Liz has spent her time most recently living on a railcar after becoming estranged from her family, but since her baby’s birth (compounded by the fact that he has developmental abnormalities) she’s become tangled up in “the system”. Although she diverts all attempts to get her installed with a phone (living as she does by her grandmother’s advice to “Always avoid ties that bind”), she could do with a television, but in the meantime, she contents herself by listening to conversations between the troubled couple next door and imagining a different kind of reality existing on a planet far away, that life itself is merely the plot of a cheap pulp novel she’s somehow been stuck in.”

*

I’m Thinking of Ending Things, by Iain Reid

“Clear the decks if you’re thinking about picking up this book, because you’re not going to be able to put it back down again. Don’t start reading it at night though or it’s going to be hard to fall asleep. I was intrigued by this psychological thriller, the debut novel by Iain Reid who’s previously been known for two award-winning heartwarming memoirs. Could he really pull off such a literary change of pace? But he does, and it’s breathtakingly good. Best of all, no one is going to compare this book to Gone Girl or The Girl on the Train, but it’s something altogether different. It also manages to be completely creepy but actually free of gore and violence, which is an incredible literary feat. And finally, that a book can be so enthralling and disorienting at once is just incredible.”

*

Today Will Be Different, by Maria Semple

“There are writers who sit down and painstakingly plan their books before they start writing, a mess of post-it notes and index cards, and one gets the feeling that Maria Semple is not one of them. The plots of her books resemble those dotted lines on maps in Saturday morning cartoons in which small children navigate space with curious and often dangerous diversions. Which is kind of a funny way to plot a book, but think of the joy you once got in running your finger along that line, and also of the momentum inherent in this kind of narrative, the briskness with which the reader is brought along for the ride. It also turns out that plot isn’t really the point is, but voice is, and Eleanor Flood’s is the kind of voice that’s hard to get out of your head.”

*

Swing Time, by Zadie Smith

“For me, Smith has always been a masterful novelist whose works just kind of peter out before the end, and my explanation for that is that her stories are so excellent that the endings are always going to be a let-down and/or do we really expect her to come up with a novel like that and properly end it too? But in her fourth book, it seems she’s finally got the conclusion that comes with a gut punch, the last fifty pages or so finally bringing the pieces together, the patterns emerging. The conclusion of Swing Time is wonderful, devastating, and ambiguous in the most engaging fashion. Yes, the book is a bit bloated in the middle, but reading any of Smith’s prose is a pleasure. And all of it matters—you just don’t know how until the end.”

*

On the Shores of Darkness, There is Light, by Cordelia Strube

“At nearly 400 pages, the novel is long, but swiftly paced and never dull. The bleakness of its considerations are broken up with incredible humour, from the cacophony of the voices in its background to the sheer audacity of Harriet herself, her nerve, all the things she is willing to do and say. There is a humour too in the contrast between the child’s point of view and the world around her, and—in the case of Harriet’s friend, Darcy, in particular—the person she is trying to to be. The sheer naïveté of these would-be old souls. Darcy likes to go on about, “that Caitlin whore,” a friend from her old neighbourhood, and we learn about what Caitlin did to her at Guides: “I was a Sprite and she was a Pixie. That ho bag made like all the cool girls were Pixies….Then the skank fucked up my puppetry badge.””

*

The Break, by Katherena Vermette

“The family tree at the beginning of the book is useful, but the reader soon becomes acquainted with the women of this family, so it won’t be referred to throughout. Momentum is strictly forward as the pieces begin to come together, Vermette deftly moving in and out of time to create a three-dimensional feel to the narrative—we come to feel we know this story from all sides. Four generations of a family, and how tragedy trickles down with all the goodness, the former not negating the latter though. As Vermette has made clear, this is a novel about women and about survival, a story that complements but also takes issue with stories and statistics about First Nations and Metis women as victims before they’re even people proper. But her characters are people here, people with flaws and foibles, strengths and weaknesses, and it’s the strength that endures: “‘It’s okay, my girl. It’s okay.’ Her answer to everything.”’

*

We Oughta Know, by Andrea Warner

In her book, We Oughta Know: How Four Women Ruled the ’90s and Changed Canadian Music, Andrea Warner articulates that whole scene, and the remarkable fact that four Canadian women were leading the charge of women in song: Celine Dion, Sarah McLachlan, Shania Twain, and Alanis Morissette. These four women too are (along with Diana Krall) are the only Canadians on Canada’s best-selling artists lists, coming in above the Beatles. And even more remarkably, they all made their mark during a five year period in the mid-1990s. What was going on exactly, Warner wonders? How did they do it?

*

Shrill, by Lindy West

From Shrill: ““Everything happened in those five years after my abortion. I became myself. Not by chance, or because an abortion is some kind of mysterious, empowering feminist bloode-magick rite of passage (as many, many—too many for a movement ostensibly comprising grown-ups—anti-choices have accused me of being), but simply because it was time. A whole bunch of changes—set into motion years, even decades, back—all came together at once, like the tumblers in a lock clicking into place: my body, my work, my voice, my confidence, my power, my determination to demand a life as potent, vibrant, public, and complex as any man’s. My abortion wasn’t intrinsically significant, but it was my first big grown-up decision—the first time I asserted unequivocally, “I know the life that I want and this isn’t it”; the moment I stopped being a passenger in my own body and grabbed the rudder.”

*

The Best Kind of People, by Zoe Whittall

While the entire book is fantastic, Whittall gets full points for her spectacular ending, however, which turns the story inside out and disturbingly rips us away from the singular perspectives of characters to reflect the wider culture of rape and sexual violence against whose context the entire novel has been taking place. Which is to say that this is not just a story about a family. And then the final sentence, which will haunt you long after you’ve finally finished reading, quiet, subtle, devastating and terrible, just like the injustice that is Justice, which isn’t anything like justice at all.

*

Notes From a Feminist Killjoy, by Erin Wunker

Notes is a way of starting. Trying. Essai. If a manifesto is a red rag, then a note is a building block, a puzzle piece. The reader responds not by charging, but by saying, Yes and, or Yes but. She doesn’t respond by tearing the whole thing down.

I love the way the narrative thread of Wunker’s book makes its way with seeming effortlessness. There is nothing laboured about how a discussion of rape culture leads to the Jian Ghomeshi trial leads to women coming together leads to a chapter on friendship. (Which references The Babysitters Club. Yes, and!!) Why are so few of our formative texts about female friendship? “What is it about female friendship that inspires such insipid descriptors?” What are relationships between women often so fraught?

“Is it too hard to write your own narrative and witness another’s, simultaneously?”

*

Five Roses, by Alice Zorn

“I loved Alice Zorn’s Five Roses, a novel that’s a love letter to Montreal, its neighbourhoods, and to the magic and serendipity of city life that is inevitably born from the fact of so many characters living in close proximity. It’s a bit of a mess, it is, city life, what with different cultures, and types of people, and old traditions and new traditions, and money and poverty, home and commercial enterprise, and history and the moment, which is now, and impossible to capture anyway…because the only thing that ever stands still in the city is the force of change. Zorn’s novel, however, manages to convey all this and not be a mess, disparate narratives woven together in a way that sparks magic but is left just untidy enough to still ring true.”

May 16, 2024

Truth in Timbre: On Reading Toni Morrison

It’s only been in the last few years that I’ve started to read the novels of Toni Morrison—Beloved, Sula, Jazz, and just recently her debut The Bluest Eye—and for me, this has been a process of becoming, of watching the possibilities of literature unfolding. Mesmerizing, and also disorientating. I’ve found understanding these novels to be difficult. The kinds of places where the bottom land is high up on the hill. Where the unsaid is articulated, where the wicked are permitted sympathy and understanding. Whose love is a kind of gutting desperation, an urge toward destruction. Stories that are strange, true, and irreducible.

“I chose a unique situation, not a representative one,” Morrison explains in the Foreword to The Bluest Eye. And yet that novel’s unique situation, the particular wounding and destruction of Pecola Breedlove, is shown not to be singular at all, but connected to race, to class, to gender, to geography. To everything. Omnipresent and haunting.

“There is really nothing more to say—except why. But since why is difficult to handle, one must take refuge in how.”

In The Bluest Eye, as in all her novels that I’ve read so far, Morrison’s narrative stretches back across years and the expanse of a country to answer that question of how, never straightforward, never linear, because to be direct is too simple. A straight line can be negated, traced back upon itself, but the winding tendrils of Pecola’s story are impossible to resist becoming tangled in. Or you might try to resist, but they’ll only hold you tighter.

And I marvel at how a novel about such abject suffering, a novel I find absolutely difficult, can still flow like running water. Sparkle, even. How can The Bluest Eye be such a pleasure to read? The pitch-perfect dialogue, the most compelling description of the viscousness of vomit: “How, I wonder, can it be so neat and nasty at the same time?” How does a writer do a thing like that? Capturing “the dreadful funkiness of passion, the funkiness of nature, the funkiness of the wide range of human emotions”?

As a beginning reader of Toni Morrison, and as a reader who is white, I relate to the perspective of Claudia in The Bluest Eye, listening with her sister to the conversation of the grown-ups around them: “We do not, cannot, know the meanings of all their words… So we watch their faces, their hands, their feet, and listen for truth in timbre.”

April 29, 2024

On Being Chosen

I’ve had a very fun and action-packed couple of weeks literary-wise that continues with tomorrow’s trip to Waterloo to interview Iona Whishaw about her latest Lane Winslow book. And a highlight was Thursday’s Biblio Bash at the Toronto Reference Library, a gala event at which I was invited to be a guest author. I’d attended once before in 2017 when my first novel came out, and the whole experience was intense, awesome, very overwhelming—plus I got my makeup done at the drug store and told them the look I was going for was “very dramatic” and ended up resembling a drag queen, and I’m still traumatized, no offence to drag queens. This time I had the benefit of hindsight and hired someone excellent to do my makeup, plus I’m about 300 years older than I used to be (pandemic effect) which meant I behaved with aplomb, looked quite fantastic, and drank so little that I woke up in the morning without a hangover, but still had lots of fun. It was a very good night and the Toronto Public Library Foundation raised more than a million dollars.

But I was cognizant through the entire process too that a big part of the experience (and one of its chief appeals, beyond the stunning portraits) was the feeling of being chosen. An exclusive event, an opportunity to mingle with the fancy people and wear a floor length gown. And I’ve been reflecting on this a lot, how much of the reality of publishing is often about the experiences of being chosen, or otherwise. Finishing your book, signing with an agent, getting a book deal, getting an impressive book deal, a book deal with a big press, becoming a bestseller, sustaining bestsellerdom, continuing that success with your next book, winning prizes, getting reviewed in all the best places, being “picked” by Oprah, Heather, Reese or Jenna, and on and on and on. And even when you get chosen on one level, there are all kinds of tiers and ways to still feel like you’ve been chosen (or that you’re falling short) and it’s all so urgent and arbitrary and so little of it (as with most things) is actually within any of our own control. Who gets to matter, to be important, and the pressure—even if you happen to be one of the ones—of staying on top, remaining relevant.

And all of it—it’s excruciating. I spent most of last fall feeling like such a failure, my self-worth so undermined by my latest novel’s failure to launch in the way I had envisioned—and thinking into the future, in which I might no longer be able to publish books at all, to be once again un-chosen by a publisher, and on one level, the stakes are negligible here, life goes on, but on the other, this is my career, and the thought of failure is just devastating once one has built their entire sense of self around the identity of not just being a writer, but one of those rarest of cases—a successful one.

There is a line from the Dar Williams song, “As Cool as I Am“, that I think (ugh!) I’m going to continue to be reminded of for the rest of my life: “And then I go outside to join the others; I am the others.” (You can even get a t-shirt!). So much of my own yearning to be chosen, to be validated, is to be offered proof that I am special and have worth. And of course I am special and have worth, by virtue of my existence as a human being, just like you do, but how to deal with that desire for distinction, for proof that I am not merely one of the others—it’s something else I’m figuring out at the age of almost-45, along with how to look good at a gala.

To accept that I am the others is realize that my sense of value and self-worth is intrinsic, rather than extrinsic, and that often nobody else is going to be see it but me, which means that I really have to know it, or no one will.

To quote another line from “As Cool as I Am”: “Oh, and that’s not easy.”

It’s really not, it’s so much easier to be seen by others than to see our ourselves as we really are, warts and all, and not even just accept it, but hold that reality as something worthy and sacred. It’s so much easier to share a photo of myself looking stunning at an exclusive shindig and have hundreds of people LIKE it than to sit with myself and know that this is all I’ll ever be.

But I’m working on it, little by little, building up a solid core, something unimpeachable.

March 28, 2024

Gleanings

• and I realized that my quiet writing has a relevance to those who are willing to listen. And even if it doesn’t, I need to do it.
• A lot of writers, I can only assume, would feel like they can’t write about a thing unless they’re an expert about the topic, but there’s a lot of activity that happens in the act of learning. That’s where the factual stuff in both of our stories feeds the emotional content.
• How do I know so much about these Mills & Boon romances? Because I snuck into my sister’s books of course. Later I also snuck into my father’s bookshelves and read all the juicy bits from his Harold Robbins books (The Carpetbaggers comes to mind) and Jacqueline Susann (Valley of the Dolls) and Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying along with Leon Uris’s Exodus and others. It was my dad who ignited my love for books and stories early, with his bedtime storytelling. He was born a storyteller.
• Contrast isn’t about what’s better or worse, or right or wrong, it’s not about comparing one thing to another — instead, I think about vibrancy, colours, shadow, texture, depth and height, the common structures of my everyday, and how routines and patterns might be shifted to bring even more enjoyment, pleasure, delight to my mind.
• When I told my boyfriend that I wanted to die, he hung up on me. I was seventeen and sitting in my basement, winding a phone cord round and round my fingers.
• But even with words to wrap around it—English, Welsh, and otherwise—I am so often so unsure of what those I love are thinking, seeing, forgetting, remembering. That doesn’t mean they’re disappearing. It means they’re only partially perceptible to me.
• It’s a litmus test for me to know who my people are and it almost always works. For some people it’s astrology. For me, it’s the blind recklessness of youth and how it did or didn’t define us. How we grew ourselves from the filth of our regret. Found purpose from our accidents. Failed and got back out there.
• First customer is looking for a hand puppet for a gift. I show her a giraffe and she says pointedly No Giraffes! and I wonder what happened there.
• There is something special about living on an island. I see it in the faces of strangers when I mention we live on an island. They look at us with astonishment, surprise, and sometimes, envy. They ask a hundred and one questions. Is it expensive to take the ferry? What is health care like? Are there wild animals? Does everyone know each other’s business? Have you been welcomed into the island community? What is there to do on an island?
• It was the flashing bitcoin sign in the window that caught my eye, maybe because I’d heard that crypto is sky-rocketing. I’ve walked past this corner shop over a hundred times, and until last week, I’d never noticed how charming it is.
• For me, this moment was a clear provocation for us to think about Mina’s own project. Is it possible to tell the story of Peter Manuel’s crimes in a way that doesn’t take anything more away from its victims, that doesn’t itself cause fresh harm? Is there a way for us to read about the case that is neither uncaring nor, like the weeping woman, intrusive? It isn’t our loss, after all; it isn’t our daughter. What right do we have to want to know all of this?
• And this is a lot of what my book, Apples on a Windowsill, is about. The details of a life, of still lifes — that intersection. It is also in the category, relationship-lit, and the narrative which can be pieced together in the (un)connected/standalone essays has to do with how the F do women make a creative life for themselves. Like, what is the narrative now, what are the possibilities? And also what are the obstacles in the 21st century…
• We must harness everything we have, everything we do. We must use every part of our books as bridges, leave no margins. We must build belonging.
• “People label our country undeveloped or developing,” a sweet human shared with me last night, “we say yours is developed because there is much material wealth, but what about the people … are the people developed? Developed countries, with many undeveloped people.”
• It’s cooler in Melbourne today, the tail end of Summer has swished out of sight and Autumnal weather is shuffling in. Just one more hot day, perhaps, and then we’re fully Fall. I hope. I woke up very early but stayed snuggled down, making the most of that snug feeling that’s been absent for so many months.

March 13, 2024

Home, by Toni Morrison

“It’s only been in the last few years that I’ve started to read the novels of Toni Morrison—Beloved, Sula, Jazz, and just recently her debut The Bluest Eye—and for me, this has been a process of becoming, of watching the possibilities of literature unfolding. Mesmerizing, and also disorientating. I’ve found understanding these novels to be difficult. The kinds of places where the bottom land is high up on the hill. Where the unsaid is articulated, where the wicked are permitted sympathy and understanding. Whose love is a kind of gutting desperation, an urge toward destruction. Stories that are strange, true, and irreducible…”

In the two years since I wrote those words (in a mini-essay I just loved writing) I’ve continued to make up for my Morrison deficit—I’ve since read read SONG OF SOLOMON, PARADISE and now HOME, that last one under the influence of Donna Bailey Nurse who posted about it on the last day of Black History Month: “Morrison jazzes our idealistic image of 1950s America. She scratches the sepia-toned album of post-war prosperity, small-town security, domestic bliss, and the nuclear family.”

HOME seems to me more straightforward than Morrison’s earlier books, but that doesn’t mean there’s not a whole lot going on beneath its surface, in the space between the lines. Between the actual chapters even, as Korean War vet Frank Money—”An integrated army is integrated misery. You all go fight, come back, they treat you like dogs. Change that. They treat dogs better.”—engages in dialogue with the author writing his story (“You can keep on writing, but I think you ought to know what’s true.”) The story of his journey through 1950s’ America to come to the aid of a beloved younger sister who’s in trouble, a journey whose obstacles include trauma, addiction, vagrancy, bad luck, and violent racism. A brutal story underlined by extraordinary gentleness and so much love.

*If you too have a #ToniMorrison deficit, I think HOME would be a great place to start remedying that.

February 22, 2024

Gleanings

• But I also see where this urgency can lead us—myself included—to run roughshod over our own relationships, turning people we love into targets of our wrath.
• This wasn’t one of the better times in my life. That’s not Dar Williams’ fault, but regardless the emotional ups and downs of my final years in that university town came to have Mortal City as their soundtrack.
• I have not been to hell and back/ But maybe that’s not true.
• Socially, I was lukewarm: being known as the 15 year old who square danced with her parents was not likely to turn the temperature down to cool where I longed to be. (Becoming hot was never in the cards).
• A thing I like to do in the car: say “How dare you” out loud with different intonations and degrees of vehemence. My life is not dramatic enough to necessitate saying it for real, but I want to be ready. 
• I am always taken aback by the metaphysics of time and place. That you think of someone perhaps returning from a run along Mill Creek in Edmonton or skating with his children and he is thinking about dinner in the 5th in Paris.
• In these stories we find the extraordinary and the appalling happening all over the place, quite unremarked upon. The casual transfiguration of women into birds, of phantoms into songs. The unflinching brutality of murder and death. The inconsistency of time and geography, which can trap you or hasten you along. Not only airships, but wind that has a voice.
• It’s high summer in Melbourne and the city is absolutely effervescing with the excitement of Taylor Swift being in town.
• I’ve brushed my girl’s hair a thousand times. And braided it just as many. High pony. Low pony. Bows. Barrettes. Headbands with flowers as big as dinner plates. Ballerina bun. Top knot. Backcombed witch’s mane. Lice. Thrice. Graduation. First party. And then today, for the first time ever, Iole did my hair.
• Because here’s the thing about telling stories. We don’t need to know, or understand, or locate meaning. We just need to be open to receive, to see, to listen, to translate, transcribe, hunt down, search out, borrow, collect, connect, tell. 

January 17, 2024

Off the Record, edited by John Metcalf

I’ve written before about my aversion to self-mythologizing male writers, how much space such hot air takes up in so many rooms, a logical counter, of course, being more women encouraged to see themselves as subjects of grand narratives, to tell their own stories in their own voices, and so enter Off the Record, an anthology of essay-interviews with six writers who’ve worked with editor John Metcalf over the years. Metcalf continuing the editor’s work of self-effacement in this volume, his questions removed from the interviews so just the writers’ voices remain, each interview telling the story of one writer’s becoming, followed by a short story by the writer in question, the fiction as a kind of arrival.

Keep your pencil handy, for this is an underlining, notes (and hearts) in the margins kind of book, with highlights like this from Kristyn Dunnion: “Good writing often embodies a numinous quality, sifting through echoes of other lives lived, connecting clues in an attempt to find meaning: ghost hunting.” Dunnion, along with Elise Levine, two of the writers included here whose work I’m not familiar with, but I appreciated their pieces just as much as those by Caroline Adderson, Cynthia Flood, Shaena Lambert, and Kathy Page, all of whom have written books I’ve loved. The ways in which each of their journeys have been different, but the commonalities too (quite a few backgrounds in activism informing the imagining of fictional worlds). Complicated relationships with parents, publishing journeys that affirm something my friend Marissa Stapley shared not long ago, about a writing career as a marathon, not a sprint, rife with as many downs as ups. The publishing business has always been fraught, and a book deal has never been the end of the story, but maybe we’d be sorry if it was.

From Shena Lambert: “Showing makes our worlds more believable. But this is a secular way of understanding what is actually more like a magical question. In fiction, anytime you press into the five senses, you will write something specific, something, precisely because of its singularity, which will begin the strange work of making meaning. Things of the earth want to be doors into something greater.”

THINGS OF THE EARTH WANT TO BE DOORS INTO SOMETHING GREATER. I don’t know a better explanation of fiction-making, which is to say meaning making, than that.

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.