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.
August 3, 2023
The Damages, by Genevieve Scott
So just say you wrote a novel about the toxicity of sexual politics in the 1990s with a campus setting, a novel with duel timelines, the contemporary story set against the #MeToo movement as the protagonist grapples with allegations of sexual misconduct against her former partner, the father of her child, and the allegations and their fallout stir up memories of a catastrophic event on campus more than two decades before during which the protagonist’s roommate went missing, creating a fallout that left the protagonist’s reputation in ruins and trauma she’s still just beginning to process…
Wouldn’t it be SO ANNOYING when Rebecca Makkai’s smash hit I Have Some Questions for You comes out just months before your pub date?
A novel whose description so uncannily matches your own (there’s something in the water!) and whose enormous success could possibly overshadow your own?
Thankfully, however, there is this: If you liked I Have Some Questions for You (and a lot of people did!), you should definitely pick up Genevieve Scott’s The Damages. And there is also this: The Damages is not derivative in the slightest and turns out to be its own specific literary creature, a book that held me rapt throughout, and also doesn’t suffer from the overstuffedness that weighed down Makkai’s book at times (though I ultimately felt that the overstuffedness of IHSQFY was deliberate, the point).
The Damages takes place at a fictional version of Queens University in the winter of 1998 during a devastating ice storm that cut off power, caused vast damage and left people stranded throughout the northeast of North America. The novel’s narrator is Ros, who’s trying hard to fit in during her first year at university and who is eager to distance herself from her earnest and wholesome roommate who is the antithesis of cool. But when her roommate goes missing during the chaos and upheaval from the storm, everybody around her declares Ros responsible for what happened, and this shatters the tentative place she’d made for herself in that community, leading her to drop out of school.
22 years later, set against the backdrop of the Covid-19 pandemic, Ros and her son are isolating in Ontario’s cottage country as she’s also processing allegations publicly made against her ex-partner, a renowned children’s author. She’s forced to finally reckon with notions of her own culpability, her responsibility, and the possibility that perhaps she’s been a victim too. As with the best books inspired by #MeToo, she doesn’t come to neat conclusions, but instead engages with the mess of it all, teasing out the multitudinous threads, asking questions instead of claiming to have all the answers. A terrific read.
August 2, 2023
Wait Softly Brother, by Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer
The pieces of Wait Softly Brother—a novel about a writer called Kathryn who retreats to her childhood home in Ontario’s Hastings County after fleeing her marriage, she and her aging parents in a relationship of mutual irritation as she pesters them for details of her brother, stillborn before her own birth, desiring some kind of fragment to make the fact of his existence feel tangible, but her mother hands her a letter from a long ago ancestor instead who fought in the Civil War, Kathryn making up HIS story instead as a way to interrogate maleness and brother, and missing pieces of a whole, all the whole torrential rain is falling for weeks and weeks, the family farmhouse an island cut off from the rest of the world—culminate in the richest and most satisfying kind of story, a deep literary mystery. On dwellings, and dwelling, and wells and welling. So so excellent.
July 27, 2023
The Mythmakers, by Keziah Weir
Okay, hear me out: Lily King’s Writers and Lovers meets Meg Wolitzer’s The Wife (which it directly references!), with a healthy and surprising sprinkling of astrophysics and consideration of the possibility of a multiverse. I LOVED this book, The Mythmakers, the fiction debut by Keziah Weir, a senior editor at Vanity Fair (who has British Columbia ties, so the book gets to be Canadian!). It’s about Sal, a struggling magazine writer whose life has just imploded and who is surprised, no, perhaps enchanted, to find herself within the pages of The Paris Review as a character in a story by an older author she’d met at a book launch years before. But then she reads the story’s introductory text to discover that the author, Martin Scott Keller, had recently died, and also that the story is an excerpt from his final novel, a long-awaited text. Well, naturally, Sal wants to read the rest of the story, and concocts a scheme wherein she connects with his widow under the guise of writing a magazine piece about the experience of discovering herself in fiction, but then the story becomes more tangled than that, too tangled for magazine piece, even long-form.
The Mythmakers is rich and absorbing, a fast gripping-thrill, but also deeply literary, about the nature of story and storytelling, and also the nature of the universe, and of marriage, and love, and the way myths—in particular that of the male genius—are propagated and upheld. It’s a story about art, and art-making, and science, and sexual politics, and gender, and it’s also slightly uncanny, it’s narrative voice hard to pin down, sometimes Sal, sometimes Martin, or Moira, his wife, but is it really?
Who’s telling the story? Who’s pulling the strings?
July 27, 2023
Wilderness Tips
“Camping in the wilderness is no reason to let culinary standards fall,” read a blog post I found last week while searching for an easy one pot recipe for pasta. “All it takes is some prepping before you go…” And I read this line aloud to my husband, who was packing the cooler, and we laughed and laughed and laughed.
Until the end of time, I will be indebted to the families we went camping with when camping was new to us, about ten years ago, for not murdering me in my sleeping bag as I too was quite sure that camping in the wilderness was no excuse to let culinary standards fall. The first time we went camping I brought a dutch oven and cooked a pork roast on the fire, and I remember our friend pointing out the one fact that had never occurred to me, which was that someone would have to be there to watch that pork roast for hours and hours and hours, and maybe there might be better things to do on a camping trip. The second time we went camping I prepared all these little foil packets with meat and vegetables that we roasted on the fire. The third time we went camping, we went alone (I know, so shocking) and I made little foil dishes of macaroni and cheese in advance which were cooked on the fire, and they were very good, but also the day before we left I’d spent hours and hours “prepping before we go” and arrived at our holiday exhausted, which is NOT GREAT when you’re about to spent the weekend sleeping on the ground.
Over the past decade, we’ve evolved naturally, little by little. It started with hot dogs, I think, instead of fire roasted pork, and ham sandwiches instead of campfire burritos. And I’ve realized how good simple food can taste, and how nice it is when things are easy, which is the whole point of a holiday anyway. Last weekend, our camping menu was was the least fancy yet—dinners were hot dogs (of course!), campfire nachoes, and pasta mixed with a jar of alfredo sauce. On our very last morning, we warmed up grocery store cinnamon buns on our fire, and it was one of the most delicious breakfasts I’ve ever had.
I’m still a little bit annoying though—old habits are hard to shake. Campfire muffins are one of my favourite things, not just because they’re delicious, but also because they necessitate lazy mornings around the campsite, which is one of my favourite things.
July 26, 2023
Girlfriend on Mars, by Deborah Willis
The premise sounds like a gimmick: Kevin is a failed screenwriter who now ekes out a vague living as a film extra while growing pot in his Vancouver basement apartment, the enterprise—until lately—overseen by his highly capable girlfriend, Amber, the two of them a couple since high school, after which they managed to escape the confinements of their hometown in Northern Ontario (as well as Amber’s dashed dreams of Olympic glory after an injury ends her gymnastics career, the freight of her evangelical upbringing, and Kevin’s overbearing troubled mother) for a new life on the west coast. But that new life never proceeded according to plan, and now Amber is gone, having won a spot on a reality show whose contestants are vying for a one-way-trip to Mars—and it turns out that Amber stands a mighty good chance of winning, of escaping Earth and all the doom inherent in its future. And escaping Kevin too, but he’s just not willing to give up on her yet.
Girlfriend on Mars—Deborah Willis’s first novel following her Giller-longlisted story collection The Dark and Other Love Stories—is really funny, a whip-smart satire, and also intensely moving, even in its more ridiculous moments, because these characters caught in an awfully silly situation have arrived on the page with perfectly tuned back stories providing real emotional heft to a story that otherwise might be so light as to be weightless. This was a story that had me turning its pages with no idea how and where it might possibly end, and a little warily too because I worried these characters existential dread could be a trigger for my own anxiety, but it all came together in a way that was sad, gorgeous and perfect. I heartily recommend!
July 6, 2023
ASKING FOR A FRIEND Book Trailer REVEALED!
I’m so excited to share my very first book trailer for Asking for a Friend, which Stuart and I had the most fun creating together back in the spring. I hope that it makes you extra excited to read the book and that you’re even moved enough to share it with your own networks! Two more months until everybody gets to meet Clara and Jess!
June 29, 2023
Tis the Damn Season
Blogging will be intermittent for the next two months as I get busy going outside and doing stuff. I am wishing you much of the same!
