October 19, 2023
Landbridge: life in fragments, by Y-Dang Troeung
“In the image of the land bridge, the ingenuity of refugee survival is laid bare alongside the scourge of permanent war. Backward from Cambodia to Laos, Vietnam and Korea, and forward to Afghanistan, Syria, and Yemen—how far can this bridge wind on?” —Y-Dang Troeung
This week was a sadly fitting week to read about war, about the terrible violence that human beings inflict on each other, what it means to survive it, what survival even looks like. And in the posthumous memoir by Y-Dang Troeung (a UBC Professor of English who died from pancreatic cancer in November 2022), survival looks like a life—a world—in pieces, in fragments, including letters to her young son, reflections on her experiences in Phnom Penh where she visits tourist attractions devoted to attempted genocide, contemplation of a tangle history of colonialism and Asian connections, news clippings from her own refugee family’s arrival in Canada in 1980 where they were personally greeted by Pierre Trudeau, this contrasted with images of his son—now Prime Minister—greeting refugees from Syria in 2015, and these are supposed to be happy endings, but the true experience runs much deeper and is more contemplated, and also war trauma never ends. Troeung shares photos from her family’s time in refugee camps, where she was born after her family’s survival of “Pol Pot Time,” the horrors branded on the psyches of her parents and her brothers, what it means to be just removed from that. She writes about growing up in Goderich, ON, and falling in love with the work of local writer Alice Munro, wondering if she’d ever see people like her and her family in any of Munro’s stories. “Now, over twenty years since I left Goderich, I have stopped waiting for stories like mine and my family’s to be written by the national artists. When, little by little, these stories do emerge, they come from refugees who write in poems and fragments. We, the children of refugees, let the stories we could never write drop through our fingers.”
October 18, 2023
Something Borrowed: The Epigraph Edition
The SOMETHING BORROWED series is back, in which I share items and ideas that I used to create my new novel, ASKING FOR A FRIEND. In this case, used with permission! My novel’s two epigraphs are from work by Erins Wunker and Noteboom (the latter also known as children’s author Erin Bow). From Wunker’s NOTES FROM A FEMINIST KILLJOY, a few lines about friendship as an uncanny mirror. The poetry by Noteboom (which I originally read in The New Quarterly and was published this year in the collection a knife so sharp its edges cannot be seen) lines about what gets lost to history and what survives, the chance of that, tying into ideas about long friendship and also my novel’s consideration of museums. I’m grateful to both these writers for providing such inspiration.
October 18, 2023
Clara at the Door With a Revolver, by Carolyn Whitzman
A sad reality of my life is that there are more books than time, which means that many review copies that arrive on my doorstep don’t end up getting read (and for many of these, I was never the target audience anyway). And usually my calculation for what to keep and what to pass along works out fine, but it sure didn’t in the case of Carolyn Whitzman’s Clara at the Door With a Revolver, which I may have even received two copies of, but I don’t read a ton of nonfiction anyway, and never got around to which I was terribly sorry about once I’d attended the Toronto Arts and Letters Club’s panel for the Toronto Book Awards and listened to Whitzman read from and present about her book, which was a side project to her academic work on housing policy. Because the presentation was fantastic and Whitzman made clear that this story of a Black woman in 1890s’ Toronto who dressed in men’s clothing and famously carried a gun who managed to be acquitted by an (all white male, obviously) jury for the murder of a wealthy young man has a lot to tell readers about both its time and our own.
All of which primed me to be altogether ready to be hand-sold a copy of this book by the amazing Mary Fairhurst Breen (whose memoir I read awhile back!) at the Spacing Store on Saturday, and am I ever glad I bought it. I had my Covid booster on Saturday afternoon and spent a grey and blustery Sunday resting it off and speeding through this fast-paced story that’s gripping and fascinating, but also so rich with historical detail about, say, what life was like for a Black woman in 1890s Toronto, how the city’s robust newspaper scene (there were seven dailies) helped to define the stories they told, or that boathouses were notorious scenes of carnal activity (who knew!). There is also a cameo by Arthur Conan-Doyle, and lots about housing, and my suspician that Whitzman’s work would turn out to be fresh, engaging, vivid and relevant turned out to be spot on.
October 17, 2023
Gleanings
- I learned the word, Weltschmerz this week, which in German literally translates as, “world pain.” It’s a feeling triggered by the inexplicable pains and evils of the world, when our ideals of how the world should be collide with the darkest of realities.
- Look At Me offers no such consolation, especially if you recognize anything of yourself in “Little Orphan Fanny.” Fanny is a tortoise to the end, but her only victory is having the last word.
- What a gift. This completely changed my internal rules of engagement — from expectation to empathy, from pointing the finger externally to checking in with my own self.
- The next day at work, they asked us to play Nimrod before our concert in honor of Viv. I understand the sentiment behind this, but I don’t think the people who made this decision fully thought it through?!? Like, have you ever tried to play a brass solo while you were ugly-crying?!? I prepped in the bathroom beforehand by making myself a giant scarf made of toilet paper, and you bet I needed it. I wonder what Viv would have thought of it all—I’m pretty sure she would have laughed, with a very subtle eye roll.
- Why bittersweet, I wonder, not sweetbitter? How did this compound noun come to be created in this order, putting painful first and pleasurable second?
- Does this inevitably lead to passing judgment and evaluation on people? Do I consider a seamstress less admirable or valuable than a poet? Yet, there are people who evoke admiration even though I have no desire to do what they do: Firefighters, doctors, nurses, teachers.
- Jack and steam – forever linked by their common attributes of invigoration, restoration, and danger.
- Memory is wild and memory association is wilder, still. I think I will always associate Stop Making Sense with Ric and 1984, but I was really glad I got to experience it again, almost forty years later, with Chuck. And I think Ric would appreciate that, too.
- The ping of an incoming email. A friend, who ends her note with, “You are brave and good.” I hope she is right. I hope that I am brave and that I am good. I’m grateful that she can see those characteristics in me, especially on the days when I cannot.
- Now here’s a store novel that is not twee or earnest; it’s funny and mostly realistic, with mentions of working conditions of regular women, and the perils that face single women in the 30s.
- As women gather more years we become disinterested in trying to live a perfect life as defined by popular theories and philosophies. Freed from those expectations and efforts, we’ve acquired a new freedom, a stronger self-confidence and greater contentment. Instead, our passions are directed at nurturing and enjoying our relationships and friendships, at hobbies and sports and at activities – travel, theatre arts, volunteerism. Our energies are focussed on living an intentional and thoughtful life.
- This morning it’s raining and I’m inside, quiet, wishing I had my mother here to talk with, to offer her the gift or curse of this story to in a way that was loving. So much was withheld from her in her life, particularly during her childhood; she was marked by it. She was a good mother, maybe better than I deserved, because I wasn’t always much of a daughter, or at least not the daughter she might have wished for. Nearly a hundred years ago she was wrapped in a blanket and handed off to a household in Halifax where she was considered a boarder. One name was dropped and forgotten, until now.
- The thing about the plot of an ordinary life is that it’s only revealed slowly and partially even to the one living it!
October 17, 2023
Synthesis
If you’ve been around here for a while, you know that my blog is most useful to me as a place to work through my thoughts, ideas, and confusements, a place to try to synthesize ideas that seem disparate, contrary, and that this process is a way to calm my busy brain.
Synthesizing is what I do, as a human being and as a storyteller, and not long into my experience in therapy (for anxiety) it became very clear to me that every book I’ve ever published exists as an attempt to complicate binaries, to inhabit grey areas, and to bridge divides. And by extension, that I feel a responsibility to bridge divides, to manage conflict, that I feel a tremendous amount of anxiety about any conflict or disagreement that I’m not charged with mediating, and that I take on the role anyway in my own mind and fry my brain cells in an attempt to get it all sorted out.
Social media is really hard for me because of all of this. First, because I have a hard time understanding that not every message is directed at me personally—synthesizing is what I do, and so I’m using all the data, plotting it, trying to understand it, making it all make sense. And second, because it doesn’t all make sense, it can’t, and no amount of understanding or management can form all that noise (most of it charged by other people’s emotions) into a cohesive narrative—which, of course, doesn’t stop my brain from being wide awake at 4am trying to make it so.
That I can’t control how other people think or feel or emote—I don’t think I’m unique in finding this impossibly difficult. For me, that lack of control feels like a real threat to my security, even if it isn’t in practicality. Learning to let other people think what they think and feel what they feel has been an important part of my progress in terms of mental health, to learn to understand another even if I disagree. Also to sit with pain and suffering and their realities, instead of trying to fix it, or deny it. because it makes me feel better. To accept that there is not just one narrative (and also maybe that someone has more chance at arriving at what I believe to be the truth if I give them the space to get there themselves, rather than insisting on their arrival). That just because someone has a different story than mine, it doesn’t mean they’re wrong, or even that I am. I have become disillusioned with a politics of self-righteousness (along with hierarchies of suffering), because I don’t think righteousness is politically self-defeating (and also/and-by-extension, righteousness itself becomes a a silo in which one loses touch about what one is right about in the first place).
I don’t know where I’m going with this. And maybe that is the point.
And course, I sort of do know where I’m going (if not where I’ll ultimately arrive), which is that in the last week and a half on social media, I’ve been witness to conflict like I’ve never seen before. (Which, OBVIOUSLY, is the least important fact of all of them regarding conflict in the last week and a half, but, see, they’re not covering my mental state at the New York Times, so I’m sorting it all out here, and I know my three loyal readers will understand.)
So much CERTAINTY has been really impossible for me to grapple with. Of course, the proverbial “It’s complicated” is an obfuscation, for sure (as well as, in almost every instance in which it’s employed—mostly an excuse to do nothing, an acceptance of the status-quo) but I think “It’s simple” can be just as much. Especially when presented by both sides who are using identical language—of pogroms, of genocide, of being on the right side of history—and insisting that their opponents are simply presenting lies and propaganda.
How does one begin to synthesize that?
Partly, I suppose, by understanding that both sides are using this language inspired by genuine fear, by terror. Terror that’s justified by historical precedent, borne through inter-generational trauma, and justified by anti-Semitic and anti-Muslim acts of hate and violence. As a person who lives with anxiety, I actually understand a tiny fraction of what this must feel like. I felt it this week as my community centre heightened security, as I received updates from my child’s school in response to threats real and imagined.
But it’s the dehumanization I’ve struggled with, the reaction of so many to take sides, to post flags, the impulse to debate about just how babies were murdered, or justify the deaths of thousands more children. As though there was no other choice, that this is just the way. As though any of this will make anybody safer in the end. When you’re fighting a monster, and your enemy puts you in a place where you’re justifying the death of somebody else’s children (as though there were any such thing as “somebody else’s children), you’ve become the monster you’re fighting and your enemy has won.
October 16, 2023
Cocktail, by Lisa Alward
I adored Lisa Alward’s Cocktail, a short story collection whose compelling sepia tones (both on the cover and within the text) manage not to undermine how fresh and vibrant each and every single story is. These are stories about houses and the secrets they hold, about fractured families and the limits of family life—the end of childhood, a marriage unravelled. In the title story, a woman looks back on her parents’ parties, and the strange guest who ended up in her bedroom. In “Old Growth,” a woman travels with her very-ex-husband to see the off-the-grid property he’s thinking of buying and contemplates the ways in which they’re forever connected. “Hawthorne Yellow” tells the story of a new mother whose paint stripping reveals haunting images beneath the layers (recalled in the book’s cover). “Orlando, 1974” begins, “My father says Stephen only threw up because of the Hawaiian pancakes and can still go to the Magic Kingdom (and Stephen’s stomach becomes this story’s Chekhov’s gun). The ex-husband from “Old Growth” is the protagonist of “Bear Country,” set a few years earlier, in which a father escapes his troubled son (and a difficult life) by flirting with a stranger. The mother of an adult son grapples with his connection to her ex-husband’s partner in “Hyacinth Girl.” In “Maeve,” a woman in a moms’ group probes the mysteries of another woman’s life. “Wise Men Say” is a love story of a different kind, as a woman reconnects with a partner she wasn’t kind to years ago and things don’t turn out the way she imagines. “Pomegranate” is a collectively narrated story of teenage girls and their hunger. “Bundle of Joy” was my very favourite story, one that’s agonizingly “cringe,” as the kids say, about Ruth, a mother who shares a difficult relationship with her adult daughter who has just given birth to a baby, and Ruth’s not quite good enough intentions gone oh-so-wrong as she struggles to connect. In “Little Girl Lost,” a woman encounters an artist and his daughter at two pivotal times in her life. And finally “How the Smoke Gets in Your Eyes,” a story that contains lifetimes about an elderly widow whose children don’t understand the decisions she made in her marriage, and all those things that seem like a small price to pay for love.
October 11, 2023
The Possibilities, by Yael Goldstein-Love
Considering that I am someone whose new novel contains the line, “The children we have make any other world impossible*,” a novel that’s world’s away from this one but also taps right into notions of postpartum and parental anxiety (ASKING FOR A FRIEND also contains the line, on its very first page, “Parenthood…was—if you were lucky—like friendship, a story without end. The alternative too awful to contemplate. But what this also meant, of course, was that it never stopped, there were no breaks from the possibility of something new and worse to worry about around every single corner.”) then you won’t be surprised to know that Yael Goldstein-Love’s THE POSSIBILITIES tapped into something real and fundamental in my own psyche, but it also hooked (and fascinated) me as a reader in a deep and most visceral way.
And if you’re also an anxious sort when it comes to parenting, then you will know what it means to “ride the possibilities,” what Goldstein-Love’s protagonist described as the “car swerve” feeling, where it seems like some disastrous outcome has just been averted by a hair’s breadth. (Another line from my novel—”And how do you measure that line between everything that could have happened and what actually did?**). An idea that becomes literalized in this fantastic (in all senses of the word) speculative/literary mashup in which new mom Hannah’s debilitating anxiety actually becomes a superpower as she has to voyage into the multiverse to search for her missing baby (who is missing because, for babies, the boundaries between worlds and possibilities are especially blurry and thin).
A Wrinkle In Time, by Madeline L’Engle, meets Rachel Cusk’s A Life’s Work? I adored this novel, which almost caused me to cancel Thanksgiving because all I wanted to do was sit down and read it straight to the end.
*This line was actually borrowed from my wise friend Rebecca Dolgoy
**The great thing about being a book blogger is that I get to quote extensively from my own book in reviews of other peoples’.
October 6, 2023
Watch My Author Visit to the Cobourg Public Library!
October 5, 2023
Wild Fires, by Sophie Jai
Sophie Jai’s debut novel Wild Fires (which is nominated for the 2023 Toronto Book Award, was shortlisted for the 2023 Kobo Emerging Author Award and Winner of 2023 Fred Kerner Award for Fiction) is a dizzying, mesmerizing puzzle of a novel, a container for a story about a container for a family, which is to say, a house. A three story house on an ordinary street in West Toronto that is home to the most of the Trinidad-Canadian Rampersad family, a house fled by narrator Cassandra years before to get away from the whispers, the secrets, the spectre of death—but of course, the last is inescapable, and Cassandra is called home after the death of her cousin whose entire life had been tragically touched by the deaths of his brother and his mother before him.
In the house on Florence Street, doors stay shut, mouths stay closed, secrets closely guarded, and Cassandra’s need to make sense of her family’s story—to have it to told to her, and to be able to understand it—is firmly resisted by her mother and her sisters, though these women find other outlets besides story for conveying their emotions, including rage and powerful, enormous grief. And so Cassandra has to find other more roundabout, indirect ways to get closer to what she wants to know, her family throwing up obstacles and diversions all the while, the house on Florence Street absolutely riddled with metaphorical trapdoors and landmines whose triggers are impossible to avoid.
Wild Fires is a wily text, a most compelling literary mystery, a novel whose heart seems elusive at first—with so much being, literally, unspeakable. But by having to a take a long and winding route into the house on Florence Street—there are no shortcuts here—the reader will find themselves so deeply invested and absorbed in this tale, and unable to forget it.
