June 7, 2021

Gone Swimming

I swam! I swam! Not in Lake Ontario on Friday after we cycled to Ward’s Island, which would have been ideal because I had actually packed a bathing suit, but I didn’t swim there because the water was so cold and so was the air, although I did make it in to my waist and it was wonderful. (Both my kids swam though. It was incredible! I don’t know how they did it.) But the next day, which was Iris’s birthday, we drove to the Kortright Conservation Centre for a picnic and a walk in the forest, with intentions to dip our feet in the creek, and then it turned out that the one spot on the creek where we stopped was a perfect swimming hole, and so naturally I skipped down to my skivvies and swam right in, and it was GLORIOUS. The most beautiful spot, and there was no one else around, except for my children, who were mortified, but there was no one else around, and not all of us can swim at sub-arctic temperatures, children. Sometimes you have wait for the creek, the wildest swim I’ve ever taken, I think, although not so wild that there wasn’t a lifesaving float secured on the bank. Clearly I’m not the first person to take a dip there. But it was indeed a joyous way to kick off the 2021 swimming season.

June 2, 2021

Day For Night, by Jean McNeil

Day For Night hooked me from its first gorgeous lines, striking evocative prose, marvellous sentences that swept me along much in the way of Virginia Woolf’s Street Haunting. Something Woolfian about the project entire, though the copy on the back cover refers to Orlando. There’s also Walter Benjamin, whom I know nothing about, and I sometimes get deterred sometimes when writers write in homage to other writers I’ve never read before. This can be alienating, but here it isn’t. Richard is making a movie about Benjamin. It’s 2018 in London and Richard is still reeling from the shock of the Brexit vote, of the nastiness it seems to have unleashed in his world. There are parallels between his moment and that of Benjamin, who was exiled from his native Germany. Richard, born to a Kenyan father, an Italian mother. His history is complicated, sense of himself as a citizen of the world is anchored by his London home. Which feels like another world now. He feels alienated from his family as well, from his wife, a film producer, who’s proven to be far more successful than he has and her paycheques pay their bills. When he meets a young man who’s to play Benjamin in the movie, Richard becomes besotted. Something is going to happen. He knows this.

Day for Night reminded me of Ali Smith’s Seasonal quartet, in its immediacy, and engagement with the UK’s political moment post-Brexit. (Perhaps also because it’s about film and a man called Richard. It made me think of another Richard too, Richard Dalloway.) The novel’s immediacy, however, reads as otherworldly in 2021. The overwrought preoccupation with Brexit seems faraway now that it’s happened, and in light of the pandemic. I found Richard’s agonizing ill-aimed in places, too much. Richard, do you know what a privilege it is to cavort around a city freely while fretting about Brexit? How what is existential in 2018 seems almost frivolous just a few years later? There is something artificial about the way that Richard speaks. He’s more a mouthpiece than a realized character. The meticulous construction of his spoken sentences are even commented upon in the novel—just a quirk of his. But it’s definitely strange.

I will confess that for the first half of Day for Night, I wasn’t sure I could commit to this book. Richard was unnatural. In some ways, he was kind of intolerable. But I persisted, and I am glad I did. Because something happens halfway through that’s entirely unexpected, and changes everything. Casting the entire book in a different light, filters upon filters to understand what’s happening. There are so many layers of meaning, even the layer in which the current moment of this very contemporary story seems out of date now—this is fascinating. And it turns out that this novel has a broader scope than I’d first supposed. Stretching across centuries, and continents, and media. Between reality, and unreality. Summer and winter. Night and day. Male and female. Messing with binaries. Diffusing polarities. It’s a rich and satisfying project.

June 1, 2021

Gleanings

• But this time, I got caught up in a sense of hope and promise. It seemed impossible not to.
• It was a Joyspotting day again and nothing says joy to me like a wild daisy.
• When you swim regularly, you need it. You need the feeling of your aging body in water, you need the buoyancy, the silkiness as you reach out your arms to propel yourself forward and back.
• I’m quitting the pandemic to attend to the hum of the universe, to get back to universe mind.
• However, heartened and emboldened by my new paper doll, and by Julia Berick’s introduction that insists that Franny and Zooey holds up very well indeed, thank you very much, I have embarked at long last on a re-read. And I still love it. Phew.
• There is so much I wish I’d known when we started; there is so much I have learned. 
• Stepping outside of ourselves and reaching towards other people and beings, especially by trying to be useful to them in some way, is a powerful antidote to capitalism that brings the relief of contentment.

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June 1, 2021

May/June

May and June are my favourite months. They’re so much my favourite months that I like April even better for the sole reason that in April, we still have all of May and June before us. May and June encompassing what I like to think of as “Kerry Season,” from Mother’s Day until my birthday a month and a half later, and in between those two auspicious dates, both my daughters have their birthdays, we celebrate our wedding anniversary, and there’s that EPIC FESTIVAL known as Father’s Day, which is like Mother’s Day, but smaller. (Both my mother and my mother-in-law also celebrate their birthdays in June. So did Barbara Pym. How could 30 days contain such wonder?)

We are lucky in our household that anybody’s special day is everybody’s special day—we all get takeout and cake. We’ve been especially lucky this year in Toronto that the weather has been glorious and all the most incredible flowers are in bloom. May and June is the season of having so much to look forward to, even before we roll into summer proper. May/June is the season where sometimes we get tired of cake. May/June is before we start visiting places infested with bugs and before I start getting covered in rashes. Before everything is covered in sand, and beach days are just a delicious fantasy. But it’s not too soon for too much ice cream.

May and June are one of those rare experiences that I love and don’t encounter enough, which manage to be wondrous in themselves, but also on the cusp of everything. May and June are like the most wonderful swan dive off a cliff, gorgeous, in slow motion, and at the end of it all is the clearest, bluest lake you’ve ever seen. SUMMER.

May 31, 2021

Crying in H Mart, by Michelle Zauner

I loved Michelle Zauner’s memoir, Crying in H Mart, a book which was born from a 2016 award-winning essay in Glamour about how learning to cook Korean food helped Zauner begin to heal from grieving her mother’s death. An experience made all the more complicated by the fact that Zauner, at age 25, had only just began knowing and appreciating her mother again after the tumultuous drama of her teenage years. Zauner’s mother was as strong a character as her daughter is—she writes about how her mother would yell at her when she got hurt, the opposite of the other mothers she knew who’d be all cuddles and consolation. That Zauner’s mother is Korean only underlines the gulf between them as Zauner is growing up in Oregon—her American father had met her mother while working abroad and then they’d come to America together. In many ways, Zauner and her mother are alien to each other for must of her life, and in this book she explores how much of that was culture versus the particular person her mother was.

Crying in H-Mart is a coming-of-age story, about how Zauner connects to her place in the world through losing the person who delivered her here. It’s not just about loss, but as much about abundant love—as her mother is dying, Zauner hastily organizes her wedding so her mother can be in attendance. She also becomes committed to caring for her mother during her illness, though has not idea what she’s signing up when she decides this. Her efforts are also thwarted by other caregivers to whom Zauner is just in the way—the connection between mother and daughter is ever being negotiated. As in any real story about death and dying, nothing ever goes according to script and there’s never anything close to closure. And the end is also its own kind of beginning, Zauner beginning to take control of her narrative, and as she starts to achieve success in writing and music (which Zauner performs as “Japanese Breakfast”). She also begins to see her mother as a more complicated person than she’d first supposed, as an artist in her own right, and that perhaps she and her mother aren’t as different as she thinks.

I’ve read other stories about children of immigrants growing up between cultures, about stories of Asian parenting ala Tiger Moms. Crying in H Mart takes on similar things, but with a depth and texture I haven’t encountered before. It’s a familiar story, but also a particular one, powerful for how it stands for itself most of all and one extraordinary ordinary mother-daughter relationship.

May 28, 2021

Pfingsten

I’ve been reading Barbara Pym all spring, as I’ve mentioned several hundred times, and the Anglican rituals, for me, have always been the most curious aspect of these books—the vicars, and the curates, and the cassocks. What’s a cassock? I don’t even know. And especially: what is Whitsun? Whitsun, which is never a major plot point, but simply part of the course of the year (and occasion for a bank holiday). I had to google it—Whitsun is the Pentecost (and then I had to google that, and I still don’t really get it), celebrated the seventh Sunday after Easter. And frankly, not a lot—Barbara Pym aside—has been going on this spring, as Ontario moves into its eleventeenth month of lockdown, so I decided this was the year I was going to make Whitsun a thing. What that would entail exactly, I wasn’t sure. Definitely not church. But we needed something to look forward to, a goal to shoot for, and so Whitsun it is. (And indeed, this is cultural appropriation. Church of England Cultural Appropriation. It’s not the same thing.)

I decided this during a terrible weekend in mid-April where our provincial government’s incompetence took a swan dive off a cliff. Finally, after the government waiting to see whether modelling numbers predicting ICUs being overwhelmed with patients would play out in reality (SPOILER: they did! Who would have guessed?) the province moved into a locked-downier lockdown from the lockdown we’ve been locked down in since November 23. Six weeks on from then would be Whitsun. Surely by Whitsun, I told myself, we would find ourselves in a better place? Keep looking in the direction of the place you want to get to has been my motto all along…

And here we are, with falling infection rates, with vaccine rates that are really high. We were still in lockdown for Whitsun and the lockdown carries on, but it was so good to mark a milestone on a weekend with such beautiful summer weather. I’d also ordered peonies, because I’d received an enticing ad from a local florist, and the great thing about made-up holidays (all holidays are made-up holidays, even Whitsun, though I’ll acknowledge that my version of Whitsun was particularly improvised) was that you get to make them whatever you want. Whitsun peonies, I decided. And we’d make a Victoria sponge cake. I booked a car so we could go somewhere. We were going to make this the best Whitsun ever!

And it was! It was already a holiday weekend in Ontario and we’d gone for an epic bike ride the day before (Whitsun Eve). On Whitsun itself, we had Sunday waffles as usual but they just tasted better for it being Whitsun. I finished the book I was reading (Day for Night, by Jean McNeil, which I’ll be writing about here soon…). We went to Ontario Place, and had a second weekend in a row with two lake days in a row. We got ice cream. We came home (no traffic) and had an amazing barbecue supper, and then just as I was assembling the Victoria sponge cake (which was beautiful and delicious and did not look like it had been assembled by a blindfolded toddler—a first for me!) a friend sent me a text and asked if our family would like to join theirs for fireworks in the park that evening.

I can’t believe they were lighting fireworks for Whitsun!

Our children have never seen fireworks before and it turned out to be the most magical display, the first real life communal experience we’ve had while not sitting in a vehicle since March 2020 (albeit at safe distance for other people and also explosives). It occurred to me that if everybody just carried around lit sparklers all the time, we’d have no trouble staying six feet apart at all.

Even more cool things: on Sunday I was scrolling through the #Whitsun hashtag on Instagram, and what do I find. Peonies! Whitsun peonies EVERYWHERE. It turns out that the Pentecost is a national holiday in Germany and peonies (pfingstrose, translation Whitsun Rose) are the official symbol. Sometimes when you’re making it up you get it exactly right.

Not all days are glorious. Our bike ride on the Saturday before Whitsun was hot and full of whining. When we finally got to our destination, the beach was full of thick green algae and bugs were swarming us. A very loud church service was being amplified unavoidably, and it was weird and obnoxious. I was allergic to something and broke out in a rash, and on the long ride home we got caught in a rainstorm. “That was awesome,” we said at the end of the journey (20km) but also absolutely awful.

Whitsun though. Whitsun was perfect. Sometimes you get lucky. Sometimes you get to make it up and everything goes right.

May 27, 2021

My Spring Obsession: Katherine Heiny

It started in February when I signed up for an online event celebrating Laurie Colwin, whose book Happy All The Time was appearing in a new edition with a foreword by Katherine Heiny. Heiny was also co-hosting the event, which was a pleasure to “attend” and there was a reference to her work being more than a little Colwin-esque. So I ordered her first novel Standard Deviation from the library. And I loved it. I loved it SO MUCH. I loved it in a where-have-you-been-all-my-life, I-ought-to-recommend-this-book-to-everybody-I-know kind of sense. It was the book that my husband demanded he would get to read right after I was finished with it, because he wanted to know what all the laughing was about, and then I got to listen to him laughing about it too.

Standard Deviation, like Nora Ephron’s Heartburn, like everything by Colwin, is a comic novel that break all the rules of novel-writing and is definitely the kind of book in which nothing much happens and yet everything does. Stories that fixate on minutiae and room decor and thread counts, and everybody is more than a little bit neurotic. Standard Deviation is a novel narrated by Graham, who is married to Audra, his second wife, who never stops talking and is on intimate terms with everybody they encounter. They have a son with Aspergers whose struggles are depicted poignantly but also hilariously—and what a balance is that. This is the most true-to-love depiction of the heartaches of parental love that I’ve ever encountered in a book, and it’s just the most remarkable combination of thoroughly absurd and utterly mundane. I could have read this book forever, Graham as a straight man casting Audra in the most compelling light, though he’s having his own complicated experience as he has a run-in with his first wife, Elspeth, on whom who cheated with Audra, and Elspeth is Audra’s polar opposite in every single way, and because Audra is Audra, she insists that they all get together, and (shockingly) it all doesn’t run so smoothly. Add to the mix their son Matthew’s origami club and its ensuing drama, and you’ve got a family comedy like nothing else you’ve read before…except maybe in Laurie Colwin.

I think maybe if I hadn’t had my mind blown by Standard Deviation, I would have been more ecstatic about her just-released novel Early Morning Riser, which has the same tone as the first novel but is perhaps lacking its tartness. The secondary characters aren’t as realized in this novel, and we encounter them at the beginning of their connection instead of in the midst of a long history which renders the story a little more shallow. Taking place over two decades too instead of the very focused narrative of Standard Deviation, it’s just too sprawling and meandering in terms of plot. But I still really enjoyed it, and bought a copy for my daughter’s Grade 2 teacher because Jane, the main character in the book, is a Grade 2 teacher, who rolls into town and finds love with Duncan, who’s a great guy but, unfortunately (and maybe consequently) has been intimately involved with every woman they encounter in their life together, which makes things a bit awkward for Jane, plus he has his own first wife, and other connections make their life together unnecessarily complicated and Jane is just not sure how she feels about having her domestic life be so crowded…

It was not a great novel by traditional standards, but it was a good novel, and that it was distinctly a Katherine Heiny novel—in terms of humour, character, description—made it a novel that’s thoroughly worth reading. Every since I read her books, my own fiction has included characters who are just a little less ordinary, prone to rashes and strange outbursts. Somebody will be walking into a room, and why not decide that they’re carrying a giant sombrero, you know? It’s a wonderful, inspiring kind of license, to write characters who are outside the ordinary, and I’m really enjoying playing with that.

And I’m also looking forward to finally reading her very first book, the short story collection Single, Carefree, Mellow, whose title story I’m most intrigued by and which I never would have picked up every because these are three adjectives that describe somebody so different from me that I feel like store alarms might go off if I tried to buy it. But I am going to buy it now, because I’m most certain that Katherine Heiny’s writing is meant for me.

May 25, 2021

Gleanings

• It’s amazing to me, that over a few short weeks, our city has turned from grey to green.
• Then there was the asparagus itself. It seemed magical. That it could grow in such sandy soil. That it came and went so quickly—just a few weeks in May and June. But most of all because every day we would pick the same field.
• Some mornings I feel as though I am hovering between this world and another and I don’t have the words to say who I am.
• So Constant Nobody is about power, duty, identity, and love and functions as a hybrid of espionage, feminist, historical, and literary fiction. 
• I make it sound very innocent don’t I? If I told you that there are scenes both of blueberry picking and blueberry jam-making, that the cast is almost entirely female, and that much of the novel consists of the inner workings of a 54-year-old woman’s mind, you might be left with a certain kind of impression. Reader, you would be wrong.
• I didn’t plant a lilac at our first home because I knew we would likely be leaving, but here, I thought, here is where we will stay. Here is where we will raise our family, here is where we need a lilac tree.
• Understanding someone doesn’t mean we must agree with their worldviews or convert to their ideologies or repent for our own beliefs.

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May 19, 2021

A Lethal Lesson, by Iona Whishaw

To be reading a new Lane Winslow book is one of my favourite states of being, and the best thing about this series, whose eighth and latest instalment is A Lethal Lesson, is that it just keeps getting better. A little out of season this time—the story is set at Christmas and one suspects that it might have come out last fall in an alternate universe in which contagion doesn’t roam the land. But oh, still a treat to be back in King’s Cove, whose vicar turns up at the Christmas Even gathering at the end of the book and reports that his flock at King’s Cove is the most exciting of all his parishioners, “with your resident detective Miss Winslow…and the inspector established here now, and murderers and would-be murderers turning up all the time. Better than a fictional English village!”

And it’s true! Whishaw’s story has a meta-charm as her characters compare the situations unfolding around them to what might be expected to happen within the pages of a book. The situation here being a rather curious one—the outgoing school teacher has been found with a head injury, her cottage ransacked, and the incoming teacher has disappeared altogether. Does one of the women have something to fear from her past—or even both of them? And more importantly—who is going to preside over the school in the meantime before the case is solved? Why, Lane Winslow, of course, with her Oxford education, and while she doesn’t have much experience of children herself, she’s surprised to find how inspiring she finds their company, which surely pleases her new husband, Inspector Darling, who’s putting out some not subtle suggestions that he’s interested in them having children of their own.

I absolutely love the modern sensibility of these novels, of their feminism, sense of justice, their anti-racism, their progressiveness, which somehow never seems out of place in a tiny BC hamlet in 1948. Darling proposes, “Let’s say she displayed what some might have termed dubious morals and incited locals…” to which Lane gently corrects him, “No, let’s not say that. We are making her responsible for being harassed, very unfair under any circumstances…” But it’s never preachy or pedantic, and Whishaw continues to use her murder mysteries to explore the limitations on women’s lives and freedom that were contemporary to the period, and which are not yet so far away in the rear view mirror.

May 18, 2021

Gleanings

• I hear the mantra, “This, too, shall pass.” Somehow, by the lake, it’s easier for me to believe it, to remain hopeful.
• Can light still change us? Can beauty? Can a seagull perched on top of a TacoTime cactus after rummaging through the trash show me something that I need to know?
• When I was younger I wanted to change the world, I think we all did. Now that I am older I am content in knowing that maybe, for only a few moments, I have made a difference in someone’s life.
• I started writing Pocketfuls as a personal creative project when I was home raising two young boys, and writing about parenthood there gave me the skills, the personal connections with other writers (who shared expertise and resources with me over the years), and the confidence to believe that I could write books.
• These May mornings are gifts…
• Perhaps the greatest proof of friendship is that, even in the midst of some pandemic gamesmanship, some awkward silences and some selfish or uncaring comments, our love and respect for each other survives, is even, eventually made lovely again.
• And Rhonda Douglas shares 7 online writing workshops, including mine! (Thank you, Rhonda! Sign up today!)

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.