April 24, 2023

There Was a Good Man Named Paul Revere

On Friday evening, a raccoon got into my kitchen. (Not for the first time; also this was not the only raccoon intruder in the neighbourhood this weekend!). And whenever I told anyone about it, they’d ask how the raccoon got in, and I would reply, “It came in the door…” And then I’d have to resist the impulse to finish off the sentence with, “I said it before/ I think I’m over you, but I’m really not sure.” Which is a problem much more rare than Toronto raccoons are, which is that I am absolutely obsessed with the song “Summer Girls,” by LFO.

And the weird thing about this is that everyone else isn’t. I don’t get it. A few years ago, back when Twitter was not a terrible place, I shared my shocking discovery that two out of the three members of LFO (aka, “The Lyte Funky Ones,” whose “Summer Girls” was pretty much a one-hit-wonder in 1999, though they tried hard to follow it up) had died of cancer. Because what kind of a statistic is that? Cancer, robbing the world of 66% of the ones who were lyte and funky, and now there is just one. The Lyte Funky ONE, and I partook in such banter with exactly TWO people, and it seemed like nobody else on Twitter cared about LFO, or even remembered the song at all.

But the lyrics to that song are wired to my brain in a way that I just can’t kick, and I don’t even want to. Which is kind of ridiculous, because the lyrics are so random and weird, but unbelievably catchy, and I just can’t help walking around the house muttering lines like, “Call you up, but what’s the use?/ I like Kevin Bacon, but I hate Footloose.”

Part of the problem is that I have two amazing daughters, and so it comes up a lot, a line like, “You’re the best girl that I ever did see.” Multiple times a day, I’m not even kidding, to which my children reply, without missing a beat, “The great Larry Bird, Jersey 33!” And HOW can I not follow that up with, “When you take a sip, you buzz like a hornet, Billy Shakespeare wrote a whole lot of sonnets”? Not a single one of which I can recite, by the way, and yet I know all the words to this bizarre and remarkably song in which “hornet” and “sonnet” rhyme!

When I do online yoga classes, I’m sometimes instructed to “shake and wiggle,” which puts “Summer Girls” back in my head yet again...as if it even needed planting: “In the summertime, girls got it goin’ on/ Shake and wiggle to a hip hop song.”

And I don’t know a better expression of love than telling somebody, “There was a good man named Paul Revere/ I feel much better, baby, when you’re near.”

Stayed all summer, then went back home
Macaulay Culkin wasn’t home alone
Fell deep in love, but now we ain’t speakin’
Michael J. Fox was Alex P. Keaton

I honestly don’t understand why any other song has to exist!

I am not the only person who has thought quite extensively about this song, and Rob Harvilla “How ‘Summer Girls’ Explains a Bunch of Hits—and the Music of 1999” was such a joy to encounter, explaining a lot about just how this song has been running through my brain for almost 25 years. (The summer of 1999 was one of the most vivid and insane periods of my life, and I remember every song that was ever on the radio, which was this one, and “I Want it That Way,” by the Backstreet Boys, and “Living’ La Vida Loca,” and “If You Had My Love,” my Jennifer Lopez, and and and, and Harvilla does a formidable job summing up the absolutely bananas musical year that ’99 was.)

I had never heard of Abercrombie and Fitch until that song, whose video had a similar vibe to “Steal My Sunshine,” by Len, and we all watched videos then, and I put my hair in cute pigtails and wore tank tops and aspired to be admired by boys with frosted tips.

“One of the subtler pleasures of “Summer Girls” is that it exactly replicates the experience of trying to talk to a young human male, driven mad by lust but still driven to constant distraction. He’s listening to you, baby, honest. He’s doing the best he can.”

One day I’m going to be old and senile, and just repeating these lyrics on a loop.

Boogaloo Shrimp and pogo sticks
My mind takes me back there oh so quick..

April 19, 2023

The Story of My Garden

There were a few seasons during which I might have told you that I had a greenish thumb, more than fifteen years ago now, back when I was a newlywed and my husband and I lived in a second floor apartment near College and Ossington. I’d never had a garden before, but, with the help of our downstairs neighbour, we planted one in the backyard where tomatoes already grew, their vines winding around the cinderblocks and other construction debris that littered our yard.

The tomatoes should have been a sign, but I didn’t know enough to know that…

(Read the rest of my piece in the Harbord Village Gardeners e-newsletter!)

April 18, 2023

Gleanings

• And then, “I ask myself constantly….why do you return again and agin to Woolf? It is because the text made me!” And isn’t that a moment of joy for us all, to be in the presence of such a wonderful engagement with a text.
• The objective of the exercise is not to look for life balance, but to look for movement towards the things you love, those things that uniquely define and delight you, then tilt madly towards them.
• Oh, right. Duh. Public schools are basically the most complex kind of community there could possibly be–a crew of people from different racial, religious, and class backgrounds, who didn’t choose one another, coming together with pathetically limited resources to try to care for one of our most precious, insanity-inducing assets: our kids. Some eggs are going to get broken with that collective recipe.
• There are some things I just can’t enumerate, like the peanut butter and honey sandwiches, cheese sticks, and protein balls we ate on the road. Or the long stretches of beautiful or non-descript highways we traversed. The patches of wildflowers on the roadsides. The few scary traffic situations we endured, and frightening bridges we drove over. The laughs and the catching up about family and friends from way back. The discussions about childhood in which my sister and I just don’t remember things the same. The times I just wished we were there already.
• And I wondered to myself, when did my need for validation transition into a desire for affirmation? It was an aha moment; I felt like I had discovered something new.
• It’s probably ridiculous, how much I love an HB/2. It’s simple. And it’s forgiving. I can be most creative, and try and be wrong countless times- until something comes out right, when I’ve got this guy in my hand
• Okay, so there’s the obvious impracticality of spilling mouth wash all over your vintage Guatemalan textile, but really, who doesn’t love to floss over a bustle of fancy fabric?
• In summer we will swim in the bay that is hung with mist. Small boys love the shore for the starfish, the crabs under rocks, the anemones pulsing in the tidepools. Looking up from the water, I’ll remember the lilies in their damp moss, the decades of seeing them, how the sea rises and falls, rises, falls, generations of ravens in the trees, and the oyster shells on the side of the path.
• If you are a bird person, it’s hard to have a favourite bird, but if I was pressed, I would have to say that Dark-Eyed Juncos are among my favourites. See what I did there though? I didn’t commit to having a favourite, but I acknowledged that Juncos are one of my favourites. See? Hard.
• Despite the algorithm that can apparently now predict language — I couldn’t predict the way that my heart would leap when I heard a friend call his teen son sweetheart on the phone yesterday, or expect a machine to know the feel of her heart thumping against my palm while cuddling on the couch, Blake’s howling laughter in the background.

April 17, 2023

Birnam Wood, by Eleanor Catton

True confession time: I’ve never read Eleanor Catton’s Man Booker Prize-winning novel The Luminaries, and I likely never will. Reportedly, it’s very lengthy, set a long time ago, and all about a man staking his claim in a gold rush (yawn), and no doubt it’s extraordinary and brilliant, but each of these makes for three counts on my NOPE NOPE NOPE list, and there are so many other books in the world.

My interest in Catton’s latest Birnam Wood, however, was piqued by critic Lauren Leblanc’s enthusiasm for the project, which was also the reason I went to see Catton at the Toronto Public Library’s Bluma Salon event in early March, which was really fantastic, and I bought the book there. She kept talking about plot, and about how “character is action; we are what we do,” and I was intrigued, though I’ve got to say that even though this novel clocks in at only just over 400 pages, I picked it up thinking of a doorstop, and what have I gotten myself into? There was not a lot of white space. Will I be reading this novel for the next 900 years?

But reader, I sped through it in two days. This book! This book! Speaking of plot… Though it didn’t take off immediately. I was interested in the story and surprised to find that it was so much more intimate and immediate than I was expecting, deeply embedded in the experiences of characters ranging from the leader of the gardening collective, her loyal sidekick, a renegade citizen journalist, a pest-control mogul who has recently received a knighthood, his wife, and a reclusive American billionaire seeking refuge in middle of nowhere New Zealand for reasons that aren’t bound to be honourable. I thought this would be a more sprawling book, individual people at a distance, more a book in general than this one, which is so exactly, specific. Even though the paragraph-long sentences were hard to parse at first, so many clauses, and semi-colons. Like making one’s way through the weeds and the bramble, and then suddenly there I was at the heart of things and the novel was unputdownable.

“She was still looking for a villain. She was still trying, desperately—and uselessly—to find somebody more monstrous and despicable than her.”

Who is the villain of this story? Who is the hero? Such murky distinctions (if any are to be made) are what make Birnam Wood such a fascinating puzzle of a story. I loved it.

April 14, 2023

It’s All Happening

It’s all happening! Not just spring even (though spring is happening too—there is forsythia in bloom in my front garden!) but everything else, the weekends filling up like in old times. And I’m running two community events in the next three weeks, as well as supporting another one in June, and while I may have reached the “crying because I’m frustrated and no one will help me” and having periodical hissy fits stage in the organization process, in general I am doing okay, which is a big deal, because when I was having a really hard time with my mental health last year, I wasn’t sure I’d be able to take on these sorts of responsibilities again. I have a much harder time with stress these days, sometimes my anxiety turns on out of nowhere, and a year ago I was still was suffering so much, but since then I’ve rebuilt so much of my mental strength, and it feels really good. I’m proud of just how far I’ve come.

And something else good that happened to me last week was sitting down to write a little piece for our neighbourhood’s community gardeners e-newsletter. I’m at a moment in-between with my new novel nearly ready to go to print, and another novel that’s still in progress but I’m not stressing out too much about getting that next draft done, and I’ve taken a break from doing manuscript evaluations (though I’m returning to that delightful work next month!), which means that I’m temporarily between deadlines, as they say, and finally had a moment to devote to writing something for the Harbord Village Gardeners, which I’d been meaning to do for months now.

And it felt so great! To write and write and to get to the end, so richly satisfying. I’ve been writing my novel since 2015 and while getting it out there finally will be incredible, it’s still a long and complicated road to take, but this was different, and it had been so long since I sat down to write something like an essay (or a story). A creation I can (metaphorically) hold in my hand, and I was so pleased with myself, and pleased with the result. Looking forward to sharing it soon.

April 13, 2023

Diagnosing Minor Illness in Children, by Kerry Ryan

There is a line from Kerry Ryan’s first poetry collection THE SLEEPING LIFE that I’ve been thinking about for almost a decade and a half since I first read it, the line about the click of her partner’s glasses on the bedside table at the end of the day: “I wait for it all day.” And what remains just as true about Ryan’s vision all these years later as I picked up her latest DIAGNOSING MINOR ILLNESS IN CHILDREN (and read it in a single sitting) is the way she manages to capture those moments of every day existence so fleeting that most of us fail to notice until we see them articulated in a line of her poem, and declare, “Yes, THIS. The miracle of existence in a nutshell!”

Or, as I wrote in my blurb for the book: “Once again, Kerry Ryan’s singular vision and attention to perfect details works to render the ordinary absolutely extraordinary, the world shown anew through these poems about bodies, birth and motherhood, and the wildness of all of it.

Meeting Kerry Ryan at my husband’s colleague’s wedding fifteen years ago (he was marrying her sister!) was such a fortunate event for me, which I was not wholly expected when I was introduced to “another Kerry who likes books.” What are the odds that that other Kerry’s debut poetry collection would be so dazzling, speak so clearly to my soul? That she would end up contributing one of my favourite essays to the anthology The M Word: Conversations About Motherhood, “Confessions of a Dilly-Dallying Shilly-Shallier.” That she would introduce me to the wonderful Ariel Gordon! We’d also hang out in her home of Winnipeg in 2014 where lines from her second collection Vs. (about being a bookish non-sporty girl who takes up boxing) were displayed outside her gym.

So I’ve been waiting a long time for a new book by Kerry Ryan, and I’m thrilled that DIAGNOSING MINOR ILLNESS IN CHILDREN (with gorgeous cover art by Julie Morstad, who is my favourite!) is entirely worth the wait, Ryan turning her eye to parenthood and its excruciating wonderment, to losing a parent, to love and marriage in middle age, noticing everything, those perfect details. This is truly a book to savour.

April 12, 2023

The Burgess Boys

Running away on my own personal reading projects is perhaps my favourite fascination, the time I spent rereading Madeleine L’Engle’s Austin series in 2019 a case in point. (I talk about it all the time, like some people’s version of where they were when JFK was shot. Where were you when I was reading A Ring of Endless Light? Omg, remember when I was reading A Severed Wasp in New York City? Somebody ought to put up a monument!) And the best thing about these sprees, like most things I do, is that they’re never planned, they just have to happen, and when they do the moment is so absolutely perfect, serendipitous, infusing my life with light and meaning, spiritual, an epiphany. I am not being facetious or hyperbolic in the slightest.

And lately, it’s been the Lucy Barton books, which I’ve been rereading these last few months and wrote about here. These books not blowing my mind quite like the L’Engles did (“every single one of them words rang true and glowed burning coal/ pouring off of every page like it was was written in my soul…”) but rearranging my thinking in a more subtle way, a quieter way. How I’d dismissed them at first, and then going back to see what I’d been (dis)missing, and how exploring Elizabeth Strout’s books is a bit like being handed a key to a literary universe where the reader is omniscient, making connections the characters themselves don’t understand—though it seems like the inverse when one encounters the Lucy Barton books, it’s true, where the connections are elusive, and it’s hard to understand just how she (both Lucy and her author) got from there to here.

But I think that Strout’s 2013 novel The Burgess Boys might just be the bridge.

I first encountered Bob Burgess as a secondary character in Lucy By the Sea, and had the same response to him that Lucy did, which was that I loved Bob Burgess. And so, when I realized that Bob Burgess had his own book (albeit one shared eponymously with his asshole brother Jim) I placed a library hold immediately. (The best thing about becoming obsessed with the Elizabeth Strout books in 2023 is that most of the library holds come in pretty quickly…)

And so Bob Burgess came away with me last weekend, and the coals were glowing again. Oh my gosh, I loved this novel.

The most remarkable thing I can say about it is that I knew its big twist, that Bob had revealed his story to Lucy during their time in Maine, and still the story was not spoiled in the slightest. The other thing I particularly loved was that I got to see Bob (Oh, Bobby!) meeting his second wife for the very first time, and neither of them had any idea!

The Burgess Boys is the first conventionally-structured Strout novel I’ve ever read (the Lucy Barton books are a study in interiority, while her Olive Kitteridge books are the same but with…exteriority [is that a thing?]). And The Burgess Boys really is the bridge between the two, all the scenes of the Lucy Barton books just planted in its soil. Parts of the novel are narrated by Bob’s ex-wife Pam (whom we’ve also met in the Lucy Barton books) and her feelings about her first husband are a quiet preview of what Lucy will feel for William. (There is also, indeed, a line from her perspective: “Oh, Bobby!”

And the scenes in which Bob is looking out the window in his New York City apartment, wondering at all those different lives going on, lighted windows offering just the smallest glimpses of other people’s private worlds—a preoccupation of the Olive and the Lucy books alike. The mystery of other people’s experiences and understandings.

The Burgess Boys is also deeply concerned with the fabric of American society, as the Lucy Barton books are against the backdrop of the 45th President, Covid lockdowns, and the George Floyd/Black Lives Matter protests in 2020. But so unbelievably presciently considering how much I hadn’t seen coming in 2013. The novel is set around 2007, the shadow of the Iraq War and torture in prison camps still very present, and a major part of the plot involves an act of violence on the property of a mosque in small town Maine, where the Burgess boys hail from, where the locals in this dying town are decrying the arrival of Somali immigrants whose culture seems to represent a threat to their way of life. As with the Lucy Barton books, as with, well, everything, the challenge: how do we learn to live with difference? How do we learn to live with each other? Strout refusing to look away from class, either, and how poverty can come to define one’s experience. The ways in which all of our experiences make us either harder or softer. How it’s never not complicated.

April 11, 2023

Gleanings

• I think about the moment I found out I was pregnant and how I counted the years until my pregnancy would turn eighteen which felt like a hundred years from then and now it’s here. That people talk about empty nesting but not about this weird transitional in-between existential crisis of WAIT IT’S OVER. HOLD ON… WAIT, WHAT!? Like… for example, no one really talks about the funeral procession that is college tours.
• I cannot tell you what a gift that little message has been to me. A touchstone of sorts. A simple gesture that serves to remind that someone crazy enough to ride his bicycle from San Diego to St. Augustine, loves me. Now, how cool is that? Pretty dang cool!
• Now there’s a word – unfiltered – that seems like it could be a good thing. It conjures up being unshackled or uncensored, freedoms we value in some contexts. However, our echo chambers of social media and curated streaming services lull us into a false sense of security that everyone is going to unfilter their messages the same we we would. At least I did. But, as I recently discovered, being unfiltered isn’t always desirable. 
• Writing is my way of exploring and making sense of what I’m feeling in my heart.  Once it’s all committed to words, I do a little editing and then post about one in ten to my blog.  It is a privilege, being able to freely publish, but it is an absolute honour receiving all the feedback, the sweet (and snarly) comments and especially all the words of support and encouragement.
• I describe it like this to clients: You’re not just crossing unknown terrain, you’re creating the land as you go. And the first time across, the goal is to get to the end. Along the way you might drop flags in the ground, markers of places where you need to return and fine tune. Maybe add an oasis in this desert; get specific about the flora and fauna in this forest.
• And here I am, Sunday morning, ready to pull the covers over my head again. This time, not from a feeling of despair but rather a sense of deep contentment.
• I am the slowest moving tortoise, let’s call me a giant galápagos, but even the giant galápagos moves a couple of kilometers each day.
• Good writing has a lot to do with specific detail — it’s not just any blue cup that broke, it’s the blue pottery cup with the crooked handle that he found at the thrift shop and presented to her, down on one knee, when she was hoping for an engagement ring.
• When will I learn/ to trust what I see, what I feel/ what I know?
• My point is that the behavior is exactly the same! Assuming I am speaking to a fellow Old here: you did things for “likes” too! You brought the “right” book or stack of comics to be seen reading at lunch. You wore sunglasses when you didn’t need to, fished the band t-shirt out of the laundry, and went specifically to the graveyard with your sketchbook to smoke cigarettes.

April 6, 2023

AFAF Mood Board: Part One

Yesterday marks five months before the release of my new novel, and to celebrate, I’m sharing a mood board for opening chapter, set from 1998-2000. So excited to share this book with you!

April 4, 2023

On Choosing Harriet

As I’ve talked about many times—it was a formative experience that would inspire both my first novel and the name of my firstborn child—I didn’t read HARRIET THE SPY until I was 27, which I’ve always known was a blessing. Although I’d been a fan of Louise Fitzhugh’s slightly less bizarre (but only slightly) sequel THE LONG SECRET, which I read regularly throughout my childhood, tracing my fingers along the lines on the map that opened its pages. It’s a weird book, but not as weird as the Fitzhugh O.G., whose charms would have washed right over me as a young reader too firmly wedded to conventionality.

It wasn’t until that I was almost 30 that I was ready to receive its message about telling the truth, and being unlikable, and being brave, and true to oneself. When I was 27 and finally coming of age in a way that was real to my bones, HARRIET THE SPY read like a revelation.

At almost 30, I wanted to be like Harriet—that courage, that gumption, no fucks to give. And I wanted the same for my child, my daughter, who was born two years later, whom I named Harriet, imagining—the same mistake I’ve made in parenthood over and over—that she could be fully hatched as such, that I might have learned all my lessons so that she wouldn’t have to.

Last night I finished reading Harriet the Spy again, aloud to my family, the second or third time I’ve read the novel with my children, but the first time since they were old enough to critique it—they’re weeks away from turning 10 and 14. And this is the closest I’ll ever come to reading it as a child myself, because I was reading it through their impressions of the novel, and—just as I would have done if I were 10 and 14—they found the whole thing unfathomably weird.

And I did too, which I don’t remember so much from when I was 27. The unevenness of its structure. The writing is kind of sloppy in places. Why does Pinky Whitehead have the same last name as the head teacher? Someone “gasps audibly,” which, as any editor will tell you, is the only way to gasp, right? Harriet M. Welsch, I can see now in a way I didn’t have the vocabulary for 15 years ago, clearly (and wonderfully!) exists on the autism spectrum. And oh my goodness, she struggles so much, which I see now as I read like as a mother. She’s not badass, she’s tortured. She’s hurt and confused and railing against a mold into which she doesn’t fit. At age 27, I admired her obstinacy, but now I read her and think, “Oh, man! That must be so hard!”

And what a complicated legacy that is to hand to your child—how I see that now. When our children are hypothetical, of course, we dream that they will be strong, and defiant, demand tomato sandwiches. Who’d want a child who was like everybody else, prissy and obnoxious like Marion Hawthorne or Rachel Hennessy? Fitting in to the point where one’s character gets lost, and they’re just part of the crowd. Who’d want a kid who never gets in trouble, or ruffles feathers, or who gets along with everyone? Who wouldn’t want a daughter like Harriet?

But now, nearly fourteen years into parenthood, I see that these questions—in practice—have answers far more complicated than I thought they were when I first asked them. I see how we imagine our children will be brave and bold—and they have to be!—but how difficult it is to be so. How we imagine our children will be strong individuals, and raise them not to follow the crowd, to be like everybody else, but how painful it feels when they don’t fit in. How we (okay, maybe I’m talking about ME) bring all our own painful childhood struggles and experiences to the table, projecting them onto whatever our kids are going through, so that we’re all just mired in emotions and projections (and sometimes it’s difficult to tell where they end and we begin). How we might name our child Harriet and then reread the book and realize that this is an awful lot to carry in a way we really didn’t get at the time.

My particular Harriet, at the moment, is in a pretty good place—though I’ve knocked wood just now, because I’m afraid that I’ll jinx it. (In parenthood, nothing ever stays the same for a moment, which is a blessing when things are hard, but can be a curse when things are otherwise.) But oh, there have been tough times as she’s been finding her way and growing into herself, and there were times I wished for the ease of a Rachel or Marion, for her to be a kid who knew the script and could recite it flawlessly.

I had no idea what I was signing up for all those years ago when I chose her name out of a book.

But I suppose that’s the case no matter what your child’s name is.