November 13, 2024

What She Said, by Elizabeth Renzetti

I can’t find an archived copy anywhere, but I swear I listened to Gloria Steinem about ten years ago in conversation with a supposedly feminist male radio host who would very soon after be exposed as a sexual predator, and what she was telling him was that when she’d first learned about patriarchy and sexual inequality decades earlier, she’d decided that there was nothing more urgent than letting other people, the people with power, know about it. Because once they knew, she thought, surely they would want to change things, to make the world more fair for women and girls. But then eventually, she explains, she realized that it wasn’t that these people didn’t know, it was that they didn’t care, and that whole lives, careers, industries, cultural identities were actually tied up in patriarchal systems and structures which were so much more deeply entrenched than she’d ever understood, and ten years ago I thought I knew what Gloria Steinem was talking about, but I had actually had no idea. The feminist backlash roller coaster ever since then is the very worst ride I’ve ever been on.

It’s a mindfuck that my excellent friend Elizabeth Renzetti has been documenting throughout her journalism career, including with her first essay collection, SHREWED. And now her follow-up, WHAT SHE SAID, six years later, finds readers at a moment, post pussy-hat, that is somehow even worse, in which we keep being told not to believe the evidence before our very eyes—that Kamala Harris was “unqualified,” for instance. That abortion bans are about anything more than controlling women’s bodies. That our men and boys are hurting, and we need to be thinking about their feelings, instead of having a societal conversation about the reasons for domestic violence rates being sky high.

It makes no sense, but the gift of WHAT SHE SAID is that Renzetti connects the dots enough that it almost does, and the reader can breathe a sigh of relief: it’s not just you, and it’s not just me, it’s the patriarchy (and it’s all around the world). Renzetti writes about sexual harassment and the reasons women don’t report; about gender inequality in the caring professions, which mean our most vulnerable suffer; about the disparities in women’s health, and how the politics of oppression are inextricably linked to the politics of reproduction; about who tells the stories in Hollywood; about the fraught relationship so many women have with money (and their entitlement to earn it); about whether women have a sell-by date; why it’s so hard for women leaders to be elected in politics; about the incredible abuse hurled at women in journalism; about the links between domestic abuse and terrorism; and about how the world is not designed for us (and the bros who are charged with engineering the future don’t see any problem with this status quo. And then finally (SPOILER ALERT), in her epilogue, Renzetti comes out as a Swiftie: “She bestrides the world like a tall, multi-instrumental, cat loving colossus… She is Taylor Swift, and there’s no one like her.” (If you’re a Toronto Star subscriber, you can read this beautiful, empowering essay online right now. I actually cut out the two page spread from Saturday’s paper, and I’m going to save it forever…)

She is Elizabeth Renzetti, and there is no one like her either, as brilliant (I promise you) as she is funny (and she is so very funny—that this book of brutal things can be filled with lines that made me LOL is really something). Medium height, but a cat lover too, and when this world enough to make your head start spinning, her book will help you realize that you’re not crazy and messed up, it’s just that the world is, but we are not alone in it.

November 13, 2024

Gets off the train half-drunk and it’s raining again…

“Gets off the train half-drunk and it’s raining again on the platform. Strikes him suddenly that he has no umbrella: and when, where. On the tram he had it. Station toilet he thinks, yes, messing with the lemonade. For Jesus’ sake, he’s had that thing years. He actually liked it. Climbs into a taxi, cash in his pocket, out towards the old ring road please.” —Sally Rooney, Intermezzo

November 12, 2024

Heartbreak is the National Anthem, by Rob Sheffield

“The Eras Tour is a journey through her past, starring all the Taylors she’s ever been, which means all the Taylors you’ve ever been.” —Rob Sheffield

The first time I heard Taylor Swift, it was 2009 and I was driving a rental van to The Junction to pick up a secondhand (recalled) drop-side crib I’d bought off Craigslist for my six-week-old baby, and “Love Story” came on the radio, and I just loved it (that bridge! That key change! How it recalls Katie and Tommy on the old porch watching the chickens peck the ground!).

Although Swift would remain otherwise peripheral to my experience for a while longer, until my daughter (by then 6) arrived home one day from daycamp reporting a song called “Bad Blood” that she’d overheard kids singing, and wanted to hear more of, and there was no going back after that (which was fine, because who doesn’t need a little music in our minds saying “It’s gonna be alright”?).

We’ve been a crew of Swifties ever since, mishearing the lyrics to “Blank Space,” going back to turning “Red,” being unsure about “Reputation” but eventually won over, leaning into the cringe on “Lover,” being rescued from pandemic doldrums by the magic of “Folklore” and “Evermore,” wondering about the auto-tune on “Midnights” and belting out the killer tracks on “TPD.”

And while we did not win the ticket lottery for her Eras Tour in Toronto, I am leaning into the shimmer of #Tayronto this month in lieu of more dreadful things I could be paying attention to, and part of that project was anticipating Rob Sheffield’s HEARTBREAK IS THE NATIONAL ANTHEM, a fun and engaging journey through the weird, wonderful, over-dramatic and TRUE world of Swift’s music and her remarkable career.

“Champagne Problems” was playing in the donut shop when I took this photo. Taylor Swift is omnipresent, and neither she nor I would have it any other way.

November 12, 2024

Three Things

1. I purchased a shacket from Value Village two weeks ago (with the TAGS ON, even though they called it a “coatigan”) and it might be the very best garment I’ve ever worn, so perfectly cozy. I’m a few years behind on the trend, as usual, but every time I go outside it makes me happy, which is saying a lot for November.
2. On Saturday night I was in the foot care aisle at Shoppers Drug Mart when “Release Me,” by Wilson Philips, started playing on the store speaker, so I took a short video on my phone and sent it to my cousin, alongside whom I was a WP superfan in the early 1990s, and then the next day she sent me a video of “You’re In Love” in the painkillers aisle of her Shoppers Drug Mart 1000 kilometres across the country
3. I am midway through INTERMEZZO and enjoying it entirely.

November 11, 2024

Where to Start

“One implication of all this for politics, I think, is that while it’s important to argue for the world you’d like to see, through activism and advocacy, it’s perhaps even more important to live it. To “start from sanity”, as I’ve termed it, by taking the way you want life to feel – sane, generous, meaningfully productive, embracing of difference, and everything else – and treating it less as something to strive towards, and more as a place to start from.” —Oliver Burkeman

I have some idea of where to start, mainly with a different road that I went down the last time, and I really do wonder what it would have been like for 2016 and onward to unfold in the shape of something other than a Twitter thread. (I used to keep refreshing and refreshing, so sure that if I just kept sifting through the data, I’d finally find the key, the piece of the puzzle that made the world make sense.)

At that point in my life, I resolved to be loud and take up space—as a progressive, as a woman, a a feminist—and I don’t think that resolution was wrong per se, but the way I went about it was. My stance was defiance, the terms of engagement defined by the force I was opposing, and I see now how limiting that was, how unsustainable, and performative, and the inevitability that one day it would break me (and oh, did it ever…).

In my life, I’ve found that fighting monsters turns me into a monster.

I need to define my own terms, otherwise I am already not free.

I keep returning to Courtney Martin’s words (as I so often do), who shared words she spoke with her family on election night: “We are going to move through our lives being as different from him as we can—looking for those who feel scared or left out, welcoming them in, respecting people’s bodies and inherent worthiness, noticing the tenderness in ourselves and embracing it. We have to be as different from him as possible.”

I’ve been quiet on social media for the past week. In some ways, I really do have nothing insightful to add. I have learned through 2+ years in therapy that other people’s feelings are a real trigger for my own anxiety, and that I feel the need to manage these, to process these, and I feel like a lot of my writing online has often been just that, me trying to manage and control other people’s strong emotions, which is the most futile of endeavours.

I am not in charge of other people’s feelings. Other people’s feelings are not in charge of me.

In a few weeks, I am aiming to take a 2 month break from social media, to remove these platforms from my daily habits, mainly because I don’t need all the noise. I still can’t believe the attention I gave to so many ridiculous things back in 2017—since when do I need to know anything about the undersecretary in the cabinet of a head of state in a country in which I do not live? I was being fed perpetual fear and outrage, extremism and polarization.

I will never get back the time I spent reading that, “Time for some game theory…” thread in 2016, and I resent that.

And so instead, I’m going to live my values, instead of screaming them (which, it seems, only makes other people scream back louder).

It’s a place to start, a place from which to move forward one day at a time.

November 8, 2024

The Making of a Story Girl

L.M. Montgomery made me a story girl. Throughout so many of her novels, the characters showed me what being a writer entailed, the practical matters, beyond the mere precociousness of declaring oneself as such (though I did that too). It wasn’t simply that Anne and Emily were themselves writers to the marrow, bursting with romantic ideas and florid vocabularies, but that they were unabashed in pursuit of this vocation. In Emily of New Moon, Emily is devoted to practicing writing vivid descriptions in her “Jimmy-books,” which were blank notebooks provided by her supportive cousin. Anne and her friends begin a Story Club in Anne of Avonlea, writing and sharing their own creative works, a conscious act of “cultivating” their imaginations. And I was always fascinated with (and envious of!) the cousins in The Golden Road who manage to create their own household newspaper, full of tales, tips, and teasing, inside jokes and local gossip, and spent my childhood coming up with inferior imitations. Through these different narratives, Montgomery demonstrates not only that a writer is someone who writes, but also how this is done and how storytelling can connect us to each other and the wider community….

Thank you to Sarah Emsley for inviting me to be part of your Maud 150 celebrations.

Read the rest of my post over on Sarah’s blog.

November 7, 2024

Loved and Missed, by Susie Boyt

“If we had spoken then it would have been to apologise to each other endlessly and then to apologise for apologising…until there was a high tower of sorryness and of sorrow between us, in recognition that for some reason our lives were rather difficult compared to other people’s. Although, of course, we were well up to it because we were strong, because we were brave and intelligent, although if we were being completely honest, it was a bit much.”

I knew nothing about Susie Boyt or this novel going in, except LOVED AND MISSED had been recommended by a writer friend who said I’m enjoy it, and it was unusual for me to start reading a text this way, just me and the very first line, that first paragraph. But I was hooked, by this spare and pointed narrative voice, by Ruth, whose adult daughter Eleanor is an addict, and the novel profiles their engagement, the eggshells upon which Ruth has to walk in order to have access to her daughter, the bright face she puts on, not a single word that might ruffle or offend, and the reader has to go between the lines a bit to understand what the story is, because Ruth is careful, reticent. She gets on with things, as she does when she begins caring for Eleanor’s daughter Lily, the baby’s presence bringing warmth and purpose into Ruth’s world. She notes that her friends don’t look upon her with such pity now that she has her grandchild to care for, that there is some envy even, which doesn’t happen to Ruth very often, her personal life—single mum, troubled daughter—usually discussed by these friends in hushed tones.

Ruth is very aware of how she’s seen. She’s an experienced and capable high school teacher, and she notes the disconnect between of her professional success and her relationship with her own daughter, with Eleanor’s troubles. Although Lily is more of a tribute to her care, and the quiet narrative shows the joy and comfort Ruth takes in their domestic arrangements, in their closeness. The novel is slim, but follows Lily all the way into her teenage years, and nothing much actually happens, really, except the kind of daily care and gestures that happen all the time, that are what a life, a family, is made of. In Lily, Ruth finds a bit of redemption, her pattern with Eleanor not perpetuated…although the final chapters of the book show that the truth is more complicated, and older, deeper patterns are actually still at work. That there are secrets that Ruth carries close to her heart, and shame that goes unspoken.

This is a novel about love and care, their joys and disappointments, about friendship and motherhood, the people who carry us, the people who save us in ways they’ll never really understand. Strange and quiet and so so good.

November 7, 2024

Words that Are Getting Me Through

• They want you to feel powerless and to surrender and to let them trample everything and you are not going to let them. You are not giving up, and neither am I. The fact that we cannot save everything does not mean we cannot save anything and everything we can save is worth saving.
• And standing in my yard, soil under my fingers, unseasonably warm breeze on my skin, sun beaming warm light through the mulberry tree, I felt, suddenly, other emotions enter the chat: responsibility, tenderness, love, capability.
• It is true that people have lived through worse times, but they had to pass through something like this to get there. We have to look out for each other.
• This election was never going to save us, and so I have to believe that it was never going to doom us either.
• The US election didn’t go the way you hoped it would? Here’s what you control…and what you don’t.
• There are as many ways of helping and making change as there are people.
• It was an act of complete despair; a necessary one. It was December, and freezing cold, and we didn’t care. People stopped on the shore to stare at us, three women bobbing around like corks on the angry sea. My god, the impotent rage; the disbelief. We thought we might just be sunk. 
• I want it to be that I tried, cried, fought and rejoiced with my communities. And the only way to do that is to make sure I seek out joy as much as possible.

November 5, 2024

LIES I TOLD MY SISTER and WHO WILL BURY YOU?

Lies I Told My Sister, by Louise Ells

Louise Ells has become a friend since we “met” in 2019, after I read her story collection NOTES TOWARDS RECOVERY, and so it’s a real delight to be able to pick up her new book, the novel LIES I TOLD MY SISTER. The entire novel takes place over the night protagonist Lily spends with her younger sister Rose in a hospital emergency room after Rose’s husband is in a catastrophic car accident, the hours and the tension finally bringing to the surface years of secrets, resentments, and unspoken things.

The novel moves between the current moment in the ER in 2014 and incidents from the past—a traumatic loss from Lily’s childhood, a difficult marriage with painful struggles with pregnancy loss and infertility, Lily’s years living abroad when her husband was posted overseas, and the years the sisters lived much closer but were still worlds apart, each with secrets and pain in her life that the other would never know about. Until that night in the hospital, when the words are finally spoken.

It’s a tricky narrative set-up (how can one night contain an entire lifetime?) with so much of the novel told in flashbacks, but it works, mostly because Ells chooses to make the real journey Lily’s internal one as she finally faces her own reality, including the painful fact of her beloved second husband’s young-onset dementia. There’s a lot of love and forgiveness in this very moving story, and I enjoyed it all so much.

*

Who Will Bury You, by Chido Muchemwa

“Who will bury you?” demands Timo’s mother, the question woven throughout the story “This Will Break Your Mother’s Heart,” Timo “a late leaver, a decade behind all my friends who left straight after high school for the US, the UK, Australia, anywhere they’d have a better chance of thriving.” The story focusses on the distance between Zimbabwean Timo’s experiences in Toronto, the beginning of her first same-sex relationship, and Timo’s mother’s expectations of her daughter, conveyed mostly through stories of women at her church. “Don’t you think it’s time you started thinking about marriage, Timo? If you wait too long, who will bury you?”

Although Timo’s mother is also asking, “Who will bury ME?” With a child so far away, and the collection shows readers both sides of this exile, Zimbabweans far from home as their parents die or become lost to them in other ways. The collection begins with Timo and her mother, centred in Toronto, and then takes its reader back home to Zimbabwe, to other characters who are leaving their homes or preparing to leave, and characters who are left behind—in “Paradise,” Wiki maintains his family’s graves at the Paradise Cemetary.

In “The Snore Monitor,” Hamu finds work in a delicate job in Johannesburg. The next three stories are fascinating and involve the lore and history of the Kariba Dam, a major project from colonial Rhodesia. “Rugare” is the story of a boy whose big dreams don’t get him as far as he wants to go in Harare. And finally, “The Last of the Boys,” set in a Rhodesia beset by civil war and impossible choices as Zimbabweans waited on her verge of independence, as story especially resonant in such a moment of global strife and warfare. These are stories most specific, but universal at the very same time.

November 4, 2024

25 Hours

The day the clock falls back is my favourite day of the year—I’ve written about this over and over. How the extra hour is, of course, time to read in, which matters especially at a moment in which I seem incapable of reading less than five books at a time. It means that I woke up yesterday morning and proceeded to spend the next hour in bed, finishing THREE DIFFERENT BOOKS (and I’d just finished another the day before). And then after such a feat of completion, I started reading another book that was short enough and good enough—Susie Boyt’s LOVED AND MISSED—that I managed to read the whole thing in under 24 hours. And what a 24 hours it’s been. My family’s schedules obviously out of sync with the time change, which meant that dinner and all evening duties were concluded before 9pm, which is unheard of in my household. Everybody else was tired and went to sleep, but I just returned to reading, and the luxury of this time and this focus was such a pleasure to behold. (Again, it helped that I was reading a book that was so very excellent.)

One of the many book piled on my bedside table right now is Meditations for Mortals, by Oliver Burkeman, who writes in one reading about the reality of information overload. “How do you choose what to read?” somebody asked me recently in a DM, in the context of all the seemingly infinite books out there in the world, and the point of Burkeman’s book is the finite nature of human experience. And Burkeman offers the image of a river, how as readers what we do is dip into the current and pick out what we can, what we want to. No one is ever going to read all the things—there are not enough extra hours in the year, even though I’m doing my best to make a dent, for sure!—and nobody should feel bad for their failure to, and this was such a relaxing way to think about the stacks of books on various surfaces around my house that are constantly, dangerously, threatening to topple over.