July 26, 2023
Girlfriend on Mars, by Deborah Willis
The premise sounds like a gimmick: Kevin is a failed screenwriter who now ekes out a vague living as a film extra while growing pot in his Vancouver basement apartment, the enterprise—until lately—overseen by his highly capable girlfriend, Amber, the two of them a couple since high school, after which they managed to escape the confinements of their hometown in Northern Ontario (as well as Amber’s dashed dreams of Olympic glory after an injury ends her gymnastics career, the freight of her evangelical upbringing, and Kevin’s overbearing troubled mother) for a new life on the west coast. But that new life never proceeded according to plan, and now Amber is gone, having won a spot on a reality show whose contestants are vying for a one-way-trip to Mars—and it turns out that Amber stands a mighty good chance of winning, of escaping Earth and all the doom inherent in its future. And escaping Kevin too, but he’s just not willing to give up on her yet.
Girlfriend on Mars—Deborah Willis’s first novel following her Giller-longlisted story collection The Dark and Other Love Stories—is really funny, a whip-smart satire, and also intensely moving, even in its more ridiculous moments, because these characters caught in an awfully silly situation have arrived on the page with perfectly tuned back stories providing real emotional heft to a story that otherwise might be so light as to be weightless. This was a story that had me turning its pages with no idea how and where it might possibly end, and a little warily too because I worried these characters existential dread could be a trigger for my own anxiety, but it all came together in a way that was sad, gorgeous and perfect. I heartily recommend!
July 6, 2023
ASKING FOR A FRIEND Book Trailer REVEALED!
I’m so excited to share my very first book trailer for Asking for a Friend, which Stuart and I had the most fun creating together back in the spring. I hope that it makes you extra excited to read the book and that you’re even moved enough to share it with your own networks! Two more months until everybody gets to meet Clara and Jess!
June 29, 2023
Tis the Damn Season
Blogging will be intermittent for the next two months as I get busy going outside and doing stuff. I am wishing you much of the same!
June 27, 2023
Gleanings
- We aspire towards the observation of little things, the magic in the smallness of everyday. We debate not losing our power and staking a claim to it. But there are times when all we need is to become small ourselves and watch the world go by as if it has no need of our presence.
- I don’t know whether I’ll need it in the same way; nor what new or changed goals it may meet or fulfill. I don’t know. I do know that I still love to write in order to find order in the dissonance of experiences. I still love to write to untangle the muddle of my mind. I still love to write to record and reflect and come closer to understanding the world. But it’s just one way of knowing and doing and being. I’m discovering other ways now, too.
- If I’m being honest, not precisely is where I land most of the time, even when I deliberate for weeks and finally tire of my own waffling and just pick something.
- For now, I will take my extra time to enjoy my children, without regret. We drive down country roads, listening to music and talking. Sometimes we play a certain song (Unwritten) and laugh. It might feel silly, but it is good for our souls. The three of us singing loudly (and horribly). The message loud & clear. We are ridiculous, we are alive. Things aren’t perfect, but they are pretty good. I’m always writing my book.
- The bustle of the morning is over and the day holds so much potential. I’m also not near the mid-afternoon crash yet or the evening anxiety.
- And so I think we just need to keep training ourselves to see beauty, and sharing that, and maybe somehow it translates down the line into something good. It can’t hurt to try, anyway, right?
- Stitch by stitch, I wish they knew all the places this blanket travelled, all of the tears it has absorbed, the dirt and crumbs and germs it has acquired, the specific, soothing smell. The nurturing, the comfort, the anxious moments when it is pulled away for a bath. The love.
- Sometimes, around 4 p.m., particularly if the day has been busy, I think to myself, In 3 hours you will be reading! I’ve never watched much television and so after dinner, after dishes, I head upstairs to arrange 4 pillows behind me and I get into bed to read. This time of year the windows are all open and I can hear the evening chorus–robins, Swainson’s thrushes, western tanagers, and others.
June 26, 2023
Leaving Wisdom, by Sharon Butala
Leaving Wisdom is the latest from Sharon Butala, author of over twenty books of fiction and nonfiction whose vision of the Canadian west has always made me think of her in the company of Joan Didion, and she continues to remap her familiar terrain in this story of aging and coming to terms with one’s history (and history in general) set in the fictional Saskatchewan town that her protagonist, Judith, decides to the return to in a post-concussion fog.
The concussion occurs after a fall at what was supposed to be Judith’s retirement lunch after a long career as social worker in child protection/family services. In the days that follow, Judith’s brain is confused, her head aches, and she’s overwhelmed by considering the threads of her life, in particular her four daughters, who all continue to occupy her attention in different ways, her two late husbands, and the family she left behind as a teenager when she fled their piety and the suffocating small town of Wisdom, a place in which she realizes she has unfinished business still and so she decides she must return.
Once re-established in Wisdom, Judith tries to ease her way into a relationship with her estranged siblings, continues to worry about her daughters, and discovers her father’s own traumatic history in World War Two, which becomes connected in her mind to a local act of antisemitism. Meanwhile there are strange and troubling goings-on at the house next door which suggest one can never travel far enough to escape the world—let alone family histories and one’s own past.
Leaving Wisdom is quiet, thoughtful and utterly absorbing novel about families, aging, trauma and history, and how all of these factors happen to intersect.
June 26, 2023
Most Anticipated: AFAF is 20% off at Indigo this week!
Is there a nicer way to kick off the week than with the news that ASKING FOR A FRIEND is part of @indigo’s MOST ANTICIPATED CANADIAN BOOKS promotion with pre-orders on sale for 20% off until July 2?
I DON’T BELIEVE THERE IS!!
Out September 5 from @doubledayca, now’s your chance to support it with your pre-order and get a sweet deal in the process.
I am so excited for readers to fall in love with Clara and Jess!
“This novel is like the best kind of friend: honest, wise, complicated, endearing, smart—and Kerry Clare as a writer is all these things, too. What a poignant, observant tribute—and elegy—to the life sustaining force that is friendship between women. Clare sees it so clearly: the way friendship can be a love story, complete with heartbreak and redemption. I plan to share this book with my dearest friends, all the while marvelling at how lucky I am to have them, and how much better a place the world is with Clare’s books in it.” —Marissa Stapley, New York Times bestselling author of Lucky
June 26, 2023
Believe the Hype
Wow, did Ashley Audrain’s The Whispers live up to the hype, and then some. (Most sophomore novel don’t!) It was reminiscent of Lianne Moriarty’s Truly Madly Guilty, a book I LOVED, but then managed to turn into a literary creature all its own with such complicated, deeply imagined characters whose stories were interwoven in ways that never stopped surprising me. The plot is propulsive and rich with suspense, but also poses some fascinating questions about women’s choices and women’s lives, motherhood and infertility. Such a fantastic read.
June 23, 2023
Happy Birthday, Clarence Thomas?
Before last June, it had never occurred to me that Clarence Thomas had a birthday. That he had not, in fact, emerged into the world middle aged, sitting in a room crowded with concerned-seeming people who pronounced “harassment” in surprising ways while telling stories about pubic hairs left on pop cans that were bewildering to my 12-year-old ears, and that I don’t understand any better today.
But it turns out that Clarence Thomas’s birthday is today, June 23, and also the day before mine, which I discovered the morning I turned 43 while hanging out sheets on my clothesline and listening to @mollyjongfast on her political podcast right before I got the terrible news that the US Supreme Court had ended abortion access for millions of Americans.
Happy Birthday, Clarence Thomas…I guess??
Thanks to @shedoesthecity for publishing my essay on the devastation of Roe vs. Wade falling one year ago, but also about how it made me realize how my new novel (ASKING FOR A FRIEND, forthcoming from @doubledayca on September 5) had to end.
