September 18, 2024

On Emily-Splaining

People are weird on the internet. A couple of weeks ago, a comment turned up on a post I published more than four years ago about rereading Emily of New Moon, and this commenter was not having it, unleashing a diatribe of scolding. And not even for having stolen a copy of the book from my school library (which would have been fair!), but for having understood Emily within the context of Anne, and for judging a book by its cover. Of my trouble with the drowned barn cats, they wrote “If your delicate modern sensibilities are disturbed by this, well — you need to read other books.” OMG, SERIOUSLY, COMMENTER: DO YOU KNOW WHO I AM?? I have read ALL THE BOOKS. And then they proceeded to answer all the questions I’d posed in my post, which was really really annoying since these were actually the questions I’d had about the books when I was 9, and I’d actually worked most of them out by now. It was more than a little PATRONIZING.

But I’m not bringing this all up so you can be indignant along with me. (Okay, I am A LITTLE BIT). But instead because I also really understood where this annoying person was coming from—and perhaps this is why I’m especially indignant because I’m just the same. To ASSUME that you could explain L.M. Montgomery to ME! And I understand that there is a whole community of Montgomery scholars and historians, and they even have a society, and that’s fine, but I’m still quite sure that nobody there could have the connection to Montgomery and her work that I do. I’m entirely wrong about this, just in case that needs stating, but it doesn’t matter, because my connection to Anne and to L.M. Montgomery’s story feels so fundamental and so personal that it’s impossible to imagine that anyone else could precisely know what I’m talking about when I mention it. And of course they can, but there are parts of the story that were mine alone—my Anne of Green Gables clothespeg doll I bought in Fenelon Falls, the Anne of Green Gables Treasury I absolutely coveted from this folksy store at the mall and saved up for. When I was Anne for Halloween, the copies of the novel that were gifts from my Grandma. The time we were out on a boat with another family, and I asked my mom how Anne and Gilbert managed to make all their children because, according to Anne of Ingleside, they slept in separate bedrooms…

If that commenter is anything like me, they are possessive of their Emily. Other people might have their own Emily stories, but it’s not the same, and it’s the strangeness of these characters we got to know in our most formative years, the way it felt like they were speaking directly to our souls, but other readers were picking up the very same signals. The way that reading seems like such a solitary thing, a private universe, but there are so many of these, and the shock of realizing the connection may not have been quite so intimate after all.

September 16, 2024

The Opposite of a Void

“But I think I’ve finally figured out what literary community means to me and the kind of role I want to play in it, short of making absolutely everybody like me, which sounds exhausting, and that role is—for a few writers every season—to be at least one place where the books I love will have landed.”

My Pickle Me This Digest for September is out now, with a short piece about literary community and the role I’d like to play in it. Free for all readers, and you can read it here!

September 12, 2024

THE WEDDING, by Gurjinder Basran

Gurjinder Basran’s The Wedding begins with a Jane Austen epigraph, which had me supposing this might be an Uzma Jalaluddin-esque modern take on social mores, but set among Sikh-Canadian families instead of in the Muslim-Canadian community that Jalaluddin writes about, and while there’s a bit of that, there’s also none of the formality, which makes for a wild literary adventure, and I loved it. Each chapter moves between the perspectives of family members, neighbours, event staff, and those of Devi and Baby themselves, bride and groom, whose wedding marks the joining of two prominent families in Vancouver. And things are not going well—Baby’s dad is driving a cab to earn extra money to afford the lavish occasion, there are rumours of Devi having cheated on a trip to Las Vegas with a local gangster involves with a shooting that put Baby’s brother in a wheelchair, Baby’s not sure if he ever really loved Devi or if the wedding preparation has turned her into Bridezilla. Meanwhile Devi is considering if she’ll manage to avoid a trap like the marriage between her mother and abusive father. The wedding photographer’s mother has set him up on a date with Baby’s out of town cousin, having written a profile that falsely claims he’s an engineer. Local journalist Priya Deol is doling out love advice, but perhaps needs help of her own. The bigoted neighbour has concerns about the noise, as the wedding unfolds over days, characters considering the role of ritual and tradition, whether the why of it all matters, what it means to listen to one’s heart. A delicious page-turner, but also rich with depth and meaning, The Wedding is a terrific read.

September 11, 2024

Gleanings

• We all know the answers, but we need to hear them again and again. We need to listen to the work, our life’s work, most of all, because it tells us what we’re required to do.
• I’m half Pakistani, and occasionally I wonder if it’s odd that this expresses itself almost exclusively through food. Is it odd? Is it enough? Is it okay to only express part of who you are in a highly specific way?
• I know, some of us are the gatherers. The ones who reach out and invite and create the space. And some of us are the gathered. The ones that say yes, that show up, that ask, that listen, that learn. Our tables need to be filled with both. Maybe we need to try the one that’s harder for us … or not.
• In the breaks between death defying formation stunts; modern fighter jets screeching across the sky; the stately elegance of the Lancaster bomber; and lifesaving waterbombers scooping Lake Ontario and regurgitating it back, we discussed this weird fascination we share and how at odds it is with our environmental and political views.
• Nearly 100 years after Mrs. Dalloway was published, I sat on a bench and felt chills all over my body. What is this terror, what is this ecstasy. What was it? Something had happened to me beyond what was intellectual, and beyond what was emotional. It was, I concluded, so spiritual I could not put words to it.
• When my mom finally sold the house and the smell became very rare, I finally became able to smell it—there’s a few items and areas in my mom’s current place that contain it, certain cupboards I stick my head in and sniff and remember.
• This morning, at the beginning of my swim, a little silver trout jumped out of the water just beyond where I was heading, the curve of its body an opening parenthesis to my thinking.
• The cold, hard, truth about enjoying a spectacularly good day is that it is, simultaneously, someone else’s very worst day.  Life’s Yin and Yang, our shared burden – knowing that the houses of joy and anguish both have revolving doors.  Understanding that as we are born, someone is dying; that as we rise, someone is falling; that as we laugh, someone is crying and that, despite clinging to hope, we cannot end or even pause that cycle – we are all constantly trading places.  
• I’m a very clumsy, generally inactive person but when I’m on the ice, I feel fast and light and strong. Let’s be clear: I’m a terrible skater! I haven’t figured out how to stop yet. But the feeling of being on skates is paralleled only when I’m in the water: where I suddenly understand the strength of my body and the joy in movement.
• Parents understand that the real New Year begins in September, and my mindset has shifted accordingly over the past week. My kids are back in school! The sun is setting earlier each day! What am I doing with my life?!
• What are the values we’ve internalized along the way? We are all part of our varied pasts and upbringing, but there are some values we all (or most of us) subscribe to and which are non-negotiable in our friendships and relationships. Apart from the Dream Big and Laugh out Loud type of superficial exhortations, I think the underlying message on the placard is: Be someone who others can respect and trust. Be considerate. Be genuine and kind. Be a person of integrity.

• Will ‘we’ tolerate not having bananas? Will i be able to grow bananas in New England?

September 10, 2024

DEATH AT THE SIGN OF A ROOK, by Kate Atkinson

I didn’t know I liked detective fiction until I read Case Histories in 2005 (apparently purchased with a gift token I got for my 26th birthday!), following up my introduction to Kate Atkinson with her stunning, award-winning debut Behind the Scenes at the Museum, but I have been devoted to Jackson Brodie ever since, and the book turned me on to the genre in general, a genre of which Atkinson is very aware in this latest Brodie instalment, Death at the Sign of the Rook. And it’s true that self-aware detective fiction is having a moment. Maybe it’s not a golden age, exactly, but I’m thinking about Knives Out and Glass Onion, and Richard Osman novels, Only Murder in the Building. Death at the Sign of the Rook begins with a murder mystery weekend at a great house, Brodie himself turning up (there has been a snowstorm and he’s stranded) along with the team of actors playing the parts, and can you imagine what it would be like to run a murder mystery with Jackson Brodie in the room? Atkinson has talked about writing this book in lockdown and her desire to have some fun with the experience, which makes this a lighter Jackson Brodie than we’ve encountered for a while. What leads to the great house begins with a series of art thefts in Northern England, Ilkley, specifically, which is one of my favourite English towns (and which I only visited in the first place because I’d read about Betty’s in a Jackson Brodie novel, and Ilkley is the closest Betty’s location to where my UK family lives. And on my first visit there, I learned about Ilkley’s wonderful Grove Bookshop, which shows up in the novel twice!). Private Detective Jackson Brodie takes the case, and it overlaps with another case in which his protege Reggie Chase has worked, both cases also linked by vintage detective novels left at the scenes by a Agatha Christie-esque author called Nancy Styles. There’s a wacky family of aristocrats (as well as a reference to eccentric Englishmen not being as great as they seem, and Hugh Grant having a lot to answer for), a mysterious elder-carer (with a big bag), a vicar who has lost his faith and his voice, two sets of twins, a former soldier with PTSD and a prosthetic limb, and a murderer on the loose. And like everything Atkinson writes, the scale and pace are Shakespearean, references range from classical to contemporary, everything is just a little absurd, everyone so achingly human. I loved it.

September 9, 2024

My Stacky Authors

This weekend, Kate Atkinson joined an esteemed group of writers when her latest, Death at the Sign of the Rook (review to come! RAVE!), found its place in my personal library, and I determined that it was time for Atkinson to get stacky, which is what happens to authors who I like too much. And I actually kind of hate it, that I don’t get the pleasure of seeing books by my favourite authors with their colourful spines all in a row, but space is at a premium and I have to make it work (although my husband did recently suggest replacing one of our bookshelves with a taller one! SWOON!), but the only way I can accommodate the necessity of having 13 books by Atkinson on my shelf (does not even include the two of her earlier novels that I didn’t love and got rid of, which rankled the completest in me, but what can you do) is by stacking a bunch of them into a pile.

Which frees up so much space!! Room to breathe!!! Room for more books!! To be one of my stacky authors, really, is one of the largest literary compliments that I could pay you. You’d be in the company of Kate Atkinson, Joan Didion, Margaret Drabble, Jane Gardham, Penelope Lively, Hilary Mantel, Sue Miller (SO MANY L and M AUTHORS!), and Iona Whishaw.

Carol Shields is on the list now (there is more room among the Ss), for the next time shelf space gets tight.

September 3, 2024

The Summer Was An Envelope

The summer was an envelope

packed with photographs

ticket stubs

and ice cream cone wrappers

that say JOY

Waterlogged and gritty

with beach sparkle

smells like sunscreen

Moments to memories

A sacred container

Most precious souvenir

September 3, 2024

AFTER THE FUNERAL, by Tessa Hadley

I’ve never read a Tessa Hadley short story before, just her novels (most recently, Modern Love, and mercifully I still have most of her backlist before me [though they’re not easy to come by—perhaps some of them were never published in Canada?], so I was excited about her new release After the Funeral because it was a Tessa Hadley book at all, and not necessarily because it was a story collection. And then I started reading it and then spent two days walking around exclaiming, “OMG THIS BOOK THIS BOOK THIS BOOK!” because this Tessa Hadley story collection is basically 12 Tessa Hadley novels in one, each story with a ballast that is decades of history and so much perfect detail, and possibly the mind was not meant to handle so much literary goodness in a single sitting or two, because it was seriously overwhelming (and possibly I’m hormonal), but also seriously wonderful, these stories so rich and satisfying, where so much happens, where so much and said and goes unsaid.

These are stories about departures and arrivals, and also odd little intersections that occur somewhere between the two. In a recent New York Times Review of another book, Dwight Garner cited a quotation by John Edgar Wideman, who’d written, “You don’t have to be very smart to write a review of a book of short stories… All you need to say is that some stories in the book are better than others,” but I can’t even say that about this book, because they’re all wonderful. The title story is about what happens to a family after the death of a father, about how long “after the funeral” really can be. In “Dido’s Lament,” Lynette encounters her ex-husband, and reads everything all wrong. “The Bunty Club” is about three sisters, now adult, coming together upon the imminent death of their mother. “My Mother’s Wedding” features the first of a few children in this collection raised by less-than-benign neglect, and the second appears in “Funny Little Snake,” in which a woman encounters her not-so-lovable stepdaughter for the first time and then her even less charming mother. Two adult sisters meet after years of estrangement and pretend not to know each other in “Men.” “Cecelia Awakened” is about a teenage girl on holiday with her parents who finally discerns her separateness from her family, and her family’s separateness from everything else, with gut-punchingly relatable lines like, “Those girls at the next table were silly, but they were worldly, she thought, trying out that world. They were in the world and she and her parents were somehow shut out of it.” In “Old Friends,” a tragedy could possible bring together a couple together, but it turns out the absence of the third in their triangle over pulls them apart. A dream of childhood is still as vivid to a grown man as the present moment in “Children at Chess.” “The Other One” is an epic in under 30 pages, the story of a woman who encounters a figure from her father’s past in an entirely different context. “Mia” is a portrayal of glamour from a teenager’s point of view and finally “Coda,” a lockdown story of loneliness, loss and longing for connection.

Singular, vivid and compelling, every last one of them. This book came out ages ago in the US and UK and I’m glad to finally get a chance to read it. It’s one of my favourite books of the year.

August 28, 2024

Peggy, by Rebecca Godfrey, with Leslie Jamison

The two stories behind Rebecca Godfrey’s novel Peggy are interesting, first the biography of Peggy Guggenheim herself, the iconic art collector from a famous American family, and then Godfrey’s own experience working to complete her novel about Guggenheim before her death from cancer in 2022 and how, when she was unable to do this, her friend Leslie Jamison stepped in to finish the book. But as a reader who knows almost nothing about Peggy Guggenheim and who hasn’t read Godfrey’s work widely (I think I read Under the Bridge a long time ago), neither back story seemed necessarily resonant or pressing to me. Would Peggy be a book I really needed to to pick up?

But then I did, and I couldn’t stop reading.

And I finally understood the weight of Jamison’s task, and what a loss it would have been if this novel had never seen the light of day, because it’s just wonderful, imbued with a kind of magic, rich and artful, the prose full of light and surprises, Peggy Guggenheim so entirely alive on the page. We meet her at the beginning of Chapter 1, “Striped and shot, the tiger lay flat, and I stretched my hungry body across him. He was part treasure, part prey. Though we had so much, I often ignored the chaises and satin chairs, instead gathering my book and lying upon this tattered dead animal.” And it pretty much goes on like that, both extraordinary and so matter-of-fact, Guggenheim’s remarkable experiences including her provenance (“I am the daughter of two dynasties”), that her father went down with the Titanic, her life in 1920s’ Paris, being photographed by May Ray, a love affair with Samuel Beckett, that she was a patron of artists including Djuna Barnes and Emma Goldman, and would build a modern art collection that would become famous throughout the world.

A tragic figure in some ways, Godfrey also shows that Peggy Guggenheim was full of life and spirit, that she would eventually come into her own power, but some losses would never be overcome, and that she was a marvellously imperfect person, beyond ordinary (which is what she so longed to be) but also so achingly human, and that vitality is this novel’s chief appeal, that fiction can seem so real . Even fiction that’s messy and sometimes strange, mistakes and inconsistencies popping up throughout, not overwhelmingly but you notice. At the beginning we learn that Peggy and her sisters were living at the Waldorf-Astoria, but it’s the St. Regis on the following page (and in actuality, according to my internet sleuthing), and initially I was thrown by this—Jamison opted to leave most of Godfrey’s manuscript untouched, to not presume to edit, which seems like a strange call until you come to the line where Peggy is using her eye and describing some Impressionist works to her father: “These paintings look unfinished, but they’re deliberately haphazard.” And then her father points to the paintings and tells her that “all [she] need[s] to know…is that this is life.”

Peggy Guggenheim made art her life, and her life was art, and so too is this strange, beautiful and heartrending novel. Peggy is such a remarkable literary achievement.

August 20, 2024

SLOW DANCE, by Rainbow Rowell

My friend @meli_mello1 was a Rainbow Rowell fan, and when I was reading Slow Dance this weekend I kept thinking about how unfair it was that she’d never be able to read it, all those things a person is robbed of when she dies at 45 (not least of all, the chance to see her three daughters grow into the people she was raising them to be). The unfairness of this inspiring me to once again sign up for the Turning the Page on Cancer Readathon, for which I’m hoping to raise $1000 for Rethink, supporting young women diagnosed with metastatic breast cancer. I hope you will consider supporting my efforts!

And wow, SLOW DANCE, just a beautiful, impossible, agonizing-at-times love story about two messed up weirdos who everybody always assumed were together in high school, but they were just friends. “Just friends” who were everything to each other, and so terrified of communicating that truth and daring to take things any further for fear of messing it all up and wrecking everything that they mess it all up and wreck everything. They both have different dreams of how they’re going to make it out of their North Omaha neighbourhood, Shiloh through Broadway stardom, and Cary through a career with the Navy, and how to weave those dreams together seems absolutely unworkable, and then they don’t even speak for 14 years until a reunion at their friend Mikey’s wedding, Shiloh divorced and a mother of two, Cary still dealing with his dysfunctional family, Shiloh living back at home with her mom. It’s like nothing has changed, but also everything has changed, and will it be possible for these two to find a way forward (particularly as they’re both determined to fling obstacles in their way so they won’t ever have to stumble upon such a thing unaware).

I loved this book. I loved these characters. A time machine, without the metaphysics. How did we get from there to here, and where are we going after?