September 7, 2023

AFAF is Launched!

Thank you to everyone who attended my launch last night at the Lillian H. Smith Library. It was an extraordinary night, everything I wanted, and this whole week has been joyful and fun.

September 1, 2023

Book Club Kit!

I’m very excited to share the ASKING FOR A FRIEND digital book club kit, created by my excellent team at Doubleday Canada. It includes discussion questions, a yummy recipe, a playlist, further reading suggestions and a heartfelt letter from ME! I do think this novel would make for a perfect book club kit—you will most likely end up actually talking about the book!

August 28, 2023

AFAF a Chatelaine Fall Pick!

I’m overjoyed to find Asking for a Friend selected as one of Chatelaine’s Fall book picks—in excellent company! Pick up a copy at your local newsstand.

August 23, 2023

Another Week in Paradise

A+ vacation reads last week. Laura Lippman never disappoints. I LOVE Sue Miller and am reading through her backlist; this one was my favourite Marian Keyes novel I’ve ever read, about a depressive Private Investigator trying to find a member of a reunited boy band all the while experiencing suicidal ideation; my fourth Barbara Trapido novel, a contemporary story told in the fantastical structure of a Shakespearean comedy; THE GREAT CIRCLE, which I did enjoy but skimmed in parts; Andrew O’Hagan’s truly beautiful story of lifelong friendship; and William Trevor, William Trevor Forever! I love him.

August 11, 2023

On Being Out of My Depth

It was story that started it—the kinds of stories we tell ourselves about the importance of being pushed outside our comfort zones, how we can learn and grow from a challenge. I was thinking about my work with writers on their early manuscripts and how scary it can be to open one’s self up for critique, but about how, in avoiding such a thing, we miss the chance to improve and make our work all it can be. I was thinking too about the story I was going to tell at the end of it the night, and how it would be one about triumph, fake it until you make it, about how you just never know what you’re capable of until you try.

I was thinking about how often we tend to underestimate ourselves, and the pitfalls of imposter syndrome, and how essential it is for me to override a tendency to stay small, to stay home. I was nervous, but those nerves, I supposed, were merely a sign that this was important, and that it was time to be brave. Do the hard thing. “Look,” I told my children too smugly. “I’m scared, and that I’m doing it, and *that* is the definition of brave.”

For seven years, I’ve been swimming near-daily, pandemic lockdowns aside, and I’ve come to own an identity as A Swimmer, tearing through Speedo caps, replacing goggles, usually one of the faster people in the pool (now that I no longer swim as the pool where the university swim team trains). And I’ve been curious for a while about trying something a little more difficult, about dipping a toe (ahem) into something with higher stakes, about improving my strokes and having somebody show me how to be better. So I finally signed up for the Masters Swim program at my community centre, drawn in by the suggestion that it would be an introduction to the world of competitive swimming, in which I’d hardly be a foreigner, since I essentially have gills and fins.

Oh, but Reader, it didn’t work out that way. Oh, Reader, I’ve not been so out of my depth (see what I did there!) since the time I decided to sneak a six pack of beer into a Scottish music festival where alcohol was apparently forbidden, and encountered people at the gate pushing in towers of beer cases on dollies. Sometimes, see, nerves are actually our instincts. If underdogs always eventually triumphed, as pop culture might suggest, wouldn’t there be no such things as underdogs after all?

I’d imagined Masters Swim a bit like Old Timer’s Hockey, see, me and a ragtag band of senior citizens. I really thought it would be gentle, an introduction, the name mostly ironic, but it quickly became apparent that it wasn’t. When the coach presented us with our “warm-up” written on a whiteboard, and I couldn’t decipher a single word. And the math! Reader, who would have imagined such math, the requirements delineated in metres, but how was I supposed to know how long the pool was, because I’ve never measured it, and even once I knew, how am I supposed to find space in my brain amidst all the SPORTSING to figure out how many lengths go into 300 metres, just say, and even if I did, how am I supposed to get track of them as I go? Plus we were supposed to be going fast! The whole time! For no discernible reason, because it wasn’t as though any of us were being chased.

I’d really been envisioning somebody holding my hand and showing me how, for once, I might do a proper whip kick. And then when we were waiting for the session to begin and I confessed to feeling like maybe this all wasn’t quite right, the other swimmers—who appeared to be in their early 20s—assuring me that they actually hadn’t swam competitively since high school really didn’t help assuage my fears.

I AM a swimmer. And THIS was the pool where I swim every day, but all the same, I might have signed up for intermediate Mongolian lessons and come up further ahead.

So I bolted. Of course, I bolted. Five minutes after the class started, I was gone, fleeing down Spadina Avenue in my bathing suit, still dripping from the pre-pool shower I’d taken in more hopeful times. Remembering a line from the picture book DOORS IN THE AIR which is one of the essential life lessons I’ve ever encountered in literature: “Remember, you don’t have to stay where you are.” The FREEDOM of that. (The best thing about being 44 is that you rarely have to feel like this ever.)

And so this story has turned out to be a story of abject failure and embarrassment (did they wonder where I’d gone, that weird lady who was only there for five minutes?), instead of triumph. A story that I’m telling because it horrifies me less when I can make it into something, and perhaps it will serve to help you feel better about yourself, because whatever else you got up to this week, at least you didn’t do that. A story about how the universe has a way, always, of keeping me humble. About how sometimes life is just challenging enough, and how comfort zones are fine, and about how I’ll stay in my lane.

August 10, 2023

Morse Code for Romantics, by Anne Baldo

I was soliciting picks for 49thShelf’s Summer Books lists when Stephanie Small from The Porcupine’s Quill got in touch. “It might not look like one from the cover,” she wrote, “but actually, I think Anne Baldo’s Morse Code for Romantics makes a good summer read,” which is an understatement if I ever heard one. For this is a book that is so steeped in summer, a collection of stories with sand between their toes, set along the shores of Lake Erie, scrappy cottages and rundown motels. With lines like “We don’t know it yet but we will never be bigger, or more real, than we are right here this summer. We will keep fading and shrinking, in small ways, forever always, after this.”

For the most part, these are standalone stories—the exceptions are a handful in which characters reappear—but they’re linked by geography, by recurring imagery, and themes which make this collection such a satisfying book. They’re linked too by being crafted to a standard of real excellence, and I’m thinking of the image on the book’s cover, of the power lines connecting the utility poles, without which I’d probably be employing a metaphor right now along the lines of beads on a string, one gleaming gem right after another.

These are stories of working class people, of people who’ve dropped out of the working class, of Italian-Canadians in the Windsor region. Most are fairly contemporary, the exception being “Marrying Dewitt West,” about the arrogant 19th-century naturalist investigating reports of a sea monster in the depths of Lake Erie who becomes the object of a wily young woman’s affections. And the sea monster image occurs also in “Monsters of Lake Erie,” which begins with an explanation of sonar equipment used in attempts at detecting the Loch Ness Monster: “I thought when you had been lonely for a long time you gained a similar sort of ability with people. To look at them, beaming out a silent pulse, and be able to glimpse the dark, monstrous shapes of their own loneliness lurking underneath the surface.”

There are a lot of lonely people and dark, monstrous lurkings in Morse Code... But peonies too, and shimmering light, a daring to hope, to dream. Magic and mermaids—”But people always forget that mermaids are monsters.” Sparks and fire.

August 10, 2023

It Takes Two Giveaway

🎶 When the sun shines, we’ll shine together…🎶

So here’s the coolest #giveaway YET for ASKING FOR A FRIEND (which drops in 26 days!!).

It’s a giveaway for a very special group of readers, and altogether fitting for a book about BFFs….

Are you buying TWO copies of the novel so that you can pass along the spare to your bestie??

(Or your sister, or your cousin, or your yoga teacher, or your open minded grandpa??)

If you are, DM or email me your proof of purchase and you’ll be entered in a draw to win this gorgeous pair of bookmarks for each of you (designed and created by @breezyknots!)!!

If you’ve already preordered one copy and plan on picking up a second at one of my events this fall (in Toronto, Peterborough, Hamilton, Uxbridge, and more tba!!) that’s also VERY EXCELLENT, or if you’re planning to grab your pair at one of the events and support an awesome indie bookseller, that’s great too! Just drop me a note and let me know, and you’ll be added to the draw!!

Contest runs into the end of August!!

IT TAKES TWO, BABY!!

August 8, 2023

Yellowface, by R.M. Kuang

So, I can’t say I’d necessarily recommend R.M. Kuang’s Yellowface to anyone else who has a new novel coming out in 28 days, because it’s just a little too on the nose, a satire that’s so real about the pressures and cutthroat competition of the publishing industry, the high stakes and low odds which “have made it impossible *for white and nonwhite authors alike* [emphasis mine] to succeed…” (to quote from the novel’s white narrator, who steals a manuscript from her dead friend, an Asian-American bestselling novelist, whose CV is not entirely distinct from that of R.M. Kuang herself—there are so many complicated meta-layers of to this work!). Mostly though, what a white author who sees her own experience in this novel is quite likely to miss is that Yellowface is also a satire of the way in which white women are able to put themselves at the centre of every story, wholly accustomed to being “the expected reader” (to borrow a phrase from Elaine Castillo) of every narrative they encounter, and oh, Kuang plays some tricks with that tendency with both her characters and readers alike. Edgy and brilliant.

August 8, 2023

Book Launch!

Celebrate friendship and fiction with the launch of ASKING FOR A FRIEND, Toronto author Kerry Clare’s third novel, which is partly set at the Lillian H. Smith Branch, and is the story of an enduring relationship between two best friends that unfolds across decades.

Bring your bestie and listen to readings from audiobook narrator Kate Keenan, take part in a BFF-themed quiz show by Shari Kasman, get your picture taken in the photo booth, and pick up a copy of the book, on sale from A Novel Spot Bookshttps://www.eventbrite.ca/e/asking-for-a-friend-kerry-clare-tickets-682361881757.

August 4, 2023

Something Borrowed Parts 1&2

SOMETHING BORROWED is a new feature I’m going to be sharing in the (six!) weeks left before the launch of my new novel, ASKING FOR A FRIEND (coming September 5 from @doubledayca).

Though STOLEN GOODS could also be a not entirely unsuitable name…but art is more charitable than that, I think, and influence is everywhere.

In ASKING FOR A FRIEND, I’ve BORROWED from Laurie Colwin, one of my literary lodestars, the notion of a somewhat preposterous cultural institute. In Colwin’s HAPPY ALL THE TIME. it’s the Magna Charta Foundation, the Morris family trust where Guido works. Similar institutes pop up in her other stories, convenient ways to occupy her quirky characters but not to have them so occupied that they need to be confined to a desk all day.

In ASKING FOR A FRIEND, Jess was originally a teacher. Not having had a proper job myself since 2009 (and even that one was more like a Laurie Colwin job than a real one—I was hired as a researcher for a project that never happened), I am not GREAT at writing work, but in order to have them seem like realized human beings, you’ve got to give your fictional people something to occupy their time with. And then, for a variety of reasons, Jess being a teacher wasn’t working out, and I was rereading HAPPY ALL THE TIME at that point, and decided to take a few Colwinesque liberties. I invented the Charlotte Nordstrom Institute for Folk and Fairy Tales, very loosely based on the Osborne Collection of Early Children’s Books housed at the Lillian H. Smith Library (and I swear its petty office grievances are PURELY fictional. So is its carpet.)

Funnest Fact: My book is launching at the Lillian H. Smith Library on Wednesday September 6! Stay tuned for more details…

Giving Jess work at the Nordstrom Institute was a lot of fun, allowing me to weave in my experience working in libraries, as well as the novel’s recurring fairy tale themes and motifs, all the while playing with workplace/office politics and dynamics, just the way that Colwin does.

*

I’m excited to share with you the second instalment of my SOMETHING BORROWED series, in which I share the things I’ve borrowed/STOLEN for my new novel, ASKING FOR A FRIEND.

Most obviously, I’ve stolen the setting for Jess and Clara’s apartment from the real apartment I shared with my friends many years ago, although I’ve cut a couple of rooms out, and changed the raccoon that got into the upstairs bedroom into a family of squirrels (with much more destruction—raccoons are pretty laidback as home invaders go). I’ve borrowed the way the golden light shone through the south facing kitchen window, and the incredible sense of home these friends created which I was so lucky to be a part of.

Weirdly, our apartment, for a period, was turned into a museum, though not until many years after we’d moved out, but it hadn’t changed much in the interim, and my novel too is a kind of museum preserving this curious and essential moment in place and time.

Something else I’ve borrowed is a line from the book which was something my very wise friend, Dr. Rebecca Dolgoy, said to me a few years ago, which was, “The children you have make any other world impossible.” She gave me her permission to use that line, for which she’s credited in my acknowledgements.

“The children you have make any other world impossible.” I think maybe the very same thing can be said about good friends.

PS Rebecca is now a Curator at an ACTUAL museum (Ingenium, in Ottawa!), whose collections include the world’s most ancient sample of flowing water. Sadly, they do not store it in a Gabe Kaplan goblet.