March 21, 2022

Rafael Has Pretty Eyes, by Elaine McCluskey

No one writes voice quite like Elaine McCluskey, and not just one voice, but all the voices, ranging from the news reporter just laid off after twenty-five years, to the canine companion of man whose brain damage to the front cortex has caused an unfortunate condition termed Witzelsucht, a bouncer with concussion symptoms, or the man whose story begins, “I am at a Toast ‘n’ Roast for my mother’s fourth husband, Wayne. Wayne, of course, is a dud. Who else do you get on the fourth attempt: Idris Elba?” And later on in the same story, “It’s Never What You Think It Is,” which opens McCluskey’s latest collection Rafael Has Pretty Eyes, the character notes that he’s convinced “that life is one inside joke after another and that people fall into two categories: the people who believe Trailer Park Boys is real and the ones who don’t, and I no longer know where I fit because last night I saw Bubbles driving a Masterati Quattraporte with smoked windows on the Waverley Road in Dartmouth and it seemed quite normal to me.”

I have loved Elaine McCluskey’s work for ten years now, as a search through my blog archives proves, ever since I first read her debut collection The Watermelon Social, and got hooked on this writer who, with a single sentence, can break my heart and make me laugh until I cry all at once. She writes about oddballs with such a remarkable immediacy that they’re relatable, and with such incredible specificity too (“a Masterati Quattraporte with smoked windows on the Waverley Road in Dartmouth,” for example) that she blows my mind with her acuity.

(Upon reading her latest, it also occurs to me that I love McCluskey’s work for the same reason I love Katherine Heiny’s, which might be the highest literary compliment I’m capable of giving.)

McCluskey writes about people who’ve fallen through the cracks, people who are hanging on just barely, suffering evictions, breakups, or being held hostage at gunpoint. The extraordinary side of ordinary—the radio DJ who’s come down in the world and makes his living now at a pay day loan outlet, the local city councillor for whom it’s all about to fall apart. Characters who seem like anybody you might pass on the street, rendered vivid by the power of McCluskey’s narrative voice, and then the story takes off, ending up in a place where you never imagined it going. (“Life is just one extended series of anecdotes strung together until they kill you.”)

I loved this book. Perfect for anyone who thinks the Trailer Park Boys are real or otherwise, and even those who aren’t always drawn to short stories, because these are short stories that underline why such things are worth reading.

March 18, 2022

Home Office

The desk we bought to replace a patio table we’d been using indoors at the height of WFH (about a year ago; things since then have improved and half our household now leaves the house to go to school) finally has a proper chair, thanks to Tiny Beaches Interiors, from whom we also got the desk. And I’m working here today because it’s March Break downstairs and I’m spending this morning working on Draft 2 of my new novel, which I’m billing as “Emily Henry meets Katherine Heiny, with maiden aunt Barbara Pym looking on approvingly.” It’s a lot of fun.

March 16, 2022

Mitzi Bytes Turns Five!

Mitzi Bytes turned five on Monday, which was also Pi Day, and so once again I made Nora Ephron’s chocolate pie to celebrate. I’m also giving away a copy of the new Harper Perennial Edition of the book. If you’d like a chance to win, enter over on Instagram before the end of the week.

March 16, 2022

Gleanings

• I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the ways in which social media and the theoretical shrinking and speeding up of the world impacts our ability to be nuanced thinkers and ethical actors, not to mention emotionally stable.
• “Zero risk is, I don’t need to wonder anymore,” he says. “Wondering is exhausting.”
• I’m not running away or hiding from news of the world. But I do recognize it’s not healthy to focus on it to the point of inducing anxiety over that which I cannot control.
• I kept to the classic script and every single person in my family, including the two who don’t like bananas at all, couldn’t get enough of it. I get it now, I really do. It’s far more complex than it seems, and abundantly cozy.
• I just bought five bunches of Hyacinths from my local corner shop that within minutes of entering the house muffled the smell of gym socks and meatloaf with their ethereal scent.
• Until the light returns/ The trees promise to remember how it felt to/ Be wrapped up in cool, endless shade.
• Time. Time is what I most long for. Time denied the Ukrainian mother-to-be and her child who were killed in the bombing of their maternity hospital. Time is also what I most celebrate. Individual moments of clarity are all the more precious when they emerge from a fog. 
• It’s been nearly a hundred and fifty years since this chair was shiny, and new, and arguably, plagiarized. As always, to me, those years are a comfort
• Poetry is a place, still, to work things out, work things through. I
• I realized I knew little about poetry. By little, I mean nothing. But I want to learn to appreciate poetry, the beauty of the rhythm and cadence of the words, the meanings within. 
• At times, I can disregard the boring days, the days that stretch on and need to be filled, the days of ordinary-ness, the days we’d long for if we no longer had them, the days, so many are wishing for in this moment, the days that make a life.
• Its the spring, things and thinks burst out from seemingly nothing. All this time, they’ve just been waiting. It can be its own overwhelm, but I am hungry for it. And overwhelmed by it. the irony, the ache. the swell, the burst. all of it.

Do you like reading good things online and want to make sure you don’t miss a “Gleanings” post? Then sign up to receive “Gleanings” delivered to your inbox each week(ish). And if you’ve read something excellent that you think we ought to check out, share the link in a comment below.

March 15, 2022

On the Subway

For the last two years, taking transit has been a disconcerting experience. And not even because of Covid risk—I don’t think public transit is a major factor in spread, in spite of that one obnoxious guy without a mask whose thighs are spread across two seats every subway car. But there has just been something off with the vibe—some people who are frightening and aggressive, others suffering from mental illness. Like, if you travelled on the streetcar and nobody was bleeding from a flesh wound, it counts as a good day. On transit, like everywhere, it’s been a long two years.

But yesterday something was different. I can’t say what it was exactly. All the signs on seats encouraging physical distance had been removed and people were crowded together, which you’d think might have made things worse, but it didn’t, especially since everyone was still wearing masks (except, obviously, that one guy). Perhaps it was just the fact of more ordinary people being out and about again, but it was just pleasant. With the signs for distance removed, I could stand up on the bus and offer my seat to an older woman, and she could refuse it, and we could both travel standing to the subway stop, leaving the seat empty, a very Canadian arrangement.

She got on the subway car with us—she’d been confused about which way to travel, and we gave her directions. Some other kind person gave up their seat so my children could sit down, and I stood alongside them watching a small child behind them formed her fingers into the shape of a heart, and began directing the shape at people all around her, including our friend from the bus. And then the woman and her son across from her, and then up at me, and I waved back, told my daughters to turn around and see.

The little girl had a doll inside her jacket, its face poking out. She kept making hearts, and then circles, and triangles—she knew all the shapes, and pretty soon she was friends with everyone in her proximity. We reminded our bus friend to get off at Yonge, and she thanked us, said goodbye to the little girl. And then when the little girl got off at St. George, everybody said good bye to her, waving out the windows, and then we all smiled at each other, all of us connected, and feeling a little bit better about the world.

March 15, 2022

Looking for Jane, by Heather Marshall

What people who haven’t thought much don’t tend to know is that abortion is not the opposite of adoption, or infertility, or miscarriage, or motherhood, or even choosing not to have children at all, and also there are plenty of people who’ve experienced two or more of these things, and that these things don’t even exist on some kind of moral spectrum, but instead, they’re a vivid constellation of lived experiences, and what I love about Heather Marshall’s extraordinary Looking for Jane is the way the story connects them all, making plain what so many women already know but still might not have the courage to put into words even almost 35 years after abortion was made legal in Canada.

Because the abortion rights activists didn’t win this fight just for themselves. This fight and this victory was for their daughters, and their daughters’ daughters. To make sure a horrible cycle was broken, and the next generation would be better off than their own. To leave these women a world where no one can tell them that they don’t own their own bodies. Where they don’t need to hang themselves or try to slit their wrists in a bathtub just to know what it feels like to have control. It all comes down to having the right to make the choice.

—Looking for Jane

What a radical thing this novel is, even with its old-fashioned cover with an image of a woman from behind, with its sepia tones suggesting this would be a safe bet for your great-aunt’s book club. Because it definitely is—your great aunt knows something about reproductive justice that those of us who came of age after the Morgantaler Decision of 1988 might always have taken for granted, never knowing a time when pregnant people weren’t free to make their own reproductive choices. Her generation will remember a time when pregnant girls were sent to “homes” where they lived—steeped in a shame they’d carry for the rest of their lives—until their babies were born, and then subsequently adopted. Or else the girls got married in a hurry and had to drop out of school, leave their jobs, give up on their dreams, and maybe it would all turn out to be worth it, but how do you ever know?

Looking for Jane begins with a letter that was never received, a letter that a mother wrote to her daughter, to be opened after her death, informing that daughter that she had actually been adopted, and that her birth mother had not willingly given her up for adoption after all. The letter finds its way into the hands of Angela, who is currently mourning two miscarriages and trying again via IVF for a pregnancy to create the family she and her wife have been dreaming of. Angela is adopted herself, and so the letter she finds proves especially resonant, and she begins determined to track down the woman who was intended to receive it almost a decade ago.

And then the book takes its reader back to 1961, the bad old days, when Evelyn Taylor finds herself removed to a maternity home and all her choices and autonomy removed from her in that process, and she’s unable to advocate for herself when she decides she wants to keep her baby, after she learns that babies being born at the home are actually being sold. The rules at the home are cruel, dehumanizing, and serve the patriarchal power of the Catholic Church—and this experience is what inspires Dr. Evelyn Taylor, almost years later, to have pursued a medical career, trained with Dr. Henry Morgantaler in Montreal, and be risking everything to provide pregnant women with abortions. She joins the Abortion Caravan protest in Ottawa in 1970—read my starred review of Karin Wells’ spectacular book on the subject, and how wonderful to see this story be rendered in fiction, because this is a part of history that every Canadian should know—helping deliver a coffin to the Prime Minister’s doorstep as a symbol of the more than one thousand Canadian women who died each year after illegal abortions, and then joins the protest in the House of Commons, women shutting down parliament after chaining themselves to their seats.

Ten years after that, Nancy Mitchell accompanies her cousin for an illegal abortion (legal abortions in Canada in 1980 had to be permitted by a panel of doctors, which meant decisions were arbitrary and no doubt race and class factored in big time, as both things continue to make abortion more or less accessible for pregnant people today) which goes very wrong, and so when Nancy finds herself with an unwanted pregnancy not long after, she is careful to find an abortion via an underground network of providers whose work was safe and reputable—and whose clinics would be the target of police raids. And this is how Nancy connects with Dr. Taylor, and comes to volunteer at her clinic at great personal risk, continuing to do so until 1988 when abortion was legalized and providers didn’t need to hide anymore.

But of course the fight wasn’t over, as anyone who’s paying attention knows well. Abortion providers are threatened with violence to this day. In 1992, Dr. Henry Morgantaler’s clinic in Toronto was firebombed at its location just around the corner from my where I live now, and I knew absolutely nothing about any of this ten years later when Dr. Morgantaler performed my own abortion, when it never even occurred to me not to take my access to abortion for granted, or to consider how hard my foremothers had fought for it. Because I’d never read a book like Marshall’s, a book that connects the dots, which spells out the patriarchal forces intent on keep women from having freedom over their own destinies, underlining just how much reproductive freedom underlines our personal foundations.

(There’s more to it too—a long history of forced sterilization of Indigenous and racialized women, the “sixties scoop,” by which Indigenous children were taken from their cultures and adopted into white families, the foster care system which keeps too many racialized women from raising their own kids. Marshall’s book is definitely the history of whiteness and reproductive justice, and that’s just the tip of the iceberg.)

I loved this novel, and also that it’s one of the bestselling titles in Canada right now, because it’s a daring and radical text dressed up as a women’s book club pick. It’s a moving and absorbing read, heartbreaking and infuriating in places, unabashedly Canadian in the most interesting way, but also universal at once.

March 13, 2022

Last Day

On Friday, for the first time in three years, I dropped my child off for the final school day before March Break with the sense that they’ll likely be returning to class a week from Monday as planned. For the first time in three years, the atmosphere on the last day before break was festive—kindergarteners were dressed up like superheroes, Iris’s class had all brought in stuffies, a karaoke party is planned for my middle schooler this afternoon. I’m so overwhelmed, happy and grateful for all of it. And as I walked back down the sidewalk, I watched other parents arriving at school, many of them carrying their little ones who’d been walking too slow (the bell had just rang!) and I thought of parents in Ukraine who’d carried their children for miles to a border, other parents for whom safety is elusive now, and while I really don’t have any idea what those people are experiencing, I can say with certainty, just like you can, that after the last two years I do know something about what it is to have the wheels fall off your life, your world. To have the ordinary suddenly transformed into something unnavigable and frightening, and I just thought about how connected all of us are, even those of us fortunate enough to live in peace and safety right now, which I’ve never taken for granted, but also never appreciated so very much as now. And, as Ursula Franklin writes, peace is indivisible. We need it for everyone.

March 10, 2022

The Music Game, by Stéfanie Clermont, translated by JC Sutcliffe

‘”Three shadows are bending over each other around a table,” Celine begins… “They are old, young, it doesn’t matter. A hand moves and the number three blurs. Maybe there are actually four of them, or even more. A hand comes out of the shade, rests between the black coats. The glasses on the table are also lanterns. They don’t touch them. They’re too busy with plotting.”‘

I’d held off on picking up Stéfanie Clermont’s award-winning first book, The Music Game, which just came out last month in English translation by JC Sutcliffe, because it’s been a tough time and I’ve been wary of anything too bleak—this is a collection of linked stories loosely structured around a suicide after all. But it turned out to not be a painful read, in spite of a whole lot of pain and longing at its core, because fundamentally, The Music Game is just interesting. Pitched to me as a book for fans of Sally Rooney, or else a modern version of The Big Chill, both of which were enough to pique my interest, and I enjoyed it very much.

This is the story of three friends who, like the book’s author, are Franco-Ontarian, growing up around Ottawa. The collection more cyclical than linear, moving back and forth between their teenage years and then their lives a decade or so on, and encompassing the stories of other friends and roommates and voices, underlining the surprising ways that lives overlap and also that the past is never truly behind us.

Clermont’s characters work dead-end jobs, struggle to complete their theses, argue about politics, look for roommates, get tattoos, experience gender fluidity, escape dangerous relationships, have creepy cousins and stepdads, take to the streets, and rue their parents’ bourgeois values all the while they spend weekends at their country house. They grow up too fast, but can’t seem to move on, all the while trying to plot their way through a culture and even a counterculture that seems to have set them for failure. Staying connected, and falling out of touch, and giving up, and also persisting.

And maybe when I say the book is cyclical, what I really mean it that it’s a web, with strange, uncanny and surprising connections, weird gaps, and a whole lot of questions, and each of these characters (caught in it? spinning it?) read as wondrously alive and real, achingly messy and complicated.

March 9, 2022

On Entitlement

So SOMEBODY is currently making the rounds hoping that his reputation can now be fully rehabilitated, especially after the sexual assault charges against him that (temporarily) derailed his political career back in 2018 have fallen apart. And fair enough. But as someone who has read his terrible autobiography (which is the worst typeset document in the history of documents), I would like to underline that the specific assault charges, to some of us, were never the point. Instead, it was a question of character. The entitlement of a guy who launches his political career with a case of beer at his elite all-boys private high school, who builds a political career with a strategy of unseating female incumbents, who has the fucking audacity to vote to reopen the abortion debate and court the family values crowd—all the while he’s in his thirties and having relationships with women just out of their twenties who work in his office. One of whom he’s now married to, whose secret relationship he only admitted to on the night in 2018 when his whole career came crashing down and suddenly it seemed opportune to be a man with a partner. Who’d be exasperating enough if he were only one guy, except that he’s emblematic of so many mediocre men in positions of leadership who have no idea how irresponsible and reckless it is that they get to have so much power over ordinary people’s lives.

So this is why I don’t feel sorry for Patrick Brown, and that so many people do only underlines the power of “himpathy” (read Kate Manne’s book), and I’ll tell you again that his is the natural trajectory of the men whose “lives are destroyed!” in #MeToo style takedowns, and, finally, if you want to know more about my thoughts on the subject, go read my novel, Waiting for a Star to Fall.

March 8, 2022

Gleanings

• Yesterday marked the two-year anniversary of the day when Faye’s kindergarten teacher sent around a parent sign-up sheet for volunteers to help with in-classroom hand washing. Just a few more days from now will mark the two-year anniversary of the day New York City schools closed and the rest of the city followed suit.
• My voice may be a little muffled by the mask, but this is me speaking. My skin is winter-dry, but this is my hand holding yours. Right now, this is everything. And more than enough. 
• Women empowering women: The importance of mentors
• In caring for a little piece of earth, one rejects the idea that scale is all that matters, or that all worthwhile labor is paid labor. One creates unruly beauty for its own sake.
• We had hoped for children, biological or adopted, but the universe had other plans. I suspect, truly, Piper chose us and let us pretend we were choosing her. I am not for a second suggesting that a cat replaces a child, but she came into our lives when we most needed her, and we have loved her ever since. 
• And yet stories of the war years have made up parts of who I am today and I can also say with certainty that although my mind doesn’t remember, my body certainly does! And it manifests the trauma and the impact of the war in variety of ways.
• Castle Breakfast isn’t as much a recipe as it’s a philosophy. It’s about making days off feel special, about feeling as calm and doted on at home as you would in a fancy tearoom. It’s about feeling a tiny bit royalty, regardless of budget. I hope it feels good.
• Does our watching the news and scrolling twitter change anything? Does reading poems change anything? Does witnessing in this way change anything? How is it possible that we can have one line of poetry about the massacre of innocents and the next about flowers? But of course we can.
• ask me what I was wearing, and if I could wear it again afterwards
• But it’s the charm against evil I’m most interested in right now.
• It is terrible, the damage grief does to one’s own generosity. I don’t like it, though for now I can’t seem to help it.
• How are we still doing this, going to war, in 2022? Have we learned nothing? How does a species who can travel into space and look at planet Earth from above, still have it in their hearts and minds to destroy each other, communities, cities, with weapons?
• I had no idea what I was in for when I signed up for this class. But it has been an eye-opening blessing and I would encourage anyone to do the same.
• She had hoped to leave her children and grandchildren something of value. She could not grasp that the family treasures we longed for were those that held sentimental value.
• There is so much I can’t do right now. But remembering the miracle of a perfect clump of crocuses, actually blooming underground, in cold soil, far from sunlight, reminds me to continue to try to find hope.
• If you know who Amanda Marshall is, that tells me so much about you.