In the record-breakingly cold first week of 2018, when the Atlantic Coast was shivering under the dramatically named “weather bomb” and all sane people were inside watching and rewatching The Office on Netflix, I took a brief solo trip to Quebec City. I have lived in Montreal for eight-and-a-half years and have travelled, in that time, to places as far flung as London, Paris, Rome, Salzburg, Munich, New Orleans, and San Francisco, but for some reason I kept putting Quebec off—maybe taking the proximity of its quaint hilly streets for granted, the way you might take the CN Tower for granted if you grew up in Toronto, or find your senses dulled to staggering beauty if you grew up in a mountain village. And although my days in Montreal are now numbered and I am visited periodically by a desire to seize them, even this trip was a sort of back-up plan. All fall I had been planning a Christmas excursion to Sicily, but despite doggedly repeating online flight searches like an unrequited lover fruitlessly refreshing her inboxes, the holiday prices ultimately got the better of me and Quebec City it was.

I took the train, an impossibly early morning train from Montreal, in which I was seated across the aisle from a family of Anglophone tourists. I pretended to read but really watched them out of the corner of my eye—four of them squished around a table, two parents and two children, sleepy-eyed, travel accoutrements spilling from their bags. Cross-legged in my throne-like single seat, I felt like a surreptitious spy from the world of solitude.

The train car was silent except for the children’s low voices. The older brother spouted impressive trivia in the forward-facing seat. The younger sister made charming observations in the backward-facing seat. Both wore snow pants, though they had taken off their jackets. The girl’s feet didn’t reach the ground. Both spoke in a tone that suggested they were aware of an audience other than their parents—slightly affected, slightly abashed, as though they knew exactly what characters they were playing. The parents communicated mainly in looks and gestures. “Did you sleep at all?” the mother asked quietly. I was staring, now, away from them, out the window at the promising orange glow on the horizon, but I could feel the father’s answer—no—as he closed his eyes and pushed back into his seat, and hers, a soft, sympathy-laden sigh.

“I miss Montreal,” the girl said wistfully, about twenty minutes after we had left the station.

An ache of longing stretched through me. To be a child again!

As we sped through the snowy dawn, the mother rummaged in her bag for snacks. The father sipped coffee and dozed. The children played cards. The mother read emails on her phone, holding it, as my own mother does, too close to her face. I gathered, as she commented on some of her messages, that she was a university professor. She had short, boxy grey hair, and after she had spoken several times I realized with a jolt how much she reminded me of the professor whose office had been across the hall from mine last year, who had been unbelievably kind to me in an utterly matter-of-fact way, and whose friendliness I never thought I returned enthusiastically enough. I pictured their house: one of those old Toronto houses with a renovated interior, homework and snack paraphernalia littering the marble countertops, comfort and routine radiating from the pot lights.

When we finally pulled into Quebec, the production of their winter dressing made me feel as warm as if I’d put on all those clothes myself, and as lonely as if I was, yet again, in a strange city with nowhere to be, no one to see, no one to notice if I fell face first in a snowbank or spoke perfect French to a server. No one to admonish me if I spent all day in bed or to applaud if I walked around in the cold for a whole afternoon without complaining.

I strained my ears to catch the last fragments of their easy intimacy, the children’s vocalized musings, the synthetic rustle of their snowsuits as they trailed behind me down the train platform, and then I walked away from them, at my own pace, out into the frigid morning.

**

It was very, very cold, but I was determined not to let the 40-50ish-degree temperature difference between Quebec and Sicily put me off exploration, and so I dropped my things at the B&B, layered up, and immediately trudged off to the Old City. Christmas, here, had not gotten the message that its hour was past, and it looked as though the Grinch had pawned off all of Whoville to the bright, overstuffed tourist shops. Carols met discordantly in the air from all directions. For some reason, teenaged couples abounded—fresh-faced youths in stylish hats holding hands with self-conscious pride. Huge clans of Chinese and Japanese tourists blocked entire streets as they posed for photos, phones on selfie sticks waving like lighters at a concert. Impeccably dressed pairs of older women speaking French strolled nimbly over the packed snow. Restaurants boasted of hot chocolate and, strangely, ice cream. On one patio, a man with a cigarette dangling from his lips pushed a snow blower methodically. It spouted a thin, wet spray onto the street, like a sprinkler in the summer.

Touristy areas in cities remind me uncomfortably of little Disney Worlds. This time in Quebec, the Old City forcefully recalled the French Quarter in New Orleans—which should actually be unsurprising, given their histories. Walking up and down the narrow, colourful, beery streets in New Orleans two summers ago, I thought as hard as I could and was able to imagine—just—the neighbourhood as it would have been in Tennessee Williams’s time, its appeal to someone like William Faulkner. The tropical whimsy, the shutters and railings, the way the light hit the low buildings in the late afternoon: I could imagine this inspiring art. But it took some serious mental reconstruction, and such focus was hard to summon as I negotiated the pools of sweaty tourists flowing from one air-conditioned doorway to the next. These cities, of course, are not to be blamed for the sham, and neither are people to be blamed for wanting to visit them. But they feel like open movie sets far more than real places where anyone lives or works. In Quebec, I kept expecting one of the characters from Game of Thrones to come charging up behind me, or maybe a dad-like actor in a Santa suit to round a corner amid a swarm of camera and sound crew. These are staged worlds, and that feels, to me, like a deep loss.

**

The feeling that I had visited a pretty, historical snow globe that afternoon lingered as, back at the B&B later, I peeled down to leggings and a turtleneck and settled in for a long night (it was only 4:30pm as I slid into bed) of TV and reading. And this impression powerfully informed my responses to the show and book I was working through at the time, which also depict highly aestheticized, self-contained worlds—intensified, sharpened versions of what a certain reality might have been like. Heather O’Neill’s The Lonely Hearts Hotel and Amy Sherman-Palladino’s The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel are both, in their ways, female Künstlerromans—stories of artistic maturation—but their fairy-tale-like settings enclose and protect the heroines so that their hardships are reassuring rather than disturbing to observe—like tiny, handmade blizzards.

The Lonely Hearts Hotel is a simultaneously heartbreaking and uplifting story set in Depression-era Montreal. Two extraordinary orphans, Pierrot and Rose, fall in love as lonely, mistreated children with sumptuous imaginations. Both are talented performers and dream of one day staging a show of their own, which they will call the Snowflake Icicle Extravaganza. But they are separated: Pierrot is sent to live in an opulent Westmount mansion as a companion to an elderly gentleman, and Rose is sent to live in an opulent Westmount mansion as a nanny to a pair of children. After these tastes of inconceivable luxury, both end up destitute, and must learn to navigate Montreal’s hard-scrabble criminal underworld. Rose’s employer turns out to be a gangster who keeps her as his mistress; after she breaks free, she stars for a brief period in early pornographic films. When Pierrot’s elderly companion dies, he is cast out onto the street and finds himself sleeping on a park bench, earning just enough money by playing the piano to feed his heroin addiction. The orphans’ love for one another serves as a kind of guiding light through these dark passages, however, and they are eventually reunited. They marry, and work together to mount, at last, their dreamed-of show, which is met with great success in New York City. Pierrot and Rose’s lives are almost comically depressing, but the wide-eyed tone of O’Neill’s narration makes their story palatable—as indeed their own wide-eyed confrontation of the impossibly trying world around them would have, if they could have existed, made their realities palpable, too.

O’Neill is a master stylist, and for a sweet-toothed lover of similes like me, reading her prose is like walking past the dessert tables at a lavish buffet. Sometimes I am diligent enough to write down my favourite phrases and images, and when that becomes too cumbersome I might take pictures with my phone of the passages I want to remember—though in any O’Neill book even that comes to feel as overambitious and ultimately futile as photographing striking flowers in a botanical garden. Here’s an example: “It was hailing outside, as if a bottle of lozenges had fallen over on the shelf.” And another: “The white ships docked in the port were like wedding cakes on display in a baker’s window.” And (I always take one Nanaimo bar too many at the dessert buffet) another: “When the evening came, a black bat flew by, like the charred remains of a burned will.” And, last one—one of my favourites: “The fat, middle-aged women were all dressed in black at the funeral, like a group of cello cases abandoned backstage during a performance.”

What is particularly interesting in these examples is that the images through which O’Neill reimagines her subjects—the “vehicles” of her metaphors—are generally more extravagant than the subjects themselves. One might expect (though this is certainly not always, or even often, the case in literary writing) that explaining something “in terms of” something else would allow the speaker or writer to make a foreign sensation familiar. But O’Neill tends to do the opposite. I have heard hail more often than I have heard spilling lozenges; I have seen more bats than I have seen charred wills. O’Neill’s similes locate the magical in the mundane. They suggest that lurking beneath our everyday lives is a whole, extraordinary world of giant wedding cakes and mournful cello cases. This world is the one that Rose and Pierrot consolidate on the stage in their Snowflake Icicle Extravaganza.

Rose is by far the more interesting of the two—it is she who really takes charge of their production, though not always in the most honourable of ways—and the novel features a kind of subplot, similar to the main storylines in O’Neill’s previous books, about a young woman finding her voice in a world that is unjustly hostile to her. I admit I was not particularly invested in the principal plot of The Lonely Hearts Hotel—Rose and Pierrot’s separation and eventual reunion—in part because its pitch is so extreme that it is difficult to be surprised by anything that happens. The atmosphere is hyperreal: colours shine a bit too brightly, the edges are a bit too sharp, and poetry explodes from every street corner. And yet this stagey aesthetic works, and is thematically important, in a story about performance. O’Neill’s similes, too, are not merely impressive aesthetic acrobatics, but bolster the novel’s message. Similes are all about translation—one thing is “like” another—and Rose’s project is to “translate” her life into art. She finally comes into her own when she is able to put on a show that makes of her grim reality a glittering “extravaganza.”

In its focus on a feisty young woman who develops her own voice through the “translating” potential of performance, O’Neill’s novel is very similar indeed to Amy Sherman-Palladino’s recent Amazon series, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel. In many ways, Mrs. Maisel’s world is the complete opposite of Pierrot and Rose’s, but the show and book are close kin in their aesthetic excess. The setting this time is late-1950s New York, where Miriam “Midge” Maisel (played delightfully by Rachel Brosnahan) is wealthy, beautiful, vivacious, and living her dream: married to her college sweetheart, she has two children, an elegant Upper West Side apartment, helpful (if interfering) parents, fashionable friends, and the same (perfect) body measurements that she had ten years earlier (she is, now, only 26). Alas, living one’s dream is not necessarily a sustainable enterprise, especially if it depends on someone else, and Mrs. Maisel’s carefully ordered life comes tumbling down when her husband leaves her for his vacuous young secretary, the unfortunately named Penny Pan. Joel Maisel, a weak if harmless man, is by night an aspiring stand-up comedian, and the two stylish Maisels regularly don black turtlenecks and head to an underground club in Greenwich Village where he practices his routine and she watches and takes notes. But it is clear from the very first scene of the show, in which Midge delivers the toast at her own wedding, that she is a much more talented performer than he. When he leaves her—on the eve of Yom Kippur—she drinks a whole bottle of kosher wine, puts on a designer coat over her nightgown, and rides the subway (how plebeian!) downtown. She stumbles drunkenly onstage and delivers a genuinely funny set about her situation, and her life as a stand-up comedian begins.

Joel’s main problem as a comic is that he cannot come up with his own material. He garners some laughs with a stolen bit from Bob Newhart, but falls utterly flat when he tries to tell jokes of his own. (The Newhart bit is about Abe Lincoln on the phone with his press secretary, and I would like to believe in some punning on “phoning it in”…). Midge’s great gift, like Pierrot and Rose’s, is her ability to transform her own, sad situation into art. This is particularly special because she brings a rare woman’s perspective to the largely (at the time almost exclusively) male world of comedy. She wonders, for instance, how women get themselves into bad relationships with cheating, ineffectual husbands, and muses jokingly that maybe it’s the clothing: “the bras and girdles and corsets cut off the circulation to your brain so that you look at your husband and he tells you things and you just… believe them.” She acknowledges that she must “seem a bit angry and deranged,” sharing her feelings so openly, but she assures her audience that she is “still a lady, and a lady never kicks men in the balls for longer than twenty seconds because otherwise the girdle starts to draw blood.” During her first performance two police officers raid the club and arrest her for public indecency (she bares her top for the audience, snarling, “You think Bob Newhart’s got a set of these at home?”), and performing without a cabaret license—but unlike Joel, at least she did not steal.

The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel brings the saturated, dollhouse, Fall Fair aesthetic of Gilmore Girls’s Stars Hollow to New York City. It often looks as though the extras are about to break into song—and in fact (somewhat to my horror) sometimes they actually do. But although I prefer to consume my Mad Men and my Gilmore Girls in separate courses, once again, as in The Lonely Hearts Hotel, this over-the-top, theatrical setting is thematically important. Midge Maisel not only learns to transform her life into art, but also to find something truer in her performance than she had in her (former) reality. The show insistently highlights the ways in which the women in Midge’s circle are constantly acting, playing roles they did not write themselves. Every night, for example, Midge waits until Joel is asleep and then sneaks into the bathroom to don face cream and hair curlers, which she then removes before he awakes, so that he will assume her “made up” face is her real one. Throughout her early development as a comedian, she moves from the highly performative world of her real life toward the raw honesty she is able to capture, at her best, on stage.

Midge Maisel does not face sentimental gangsters or jealous nuns as Rose does, but the expectations she must escape—her own, her Jewish parents’, New York’s, patriarchal society’s—are just as overwhelming. In both stories, the young women are first forced to forge their own paths by external circumstances—separation in Midge’s case, destitution in Rose’s—but they quickly come to enjoy cutting through the thick brambles of other people’s assumptions about them. Everyone wants Rose to be a meek flower, arm candy, a prostitute, a tragic orphan, and she becomes instead a dancer, a showrunner, even a drug-runner. Likewise, most people in Midge’s world want her to be helpless, to need a man, to wait at home while he lives his public life, to make a brisket while he takes the stage, but instead she finds satisfaction, and herself, in the spotlight.

Stories like these are crucial. Children, no matter their gender, should be surrounded by tales of heroes and especially heroines who slough off expectations and stride confidently in pursuit of their dreams. That said, both The Lonely Hearts Hotel and The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel left me feeling a little unsatisfied—not because they didn’t achieve exactly what they set out to achieve within the parameters they laid out for themselves, but because those parameters enclose canvases that are just a little too small and depict journeys that are, dare I say, just a little too simple. Of course, nothing about Rose’s life is easy. But she is depicted throughout as “a girl alone in a land where everybody was a cross between the Big Bad Wolf and Puss in Boots.” And for me, this limits the impact of her story. Even as the fairy-tale counterparts suggest disorienting duplicity, they are also easily categorizeable—and less threatening as a result. Midge, for her part, compares herself to Sleeping Beauty, rudely awoken to the feebleness of her prince. This awakening would be unpleasant, to be sure, but she is still Sleeping Beauty, held captive in the peppy realm of the show where every bright dress, dazzling song, and snappy line of dialogue assures us of her impending success.

Both novel and TV series are comforting rather than inspirational, for me. I want to be like Rose and Midge; I, too, want to transform life into art, to say something in a public, meaningful way. “I don’t mind being alone,” Midge’s friend and mentor, Susie, tells her; “I just do not want to be insignificant.” This might serve as a credo for all three of us. But I wonder if, despite the fact that my life is, or has been thus far, astronomically freer than either of theirs, it might also be just a little harder to achieve significance out here in the big, complicated, blustery real world.

**

Hours later in the B&B in Quebec City, after a long, cozy stretch of reading and watching, I got up to brush my teeth and get ready for bed. I was nearly alone in the house. My big second-storey room had heavy wicker furniture and walls painted a saturated sunny yellow and two tall windows overlooking the city. I paused to look outside on my way to the bathroom. We were up on a hill and the faint outline of a church was just visible in the distance, even now in the snowy dark. City lights twinkled around it. In the morning, the grey rope of the St. Lawrence would appear on the horizon, past the snow-covered roofs. Cones of yellow streetlight showed the snow coming down thick and fast. As I stood there holding my toothbrush I was seized by a sudden, momentary desire to go out. I was glad to be indoors, but the air in my room was stuffy. I imagined inhaling the fresh, damp night, making the first set of tracks on the glistening street below.

I thought about snow globes. Their pretty scenes, the contained chaos of their storms, the lazy grace of those last few miniature flakes belatedly falling. Is it better to be inside or out? The snow whirled on the other side of the glass.

**

One more thing. Funnily enough, I did see that family from the train again. It was about lunchtime—three hours or so after we had arrived in the city—and I was rounding the corner of the Chateau Frontenac, off of what would, in summer, be a boardwalk. I was bent double into the wind, driving forward like a mule pulling a plough and holding my hood rather ineffectively with one hand. I had walked around the whole building peering through doors that were exits not entrances at demure, newspaper-reading people in the hotel bar, thinking that I would happily pay whatever exorbitant price they asked for a cup of tea in exchange for a place to sit. But I suppose the hotel had anticipated other riff-raff having the same idea, because the space was for guests only. So I was heading back out onto the street to seek shelter elsewhere when suddenly there they were, clattering along in their boots, bumping shoulders comfortably in their puffy winter coats. Recognition gushed up inside me, and shyness, too. They seemed a bit worn, or maybe just resolute, and I thought they were probably looking for someplace to eat. The wind nudged them insistently from behind. None of them spoke.

After they passed me, though I didn’t turn around to look, I imagined the mother reaching down to take the little girl’s hand.