September 20, 2023

The Long Game

In late 2009, a pregnant friend of mine purchased a baby carrier that was a different brand and model than the one I’d recommended—I’d had a baby for five months at the time, and knew everything—and I was devastated. And not just because my hard-won advice had been passed over either, but because I knew that my friend and her child would suffer the consequences of this choice, and the stakes were just so high. Which is ridiculous, but also it wasn’t, because becoming a mother had blown my universe to tiny pieces and there were these certainties I had to cling to in the chaos, or else I’d have nothing to hold onto and be wholly lost in space.

I thought of this last week as I watched the inevitable online furor in response to a cover story in New York Magazine with the headline “Why Can’t Our Friendship Survive Your Baby?” I actually wasn’t very interested in the article, because I’ve been so bored for so long by how women with children and women without them are pitted against each that I edited an entire anthology about it (The M Word: Conversations About Motherhood, published by Goose Lane Editions in 2014), but the friendship angle was interesting to me because I’d just the week before published my fourth book, Asking for a Friend, which is all about how experiences of motherhood (and pregnancy, and abortion, and miscarriage, and infertility) can make friendships so fraught.

And not least because new mothers can be more than a little nuts (and I’m speaking for myself here—but I know I’m not the only one). It all can seem so personal. Case in point, my upset about the baby carrier (Team Baby Trekker for the win!), but also any debate over breast versus bottle, sleep training or attachment parenting, cry it out or (you, personally) crying it out. The best thing about my kids being older now is that we’re beyond most of all that (and guess what?! Almost none of matters!), though there are new tensions—what age do we let our kids have phones, for example. Or that I am relatively comfortable with my low-stress approach to my children’s education, but sometimes when I see the cars lined for pickup at the intensive after-school math program in my neighbourhood, I wonder how we’ll ever know for sure if we’re doing it right.

One of the epigraphs to Asking for a Friend comes from Erin Wunker’s Notes from a Feminist Killjoy, a line that, when I read it, articulated something I’ve been struggling with for always. “Is it to hard to write your own narrative and witness another’s, simultaneously? …Is that why some friendships between women crash into each other, noses pressed against glass, waving with wild recognition at the person on the other side, and then recede with the same force? Too much, too close, too similar, too uncanny?” (The other epigraph comes from a poem from Erin Noteboom’s new collection A knife so sharp its edges can’t be seen, that poem beginning with “What things are lost? / Many. Most. And those that make it,/ spared by chance…”)

I think that what I’m trying to say is that it’s amazing that any friendship survives at all, and that there are sometimes gulfs among friends who have children that are just as insurmountable as those between people with kids and those without them.

Ann Friedman phrased this so beautifully in her newsletter last week where she wrote:

“The kids question” is not a binary choice, but a complex and personal orientation that is also fluid—likely to shift over the course of a lifetime.

The term also helps me understand why phases of life when many of us are in the throes of working out our reproductive identities (um, our entire 30s?) can feel so stressful between friends. It’s rare for any two reproductive identities to be identical, even when the surface-level choice appears the same. Calling it an “identity” really captures how deep the feelings go, and how tectonic the shifts feel. How hard we have to work to understand and be understood.

“How hard we have to work to understand and be understood.” That’s the crux of it, right? That female friendship isn’t easy, regardless of whatever a particular friend happens to be going through, though there are some women who find it easier just to opt out altogether (“It would have been so easy to count the ways I’d been betrayed by girls… It was not that way with men,” was the line in How Should a Person Be? where Sheila Heti lost me altogether). But behind that hard work, all the doing, the fraughtness and the tension, there lies the richness, in being seen and known and understood, especially by people who themselves have made different choices and live in different circumstances.

From Ann Friedman again:

Or maybe I’ve always known…that friendship is a long game. That sometimes one friend is going to require more generosity and understanding than the other. That you can’t grade a lifelong friendship based on one year’s performance. That it is deeply rewarding to have friends who lead very different lives than you do.

One of the infinite number of wonderful things about being in my forties now is finally beginning to see how the long game is going to play out, realizing just how much staying the course is actually worth it, and how much all those early tensions—as we were becoming ourselves—would really cease to matter at all. And yes, being seen and known can be as agonizing as it is rewarding, but the true reward—of course—lies in the company we get to keep.

September 19, 2023

Gin, Turpentine, Pennyroyal, Rue, by Christine Higdon

Christine Higdon has followed up her award-winning debut with the most extraordinary new novel, Gin, Turpentine, Pennyroyal, Rue, a book that somehow manages to be everything all at once: action-packed, artful, playful, timely, timeless, weighty, light, compelling historical fiction that maps so beautifully onto right now. Set in Vancouver in the 1920s, it’s the story of the four working-class McKenzie sisters and their supposedly divergent paths over the course of a year—infertility, pregnancy, an illegal and nearly fatal abortion, and a lesbian relationship–and how these paths are not divergent at all, but instead irrevocably connected to bodily autonomy, choice, and women’s liberation. The 1920s’ backdrop is fun and compelling, but the glitter stark against the darkness of what came before—the sisters watched loved ones return from WW1 with minds and bodies broken, or else not return at all; their brother dies in the flu pandemic; their mother is depressive and addicted to opium. The novel moves between their points of view, including the secrets they keep from each other, with a sweep that’s at once both intimate and cinematic, the narrative held together by an omniscient beagle (of course). A truly brilliant literary (and feminist) achievement, and just a wonderful read, I loved this book so much!

September 18, 2023

Hamilton!

NEXT WEEK! Purchase tickets now!

Join us for a captivating evening with acclaimed Canadian authors Marina Endicott and Kerry Clare, hosted by CFUW Hamilton in collaboration with Epic Books and Penguin Random House Canada.

Doors open at 6:30 with live music. At 7:00 Jill Downie will lead a lively discussion about the new books, The Observer by Marina Endicott and Asking for a Friend by Kerry Clare.

This will be followed by an author meet-and-greet where you will have a chance to buy signed copies of the books.

You will be supporting education through scholarships to students attending McMaster University and Mohawk College. All proceeds go to CFUW Scholarship Fund.

September 14, 2023

September

We pay the price of summer’s end, but look at this beautiful golden light (back-lighting a cosmos. which is an object that exists to be shone on and through). The sun came into my kitchen today for the first time in months, golden light across the floor and then the table. A gift.

September 12, 2023

Gleanings

• Eyes to see what’s right in front of me. Eyes that don’t turn away. Eyes that are connected to the heart, not the stories of the mind. Eyes that see the sacred, the holy, the reverent in all of it. Eyes that dance with wonder and curiosity. Eyes that meet what’s here, now. Eyes adjusted to the bigger story, the mystery.
• I often wonder at the origins of a person’s bookish habits, The What and How of what we keep and Why. And, our love of books to begin with, is it a nurture or nature thing, the fact of growing up with many books or almost none, of being read to daily or never being read to, that makes a difference or is there some other mystery involved?
• It’s actually amazing, how people are surviving, shining, in amidst all the trauma. And yah, sometimes we’re just trying our best, too, trying not to end up buried and gone. Trying to use our souls as best we can, remembering the good qualities of those around us. Doing what we can with what we have, remembering to give what grace we can.
• For years, I mocked this love for sameness. Until I woke up to discover myself with a daily egg on toast, just one element of a tightly choreographed morning ballet that is best not interfered with. The walls of my small comfort zone (CZ, I’ll call it) sit on a foundation of DNA.
• The marginality of women and women’s words in the OED is another illustration of Jenni Nuttall’s point that advances in knowledge don’t always represent progress for women. As lexicography became more “scientific”–more systematic, more fact-oriented, more rigorous–it also became more male-dominated, and more masculinist in its assumptions about what did or didn’t belong in dictionaries.
• Back in June, I set a few goals that pointed toward a changing horizon. Softer, maybe, and calmer and gentler and as beautiful as the view across the lake from the sunset deck at my stepsisters’ cottage. The sky at sunset is always different but familiar, different but known, different if you take time to sit and savour it each evening. Otherwise, you might believe you’d see the same sunset and sky over and over again, and you might be bored by what you think of as repetition. But it’s not repetition, it’s texture and nuance and depth. It’s a groove, not a rut, as my friend Lisa says. 
• To age wisely is to be willing to unlearn as well as learn. September can be a month not only for learning new things, but unlearning what no longer serves us. Or others.
• You might say that in attempting to solve the mystery of my own family through fiction, I blurred the line between reality and family legend even further. I do hope my ancestors will forgive me. 
• Maybe it’s just one of the gifts fiction can offer us—a temporary respite, a refuge. It’s not that there isn’t trouble and heartache in the story Lara tells her daughters, but while they listen they are safe and loved. There’s definitely room for novels like that in my reading life.
• We’re still the very same people we were in Northumberland, but now we’re looking forward to having many more new experiences and passing many more milestones here in Essex County.  Turns out, no matter how many miles we move, nor how much time passes, nothing changes, really.  And that’s a good thing! 
• The first time I read Beatrice and Barb was when I was going through the submissions pile on my desk. It’s a mystery to me how it landed there — but am I ever grateful that it did! I knew right away that I wanted to sink my teeth into the story. I always try to listen to that voice — that eagerness to start working on a manuscript. I sent you an email to say that I loved your story, and we met for coffee to talk about my editorial notes … and the rest is history! 
• After the hurricane I promised myself I would never again take for granted the joy of turning on a tap to fill a glass with drinking water. I am promising myself now that I will never again miss the opportunity to smile at people – loved ones and strangers – or to kiss someone I love. 
• Poignant, funny, horrifying, moving, smart, enraging, absurd: these are all adjectives that came to mind when I sat down to write this review of Alicia Elliott’s brilliant debut novel And Then She Fell. It’s a quick and intense read, with incredible, chatty, and hilarious chapter titles and a thoroughly amazing prolonged climax that I absolutely will not spoil for you, even though I am dying to write about it.
• I love writing. And I needed to take a break from it this summer so I could remind myself who I am writing for.
• When you spend 18 hours on a train with the small group of people with whom you were waiting for it arrive, you get to hear their stories. 

September 11, 2023

10 Things I’m Looking Forward to in September

• Getting back to blogging, both writing and reading!
• Not having a rash (maybe?)
• Cool nights
• Weekends in the city
• Turning the oven on
• Promoting my book. (Did I mention I have a new book out?)
• Squash season!
• the Victoria College Book Sale
• working on my WIP
• Autumn leaves…

September 7, 2023

AFAF is Launched!

Thank you to everyone who attended my launch last night at the Lillian H. Smith Library. It was an extraordinary night, everything I wanted, and this whole week has been joyful and fun.

September 1, 2023

Book Club Kit!

I’m very excited to share the ASKING FOR A FRIEND digital book club kit, created by my excellent team at Doubleday Canada. It includes discussion questions, a yummy recipe, a playlist, further reading suggestions and a heartfelt letter from ME! I do think this novel would make for a perfect book club kit—you will most likely end up actually talking about the book!

August 28, 2023

AFAF a Chatelaine Fall Pick!

I’m overjoyed to find Asking for a Friend selected as one of Chatelaine’s Fall book picks—in excellent company! Pick up a copy at your local newsstand.

August 23, 2023

Another Week in Paradise

A+ vacation reads last week. Laura Lippman never disappoints. I LOVE Sue Miller and am reading through her backlist; this one was my favourite Marian Keyes novel I’ve ever read, about a depressive Private Investigator trying to find a member of a reunited boy band all the while experiencing suicidal ideation; my fourth Barbara Trapido novel, a contemporary story told in the fantastical structure of a Shakespearean comedy; THE GREAT CIRCLE, which I did enjoy but skimmed in parts; Andrew O’Hagan’s truly beautiful story of lifelong friendship; and William Trevor, William Trevor Forever! I love him.