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.

March 7, 2022

The Swimmers, by Julie Otsuka

“Most days, at the pool, we are able to leave our troubles on land behind. Failed painters become elegant breaststrokers. Untenured professors slice, shark-like, through the water, with breathtaking speed. The newly divorced HR manager grabs a faded red Styrofoam board and kicks with impunity. The downsized ad man floats otter-like on his back as he stares up at the clouds on the painted pale blue ceiling, thinking, for the first time all day long, of nothing. Let it go. Worriers stop worrying. Bereaved widows cease to grieve. Out-of-work actors unable to get traction above ground glide effortlessly down the fast lane, in their element, at last. I’ve arrived! And for a brief interlude we are at home in the world. Bad moods lift, tics disappear, memories are reawakened, migraines dissolve, and slowly, slowly, the chatter in our minds begins to subside as stroke after stroke, length after length, we swim. And when we are finished with our laps we hoist ourselves up out of the pool, dripping and refreshed, are equilibrium restored, ready to face another day on land.” —The Swimmers, by Julie Otsuka

The most perfect encapsulation of a pool swim community I’ve ever encountered in a book. And then on page 77, the story shifts, becomes about one woman’s experience with dementia (and her daughter), and the pool is left behind, and how these pieces fit together is still something of an unsolved puzzle for me, but I am satisfied by the wondering so much.

March 4, 2022

Tunnels

I’ve had a very tough mental health week (what I mean by this is that I’ve spent a significant amount of my time experiencing the physical symptoms of abject terror for someone who is not immediately endangered) but I finally slept okay last night for the first time in a week and it’s helping. It is a lot to be a person who lives in the world right now, even if one is fortunate enough not to be a person in immediate danger, but one thing I am grateful for is that when it all fell apart for me in December, it was because I’d finally had enough to looking for light at the end of the tunnel. That light in the distance for me had been the most sustaining force for me, always, but then I’d become so tired of reaching, or maybe the light seemed so far away I couldn’t see it or else I was afraid I’d just imagined it was ever there, or maybe what I really mean is that reaching such light is as far away as one could possibly get from experiencing life in the present moment, and I was just so tired of missing out on that, of always looking ahead for a moment that might never come.

And so this has been my objective throughout the weeks of this new year, to learn to be here now and meet the moment whatever it’s bringing. To be open and strong and brave in the case of whatever fate may deliver, and when I made such plans, it was mainly Omicron I had in mind, and what’s come to stir my soul instead has been so much more messy, heartbreaking, and terrifying. For me the way so much unrest in Ottawa blended right into the invasion of Ukraine is not entirely disconnected, and in some ways, practically speaking, it really isn’t, though of course I wholly recognize the different of scale. But the point is that I’ve been scared for a month, and really for two years now, and now this, terror on such a potentially annihilating scale.

I’m beginning to wholly understand how everyone in the mid-20th century was on Valium…

But I’ve got away from my main point, which is not to say the light will never come. (It does. It’s all around us. We’re entering our third year of a pandemic, and yet hospital capacity is fine, we’re going out for dinner tonight, my kids have been in school since January, we’re planning to visit our family in the UK in April, green things are beginning to poke through the earth—I could not be more grateful for all of this if my heart were tied up in a sparkly bow.) But just that I am glad that I committed to learning to get along in the meantime, to learn how to be mostly okay even when most things aren’t okay, when all of my ducks aren’t in a row, and that I couldn’t have picked a better year to build up these muscles, and instead of trying to rail against reality, I choose to meet it open-heartedly, which is hard, and it hurts, but it’s also so much less impossible.

March 4, 2022

It’s Here, It’s There….

Images of Waiting for a Star to Fall out and about in the world lately, including in the company of a couple of excellent mugs.

March 2, 2022

Gleanings

• It has long been said that good fences make good neighbours and, sitting in the middle of this pandemic, I am convinced that a nice solid wall might make me a better person, or at least one who loses her temper with her children less often.
• 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.
• These individual stars expand into greater constellations, and it is up to the reader to do their part in piecing them together, recognizing the links and the shapes — in a sense, building the community.
• Here’s the thing about numbers: they measure some things really well. Money coming in and going out, for example. The number of words written, the number of pitches/pieces/novels/poems/whatever you wrote. But they don’t measure everything. 
• It’s hard to settle in. (Understatement). Maybe we’re not supposed to settle in. I’m flitting from book to book, from Twitter to Instagram, from post to post, poem to poem. I don’t have answers; I’m looking for hope. I’m looking for wisdom. I don’t wish for consolation even, but evidence of deep thinking. Evidence of the human and the humane.
• If it was possible to control through monitoring and scrolling and aquiring information, hell, I would have had most of the world’s problems cased.
• “Each piece of paper I cut is a prayer.”
• I woke just before 2 a.m., wondering about Ukraine. Wondering. Rather than going downstairs in the dark to sit in front of this screen, doom-scrolling, I listened.

March 1, 2022

Sorrow and Bliss, by Meg Mason

Meg Mason’s novel Sorrow and Bliss is as wide ranging as its title suggests, ostensibly the story of one woman’s experience over decades with an unspecified mental illness, which is to say that it’s also a novel about family, relationships, work, intergenerational trauma, growing, learning, falling, stopping. It’s about mothers and sisters, cousins and aunts, one particularly loathsome ex-husband, and pregnancy and motherhood, and medicine, and mental health, and about Martha’s marriage, to Patrick who has loved her since she was 14, a solid home that Martha has finally managed to burn down.

I loved this book, even though it was also a series of gut punches, so terrifically heartbreaking, but also wondrously funny, and Martha’s point of view is why we stick around as readers, and why those who love her have persisted for so long, so matter her propensity to be difficult. Except that point of view is so fixed that Martha can’t really see how others see her, and isn’t very perceptive of their situations either, in particularly her husband whom she’s never properly regarded as a fully developed character, but instead just another player in the drama of Martha’s life.

This is a novel that channels Woolf, and Didion, and Where’d You Go Bernadette?, but also manages to be itself in the most refreshingly original way. So breezy (this is Martha’s charm, see) that the reader can almost forget the emotional stakes of it all, which is so much, and therein lies the novel’s power.