March 28, 2014
Saying Goodbye to Bookstores
This weekend is, apparently, Annex Book City’s last. I’ve not been in for awhile because it’s just not been the same, but will pop in for a last goodbye. I continue to be heartbroken, but one stumbles on. Still very much hoping for a new bookshop landing in the neighbourhood, and in the meantime, will support our other locals–Parent Books (in their new location), Little Island Comics, and Bakka Phoenix, all close by. But yes, it’s terrible. And isn’t it funny how fast one becomes accustomed to “terrible,” which is a point Jane Jacobs makes in Dark Age Ahead, which I read last week. and which, apparently, Book City did the launch for, as it was her local bookstore too, so there you go. So I am by no means living in a bookstore desert, but I have such sympathy for those people who are, though I fear that already so many have forgotten what they’re missing.
Last weekend, I was interviewed for this article by Andrea Gordon on how Book City is one of three bookstores closing in Toronto this month, along with The World’s Biggest Bookstore (which held me so in thrall as a child that I did a school project on it in grade 5. It was the most magical place I’d ever been), and The Cookbook Store, which was another favourite destination more recently, right across the road from the Toronto Reference Library. The piece is a nice look at these places which make our city special, places that are getting lost thanks to rising rents and pressure from Amazon’s discounts, not to mention longterm effects of Chapters Indigo’s predatory practices, back when they could afford such things (which has, of course, rendered Bloor West Village a bookstore desert, among many other examples).
I am too much of an optimist to wholly give over to the dark age ahead though. Something good will come of all of this, and in the meantime, I am pleased that my thoughts on loving and losing Book City are going to be included in The Bookshop Book by Jen Campbell, which will be out in the UK in October. About the book: “From the oldest bookshop in the world, to the smallest you could imagine, The Bookshop Book examines the history of books, talks to authors about their favourite places, and looks at over two hundred weirdly wonderful bookshops across six continents (sadly, we’ve yet to build a bookshop down in the South Pole). The Bookshop Book is a love letter to bookshops all around the world.” I’m very excited to be a part of it.
And for more signs of life in the indie bookshop game? Oh, do check out the blog of Parnassus Books in Nashville, which is co-owned by the remarkable Ann Patchett. So so filled with bookish goodness.
March 27, 2014
On the terror of speaking out loud
My essay in The M Word is called “Doubleness Clarifies”, and I wrote it almost two years ago during four days in July when I hid out in the rafters at the Wychwood Library while Harriet was enrolled in day camp—the first time since her birth that I’d had the luxury of a couple of hours to string together for writing. And I knew what I wanted to write about, because I’d been rehearsing the essay for years. I wrote the essay from beginning to end while listening to “Call Me Maybe” on repeat, which I don’t think you can tell from reading it, but it was essential to the creation. At the time, the book was still just an idea, and it wasn’t a sure thing that it would ever come to be. This all seems like a long time ago now, which tells you something about how long it takes to make a book. One of the most fascinating things about The M Word is the way in which its writers’ lives have changed since they wrote their essays, each piece a representation of a moment in time. That flux is the entire book’s subtext.
But it’s true that my essay had been in the works for a long time, something I desperately wanted to say, but had lacked the courage to express. Becoming a mother in 2009, as my essay demonstrates, helped me to a fuller understanding of what I wanted to write about. (See what I’m doing here? Not getting to the point. This is my point.) So I finally wrote about it, to the strains of Carly Rae. Publication theoretical, far into the future. (Hmm, is what I’m saying a lot now, maybe I didn’t think this through…)
I have practiced talking about what I’ve written about. Clues dropped here and there in blog posts (which is not “talking” per se, but it’s like talking because people are listening to what I say here.) Last spring when I was 41 weeks pregnant, Dr. Henry Morgentaler died, which gave me a meaningful occasion to finally be out with it–this was a rehearsal for the book, I knew. And the response to that post was enormous, giving me some faith that I could take my essay into the world without fear. I know I have the support of my family too, which means everything, and the contents of the essay will not be a revelation to anyone who knows me, because I’ve always been open about my experience. But this open? (Maybe I didn’t think this through…)
I write in my essay that it’s taken me a long time to say the word “abortion” out loud, not because it’s a bad word or something I’m ashamed of, but just because the word is a trigger for so many kinds of conversations that I don’t necessarily feel like having. It was a word I was afraid to own, no matter how much I was grateful for the word and its reality in shaping my adult life.If anything, it was my reticence that I was ashamed of though, the way that it was allowing others to hijack the abortion conversation, people whose motives were to restrict and undermine my autonomy, personhood and freedom. I was grateful to the book for providing another meaningful occasion for me to write about my experience of abortion and the surprising ways in which it connects to my experience of motherhood. I was compelled to tell my story also because I know it’s echoed in the experiences of so many other women who, for their own reasons, feel more comfortable keeping quiet about the whole thing.
You know, it’s not shame that keeps us quiet, that kept me quiet for more than a decade. Yes, some women regret their abortions, but that’s only because (as I write in my essay) abortion exists on a huge spectrum of experience. For me, it was barely a decision, more a reflex, but still the smartest thing I’ve ever done. For most of us though, we keep quiet because people can be cruel, showing a stunning lack of empathy and understanding. There are people for whom murder seems a fair-enough response, an eye for an eye, I suppose. Who would want to open themselves up to that? (Maybe I didn’t think this through….)
So here it is: on April 15 and on many occasions thereafter, I will be reading from “Doubleness Clarifies” in rooms full of people, in front of my dad. (See why I’m thinking about not having thought it through?) The essay, or part of it, will be published online. And I know that most people who read it or hear it read will be enlightened or else say, “Yeah, that’s exactly how it was…” because I know that most people are sensible and sane, and that even if they don’t agree with the morals of the experience, that they can understand how it was for me, which is the point of the essay after all. People are also allowed to think the whole thing is a load of tosh–a writer has to give her readers permission for that.
So maybe I didn’t think this through, but it’s going to happen anyway. And it’s terrifying. Which is where I’m at now, far away from the Wychwood Library rafters. But I’m also glad it’s going to happen, that (I hope) abortion will become a word that falls off the tongue, that this story might precede me, that maybe the narrative of abortion will begin to be shifted from polarities to something more complicated, part of life, something like how it really is.
March 25, 2014
CanLit Companions: Prairie Ostrich and Jane The Fox and Me
As if Jane, The Fox, and Me needed another endorsement. Winner of a Governor-General’s Award for Illustration, included on many year-end Best Of lists, including The New York Times’. But I walked into Little Island Comics on Saturday to finally buy a copy, and when I asked for it at the counter, the other children in the store starting raving. “It’s the best book ever,” one of them told me, so if I’d ever had any doubt…
The star of this show is the illustrations by Isabelle Arsenault, which recall her gorgeous drawings from Virginia Wolf. The story, by Franny Britt and translated by Christelle Morelli and Susan Ouriou, is about a young girl, Helene, who seeks solace from her tormentors within the pages of a book: Jane Eyre. And here, Arnseault’s images are lush, defined and richly coloured. Whereas, in the panels of her life, lines are rough, darkly shaded, bare-treed and dull. Helene is on the outs with girls who’d once been her friends, as is ever the way, and both the text and images capture her sense of being totally alone. The bullying is unrelenting (an amazingly, so pointedly hurtful and careless and stupid at the exact same time), Helene powerless against it, even more so when she’s made to join her classmates on a trip to a wilderness camp. Things get worse before they get better, but a curious encounter with a fox shifts everything, and then Helene makes a real friends, colour slowly returning to her world.
I read it as I was reading Prairie Ostrich by Tamai Kobayashi, whose cover design is so stunning that the book does not seem so far apart from a graphic novel. (Full disclosure! Prairie Ostrich is published by Goose Lane, which also publishes The M Word.) Kobayashi’s Egg is younger than Helene–7 or 8-years-old–but just as alienated from her world. On their ostrich farm in the Alberta Badlands, Egg’s is the only Japanese family on the prairie in the 1970s, her parents’ painful pasts from WW2 refusing to stay buried. But the past has got nothing on the present, in which the family has been torn apart since elder brother Albert’s death under mysterious circumstances a few months before. Her father has taken to sleeping in the barn, her mother seeking solace in booze, and her sister Kathy’s close friendship with another girl is raising eyebrows in their small town. Egg doesn’t understand the disarray she’s witnessing and, like Helene, takes solace in books, though she prefers the dictionary and books of facts over fiction, because fiction is so slippery. She likes the illusion of order which the dictionary offers to the world, and she likes other illusions too, like the alternative ending to The Diary of Anne Frank, which her sister reads to her, in which Anne survives and travels to a new life in America.
Such a young protagonist in an adult novel is a tricky thing, which Kobayashi succeeds at by making Egg quite precocious (though she is very much the opposite in other essential ways, much to her social detriment). Egg is also provided with abundant material to filter through her point of view, small towns being good for such things. There were a few moments in which as a reader, I could glimpse the author above the story, busily pulling on strings, but in general, I was taken with this story, with its pop culture allusions and as a testament to how we bury ourselves in books (and escape recess by hiding in the library—who hasn’t been there?).
Both Prairie Ostrich and Jane, the Fox and Me are books whose appeal extends between age groups, and which offer thoughtful, emphatic perspectives on everybody’s favourite buzzword, bullying. They’re books about the books that save us, about the fictional worlds we so need when we’re young in which we’re free to dream ourselves.
March 25, 2014
How Little Lori Visited Times Square
The best thing about the Lillian H. Smith Library is that its collection was born out of the Toronto Library’s Boys and Girls House, which opened in 1923, and therefore a trip through the stacks reveals all kinds of vintage gems. Our favourite fruit of Saturday’s visit is How Little Lori Visited Times Square by Amos Vogel and illustrated my Maurice Sendak (which I came across whilst browsing for Viorst).
It’s a book with a warning label: “This is a very funny book and should not be read while drinking orange juice, or you will spill it!”
This is the only picture book by Vogel, who was known for his work in cinema and as author of the book, Film as a Subversive Art. Maurice Sendak is, of course, Maurice Sendak. And oh, this book is weird and terrific.
It’s about a little boy called Lori whose bedroom decor suggests a strong affinity for vehicles of all kinds. He decides one day to go to Times Square, but every route he takes brings him to somewhere different. This is a frustrating process for him–a helicopter delivers him to Idlewild Airport; the elevates subway to his Uncle’s house in Queens. The city in the background is a crowded place, populated by curious characters and decorated with billboards and signs whose words add a marvellous subtext and might be some kind of comment on consumerism but I can’t quite decide which. Potato Chip stores and Peanut butter stores, signs exclaiming, “Buy Now!”, and an ad on the side of the bus: “Don’t walk on the pigeons.”
He ends up crying on the 25th floor of Macy’s (after a trip up the elevator), but then is rescued by a slow-talking turtle who offers Lori a ride on his back. Lori agrees and off they go. But, um, that was four months ago.
“And nobody has heard from them since.”
The warning label is not unjustified then.
Another best thing? The book has been brought back into print where it remains. Because it’s totally totally brilliant.
March 23, 2014
The Age by Nancy Lee
My review of The Age by Nancy Lee appeared in The Globe and Mail this weekend:
It seems fitting, if sinister, to suggest that something in the air could be responsible for a strange tension emanating lately from the nation’s western edge. The Age – the long-awaited first novel by Nancy Lee, who won acclaim with the short-story collection Dead Girls– joins terrific recent fiction by Zsuzsi Gartner and Caroline Adderson to form a subgenre of Vancouver literature that puts the “domestic” in domestic terrorism. These works explore female characters’ relationships to extremism to complicate notions of home and family.
Lee’s title refers to two pivotal ages, her plot born of their intersection. The first is the age in which her story takes place, 1984, which, thanks to Orwell, was always going to be a storied year, even if Soviet warships hadn’t been gathering in the Atlantic with the Doomsday Clock ticking close to midnight. It would be a peculiar time in which – and here’s the second title reference – to come of age, seemingly on the brink of annihilation, as is the case for Gerry, Lee’s misfit protagonist.
Read the whole thing here.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L2BviXN6yhk
March 22, 2014
The M Word is here!
The M Word arrived on my doorstep yesterday morning, a whole box of beautiful books. It’s all a bit overwhelming and underwhelming at the very same time, and anyone who has ever published a book probably knows exactly what I’m talking about. Though I am lucky to have the support of 24 other writers who are as excited about this book as I am, and so grateful that they’ve lent not only their talents, but their enthusiasm. I’m grateful too for the enthusiasm of Emily Schultz, Ann Douglas and Miranda Hill, who were kind enough to read the book and offer endorsements. And finally, I’m grateful for friends and family who have been looking forward to this book for a while now. If you’d like to know how to best support The M Word, I’m happy to refer you to Carrie Snyder’s Practical Guide to Selling a Book. You should be able to get the book in your hands in the next few weeks, and I do hope you really enjoy it.
March 19, 2014
New Kids’ Books We’re Loving
The Most Magnificent Thing by Ashley Spires: Harriet is big into Ashley Spires’ books, in particularly, Binky the Space Cat, which got her started saying, “Holy fuzzbutt!” But with this latest picture book offering, Spires has truly outdone herself. It’s got everything. It’s got a dog, a girl who builds things, appealing illustrations that stand out against simple line drawings of an urban street-scape. It will appeal to both sexes. It’s got words, so many words, terrific verbs employed in the act of construction. It’s about coming up short, making mistakes and getting angry–the acknowledgement of such experiences is incredibly profound and has echoes of Sendak. Perfect tongue-in-cheek humour too that kids and adults will get–Harriet likes to note that the girl’s “out of the way” workspace is in fact in the middle of the sidewalk. I love delivering the understated line, “It was not her finest moment,” when the girl finally loses it. And that wonderful image when she hammers her finger, Spires’ skill as an comics artist translating so perfectly into picture book form. What a truly wonderful picture book, coming quite close (dare I say it?) to perfection.
The Tweedles Go Electric by Monica Kulling and Marie Lafrance: As a feminist and a troublemaker, I’ve long admired Kulling’s books for their subtle subversion of gender roles. She’s up to similar tricks in this one, her latest, which seems influenced by her experience as author of a series of picture book biographies of scientists. For this is a picture book about technology, the electric car at the dawn of the new century. The twentieth century, that is, the Tweedle family deciding to finally get with the times and joined the automotive race. But they don’t want a steam engine, or a car that runs on gasoline. It’s the electric car for them, a model which is smart, green and economical indeed. Young daughter Frances, however, is not so invested in her family’s new purchase, for “like most young girls”, her interests were more in the direction of higher education. She’s forever got her nose in a book, until she gets her chance behind the wheel and discovers that she has got a sense of adventure after all. Lafrance’s detailed drawings are delightful, and as humorous as the story itself. I do love that penny farthing!
March 18, 2014
On Omens and the Dangers of Reading Too Much
One of the most wonderful things I’ve read lately is “Odds and Omens: Superstition and IVF” by Terri Vlassopoulos, not least of all because it is an M Word kind of story, the kind of tale that gets told and makes so many women feel less alone. And even those of us who’ve not struggled with fertility can identify with what she’s writing about, because anybody who’s ever tried to get pregnant knows what tricks mind and body can play on one another during the two weeks or so before a pregnancy can be detected. I wonder sometimes if it’s a problem particular to those us who read too much, who imagine the world can be interpreted through signs and symbols just like a book.
Terri’s essay also meant something to me, as I’ve been waiting for test results on my thyroid lump for the past two weeks. The good news, we learned this morning, is that the lump is still benign, which always comes as a relief. This is my third round of this, and I am definitely getting used to it. I didn’t really go insane with anxiety (though I am also not pregnant this time, and can drink!), and all the sleep I lost last night (which was plenty) is on account of my evil children. When I did it last August, I didn’t do too badly either, though the night before my results was this extraordinary evening so golden that I was quite sure I’d receive a fatal diagnosis in the morn, just for the sake of juxtaposition.
The morning of my biopsy appointment two weeks ago, in which I learned that my lump is ever-changing, I’d happened upon three accounts of women with terminal cancer diagnoses. That evening, with my biopsy much on my mind, I checked Facebook to inquire after an old friend of mine who has been living with metastatic breast cancer for the past three years, and discovered that she’d died the day before. Which was perspective, of course, a sign for me to suck it up because I’ve got it lucky in oh so many ways, but also pretty devastating and incredibly sad. Odds and omens indeed.
In some ways, I’m learning how to live with uncertainty. I no longer imagine “biopsy” to be a synonym for “death sentence”. I’ve had so many, and I just call them “tests” now. I have much cause to be optimistic that everything will be fine, and I very nearly am, and then. “What if it’s a trick? What if the universe is screwing with me, getting me all complacent so that when the bad news finally comes, I am so far from ready?” (Though who is ever ready? Sometimes I imagine that worrying is preparation of a kind, though I think I’m fooling myself.)
This is the point at which my husband reminds me that I am not the centre of the universe, that the world has not specifically arranged itself with my interests in mind. That if I’m in fact a character in a book, as I seem to think I am, it’s a book I haven’t finished reading yet, and that there’s no way really to ever know what comes next except to turn the page and see what happens.
March 17, 2014
After Alice by Karen Hofmann
What a pleasure is spending a weekend devouring a book, and for me this weekend, that book was After Alice by Karen Hofmann, which I absolutely adored. It was the most unCanLitty CanLit I’ve encountered in ages, the story instead calling to mind English novelists like Anita Brooker and Daphne DuMaurier, and then Wallace Stegner, Barbara Kingsolver and Joan Didion in its evocation of place. This is a debut novel by Hofmann, whose previous poetry collection was shortlisted for the Dorothy Livesay Prize in 2009, but she writes with a touch so rich and deft that there is nothing of the debut about it.
There’s a lot going on here: Sidonie Von Täler has retired from her academic job in Montreal designing computer models for psychology experiments. Sidonie herself is something of a cold-fish, so this seems a job to which she’d be unusually suited. We’re locked into her point of view, and it soon becomes apparent that something is just askew–she is a synesthete, displays some symptoms of Aspergers in her perception of the world. Which is not to say that Sidonie’s point of view is the point of this story, that this is a novel or that she’s a protagonist we’d ever refer to as “quirky” ala Come Thou Tortoise or the Dog in Nighttime, but just that she’s a bit peculiar. Her point of view is fascinating, and her voice is sharply defined.
She’s returned to the Okanagan Valley where she’d fled from years before. In her childhood, her family’s orchard had been one of the biggest in the area, their land defining every circumstance of their existence and their status in the community. Sidonie, ever awkward, had been raised in the shadow of her beautiful sister, Alice, whose tragic later circumstances we’re not made aware of until later in the book. Upon her return, Sidonie gets to know her sister’s sons and their own family’s. She’s also close to her niece, Cynthia, whom she’d raised after Alice’s death, and Cynthia’s son, Justin, though much goes unsaid between all of them, Sidonie choosing to believe that she prefers her independence to the complications and niceties of family ties.
And you can’t blame her–Sidonie is brilliant, accomplished and self-succificent, having left a life rich with culture and a couple of close, rewarding friendships back in Montreal. She’d married well–an architect who built Habitat 67 in Montreal, where they’d lived until their marriage ended. She looked upon her marriage not warmly, but as coolly as she did everything. Some might find her life lonely, but there is no sign that she does. But something has driven her to come home, to a past that refuses to stayed packed away in boxes.
After Alice has mystery at its core, and while its approach is most literary, Hofmann has combined that approach with well-tuned plot that makes this book a page-turner. It is also very much a book about place, though not sentimentally so–Sidonie doesn’t do that–but instead the details of the land and what grows there, what it means to work that land in terms of economics and physical labour. It’s a novel that might take a place on the shelf beside Kingsolver’s Animal Vegetable Miracle or The Hundred Mile Diet in its consideration of the terroir, what the land does to its people. And what times does too, Hofmann weaving past and present together, Sidonie’s family home casting a spell that makes it difficult for her to tell where one of them finishes and the other begins, though it’s really that points like this just don’t happen.
Hofman’s prose is lyrical and effective, if a little in need of tautness. And her ending is a little bit too tidy and choreographed, though still with its surprises. But these are minor quibbles for a novel so ultimately satisfying, and so I welcome Hofmann’s refreshing voice with this wonderful book, one of the most interesting and exciting that I’ve encountered in ages.
March 16, 2014
Spring Break
I totally get March Break now. I never really did before. But the weeks leading up to it were threatening to destroy me. Compared to others, we didn’t have it so bad, but we’d had three straight weeks of sick kids, too much going on on the weekends, and the mad scramble that is every day. This year, February didn’t really seem so bad, but I think it was just saving itself for March, which hit with such a wallop. And oh, this long winter. We’ve really had enough, and so, this was the week that came along to save us. Stuart took the week off too, and we did what we do best: a few splendid things, plenty of lunch, a whole lot of nothing, and precious precious time.
Monday was lunch at Caplansky’s, which never ever fails, followed by a visit to the Lillian H. Smith Library for a brand new stack of books. On Tuesday, we took a road trip to the McMichael Gallery to see the Mary Pratt Exhibit, which was oh, so extraordinary, definitely worth a visit. We felt a bit guilty (not really) as we drove past the sign for Legoland, but luckily Harriet can’t read yet, and the Mary Pratt exhibit was engaging for her as well, with all its bright colours and familiar objects. (She likes the hot dog one the best). On Tuesday, we actually wore shoes instead of boots, but any indication that spring was in the air was packed away with Wednesday’s snowstorm, which we walked through to get to lunch at Fanny Chadwick’s and it was totally worth it, even with the snow so wet and awful that my face was burning with cold and so soaked I had to be mopped off when we arrived. Thursday, the sun came out, and we went to the AGO, which was no crowded and had totally excellent stuff on for kids (so I felt better about Legoland), though I have no photos of any of it because I smashed my phone on the streetcar floor (which is made of rubber. How is that possible?). And then on Friday, we had afternoon tea at the Windsor Arms Hotel, and Harriet and Iris were both so totally good—with the former, this is due to her being excellent, the latter is pure luck. It was Iris’s first afternoon tea, and we threw scone pieces her way to keep her happy, and it worked. As ever, it was nice to do something so special.
And now with tomorrow, we’re back to reality, though it will be reality with extra crazy because The M Word is in the world! Which will bring me out of my hermetic existence, which I am slightly dreading, but which I’m also committing to enjoying, because this is such a dream come true.
