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.

August 11, 2023

On Being Out of My Depth

It was story that started it—the kinds of stories we tell ourselves about the importance of being pushed outside our comfort zones, how we can learn and grow from a challenge. I was thinking about my work with writers on their early manuscripts and how scary it can be to open one’s self up for critique, but about how, in avoiding such a thing, we miss the chance to improve and make our work all it can be. I was thinking too about the story I was going to tell at the end of it the night, and how it would be one about triumph, fake it until you make it, about how you just never know what you’re capable of until you try.

I was thinking about how often we tend to underestimate ourselves, and the pitfalls of imposter syndrome, and how essential it is for me to override a tendency to stay small, to stay home. I was nervous, but those nerves, I supposed, were merely a sign that this was important, and that it was time to be brave. Do the hard thing. “Look,” I told my children too smugly. “I’m scared, and that I’m doing it, and *that* is the definition of brave.”

For seven years, I’ve been swimming near-daily, pandemic lockdowns aside, and I’ve come to own an identity as A Swimmer, tearing through Speedo caps, replacing goggles, usually one of the faster people in the pool (now that I no longer swim as the pool where the university swim team trains). And I’ve been curious for a while about trying something a little more difficult, about dipping a toe (ahem) into something with higher stakes, about improving my strokes and having somebody show me how to be better. So I finally signed up for the Masters Swim program at my community centre, drawn in by the suggestion that it would be an introduction to the world of competitive swimming, in which I’d hardly be a foreigner, since I essentially have gills and fins.

Oh, but Reader, it didn’t work out that way. Oh, Reader, I’ve not been so out of my depth (see what I did there!) since the time I decided to sneak a six pack of beer into a Scottish music festival where alcohol was apparently forbidden, and encountered people at the gate pushing in towers of beer cases on dollies. Sometimes, see, nerves are actually our instincts. If underdogs always eventually triumphed, as pop culture might suggest, wouldn’t there be no such things as underdogs after all?

I’d imagined Masters Swim a bit like Old Timer’s Hockey, see, me and a ragtag band of senior citizens. I really thought it would be gentle, an introduction, the name mostly ironic, but it quickly became apparent that it wasn’t. When the coach presented us with our “warm-up” written on a whiteboard, and I couldn’t decipher a single word. And the math! Reader, who would have imagined such math, the requirements delineated in metres, but how was I supposed to know how long the pool was, because I’ve never measured it, and even once I knew, how am I supposed to find space in my brain amidst all the SPORTSING to figure out how many lengths go into 300 metres, just say, and even if I did, how am I supposed to get track of them as I go? Plus we were supposed to be going fast! The whole time! For no discernible reason, because it wasn’t as though any of us were being chased.

I’d really been envisioning somebody holding my hand and showing me how, for once, I might do a proper whip kick. And then when we were waiting for the session to begin and I confessed to feeling like maybe this all wasn’t quite right, the other swimmers—who appeared to be in their early 20s—assuring me that they actually hadn’t swam competitively since high school really didn’t help assuage my fears.

I AM a swimmer. And THIS was the pool where I swim every day, but all the same, I might have signed up for intermediate Mongolian lessons and come up further ahead.

So I bolted. Of course, I bolted. Five minutes after the class started, I was gone, fleeing down Spadina Avenue in my bathing suit, still dripping from the pre-pool shower I’d taken in more hopeful times. Remembering a line from the picture book DOORS IN THE AIR which is one of the essential life lessons I’ve ever encountered in literature: “Remember, you don’t have to stay where you are.” The FREEDOM of that. (The best thing about being 44 is that you rarely have to feel like this ever.)

And so this story has turned out to be a story of abject failure and embarrassment (did they wonder where I’d gone, that weird lady who was only there for five minutes?), instead of triumph. A story that I’m telling because it horrifies me less when I can make it into something, and perhaps it will serve to help you feel better about yourself, because whatever else you got up to this week, at least you didn’t do that. A story about how the universe has a way, always, of keeping me humble. About how sometimes life is just challenging enough, and how comfort zones are fine, and about how I’ll stay in my lane.