Reflections on living through a pandemic, seven months in.*

Here is what it is like:

You can go for bike rides and walks just like any other summer. I will remember this summer as: sitting on a bench in Cedarvale Park at dusk, the low light through the willow fronds at sunset along a certain stretch of the waterfront trail in Mississauga, the eerie loon-howls of coyotes in a small ravine, a woman calling for her cat in the dark. You can eat vegan pizza on a balcony and drink Chardonnay from plastic cups on a rock. You can watch raccoons ravage the grapevines from the porch with your neighbours. You can run along the lake to Mimico and eat hibiscus gelato on Queen Street. You can edit essays in the park while nannies run after toddlers in the splash pad and twelve-year-old boys discuss a girl called “Maddy” on the swings. This summer is new configurations.

Here is what it is also like:

For ten days in May there are tall metal fences and angry signs around all the cherry blossoms in the city; I will be fined $750 if I approach. One Sunday afternoon I am running up a sidewalk and a man yells at me, “You’re supposed to be on the other side—stupid!” There is no sidewalk on the other side of the street, but people are on edge; bodies and tempers alike must be given a wide berth. “Don’t stand so long over the bananas,” a woman snaps in No Frills. “Can I have your number?” a patio server asks me, and I feel confused until I realize it is for contact tracing. One day I have a curbside pickup at the library double-booked with a work Zoom meeting, so I leave myself muted while I dart across the street, where a woman in a mask hands me a paper bag of books; every element of this scenario would, eight months ago, have been inconceivable. The American president wanted to rip open his shirt to reveal a Superman logo as he dragged his body from the hospital and the Canadian prime minister has urged us, with Dickensian earnestness, to do what we can to save Christmas. People are dying, but they seem far away. On the radio the premier says “my friends, my friends, my friends,” over and over and over again on weekday afternoons, and I wonder if this is what it was like in wartime.

It is like this, too:

I miss going to the movies, the particular bounce of the chairs, the hope and grandeur of previews, the air-conditioning on hot days. I miss working in coffee shops, the squeal and hiss of the machines, the way the sun comes in the windows in the mornings. I miss bars, and malls, and my cubicle at work. I miss the subway. I miss being in audiences. I miss menus. I miss cooking for friends. I miss never knowing what background music to put on when company comes over. I miss running my hands over sweaters in the store. I miss running quick errands on my way home. I miss not knowing what “super spreader events” and “anti-mask rallies” are. I miss anonymity; I miss who I was, and wasn’t, in a crowd. I miss more things than I can remember. I miss all the ease of coming and going, trying and wandering—an ease I sort of knew I had, but couldn’t really understand.

And it is like this most powerfully of all:

The impossible ache of a missing hug, the gap in farewell where touch should be.

In January I was at a birthday party with 80 other people. Already that was the end of something. On March 13 I hugged my friend goodbye—“are we still doing that?” his partner asked from the other side of the room—and I did not touch another human body again for six-and-a-half months. This is not an experiment I recommend. It is sort of like when you haven’t eaten any vegetables or slept or bathed properly throughout a whole exam period, and you’re not going to die or anything but you just disintegrate a bit, only in this case it goes on and on and on and you can’t just buy a salad, you more or less need a friend to break the rules or a stranger from the internet to fall in love with you.

I am flooded with my usual desperate longing to cry out two things at once: I am one of the most independent people you will meet! and Please don’t let me disappear! Pandemic dynamics distort the old discomfort of this tension, which I am as used to wearing as my skin. It’s hard to know whether pain is better if everyone is feeling it, or worse. Most days I think, I am tired of being “in this together.” I want my own story back.

I want to say: please don’t forget about the single people. The people who live alone. I hear how hard it is to be a parent, a partner, a front-line worker, a member of a vulnerable population. I hear you, I really do, and I know how lucky I am. My privilege is staggering. My freedom is unthinkable. We’re all in this together and we’re not together at all, and I’m not really sure what that means on a grand scale, but from my little corner of this hurting, bewildered world I just want to say:

I can’t remember what it’s like to hear another person breathing next to me.

They say we are grieving what could have been, the selves we could have become over these last seven months. I don’t know if it’s grief, but I’m obsessed with this thought: seven months ago I was seven months younger. Being in one’s thirties is about learning that age has consequences, and being in a pandemic is about learning that lockdowns devour time. Spiky little coronavirus particles are out there devastating people’s lungs and I am not allowed to touch anyone except my cats, and somehow—how can this be?—my uterus is becoming more geriatric by the day. Parenthood is not really something I think about or feel ready for but this dilemma, my decaying reproductive system, has turned into a focal point for my own personal fury about the virus’s indiscriminate thievery of time.

And so it is like this: waiting, waiting, bored and tired, often grateful, usually capable, sometimes hopeless, still the self I always am just confined, impatient, trying not to eat too much or ask too much of anyone. Everything is different, and nothing has changed at all.

A spider has created one of those gauzy nest-webs above my office doorway. Perhaps there will be a colony in here by spring. The other morning I taught a class at my desk, talking to 18 sleepy teenagers on the other side of the internet and to one spider, here, with me, running laps in the lamplight. When I pad across the living room mid-morning to wash out my coffee mug in the kitchen, the cat is stretched in a square of sunshine on the floor, and looks at me with wet, comfortable eyes that say, you again. A man on the corner plays the same five songs on his tin whistle over and over, day after day, “Imagine” and “The Sound of Silence,” earnest and out of tune.

One night I heard a flower fall from a bush in the dark. There was a tiny, tired whoosh and plop. In my throat, in the aftermath, my breath caught like a gasp.

*The title of this piece comes from a wonderful blog post by Carrie Snyder, which you can read here.

April 1, 2020

Part 1:

Every time I go outside I feel like I can breathe.

When everything else in my world has stopped, I go outside to move my body. I start the timer on my watch and I run, pushing keenly into a renewed connection with my city and myself. I run, and picture a wake materializing behind me, imagine shedding the sticky film of claustrophobic indoor air. Down a narrow staircase to the park I run, careful not to touch the railing, smiling gratefully when people back into the woods to let me pass. I run along a muddy path by a pond, weaving wide berths around other movers, other runners and walkers and weary parents pointing out wildlife to rainboot-clad toddlers. Plock, plock, plock, go my shoes, like springtime plungers, and I feel released, unbound.

The swans are still haughty, the geese are still indignant, the ducks still waddle purposefully in search of food, and the chipmunks still insist on launching themselves across the path just as I run by. It feels good. The sun looks like spring. It is as I heard a florist say on the radio the other day: “you can’t stop the flowers from blooming.”

During these runs I am wholly present in my place and time, not one week or six weeks or three months into an uncertain future and not two weeks or one month or four months back in a world that will never exist again, but right here, right now, trying to determine if I’ve got a headwind, waiting for my watch to buzz another kilometre, adjusting my tights which have never fit quite right. Such focus is a salve. When no one is looking I wipe my nose decorously with the forefinger of my right glove, cautiously preserved for that purpose. I am striding over roots, leaping over puddles, hoping that my knee doesn’t hurt, registering the sound of highway traffic, which somehow roars on regardless. I am running.

There are no llamas or birdwatching troupes on this path. There are no school groups or tourists with their cameras. The playgrounds and parking lots are closed off, strung with yellow tape and big white signs. People stroll alone or in pairs. I catch fragments of conversation—“he tried twice to get admitted…,” “it’s a rainy day, so…,” “it could be a bacterial…,” “see, that’s a red-winged blackbird…”—and then I’m gone, they’re gone, the interaction ended. One day, a city worker hangs perilously by a rope from a tall tree above the path. “Heads up!” he shouts as a branch crashes down behind me. I keep breathing. I was there to see it.

Part 2:

Every time I go outside I feel like I should hold my breath.

An invisible enemy is everywhere, or so we are told. Spiky particles lie in wait, spreading with insidious intent, as Eliot would have it, leading to those overwhelming questions, how many, how much, how long. Do I dare to touch a doorknob? I’d like to shine a black light on the world, bring all the contaminated surfaces to iridescent life. This would help with the placement of caution tape.

When I am outside I am more conscious than I have ever been of personal space. As soon as I step onto the sidewalk I triangulate my distance from others; like an air traffic controller, I devise a plan for how we will pass. I dislike the rudeness of this. I step into the street when I see someone approaching, and want to cry out, I’m not like this!, but they are already too far away.

As a child I used to play a strange, spy-inspired game with myself when I rode my bike up and down our sidewalk block. I imagined that everyone I passed was releasing a poison that would kill me, and so I had to hold my breath until we had pulled apart. Somehow the impulse lingered into adulthood, a private superstition like picking up pennies or avoiding cracks in the pavement. Who knew this fantasy might one day become, if not actually useful, so eerily real and relevant?

A sidewalk width apart is the closest I have been to another human in weeks.

I feel for families, of course, cooped up with all their overlapping moods and needs, and I feel, too, for everyone whose front-line jobs go on, who interact with others tirelessly in order to pull us all into the future. But there is a different madness in solitude. It is not unpleasant and certainly not unfamiliar to me, but it is, right now, noticeably total and without respite. Will some part of me go feral, I wonder, forget how to react in company, how to laugh, how to touch and be touched?

Every time I go outside I am terribly aware of this—of other people, nearby but far away, everyone just as dangerous and vulnerable as I am. These are people to whom I am connected, as we all perform our aimless laps around the neighbourhood, but also people from whom I must remain apart. Even a sidewalk width is too close, an overstep, a flagrant transgression of official boundaries.

When I go outside I practice physical distancing and I am also closer to other people than at any other time of day or night.

Recapitulation:

Every time I go outside the air smells of that spring cocktail of rotting leaves and grass, of wet earth inhaling. The flowers won’t stop blooming and I just keep moving, moving, away from the stillness of uncertainty, away from people and toward them, full of suspicion and longing, holding my breath as we pass, in concert with the held breath of the world.

I don’t write poetry, I tell everyone who asks.

My name is Laura and I don’t write poetry or do karaoke.

(Did I just accidentally write poetry?)

Why? ask the people who assumed that because I write about poetry, I must also write poetry of my own.

(Why? they ask, assuming that because I was in a choir for many years I must be good at karaoke. I loathe karaoke —though my FOMO is more powerful than my loathing, so please, still invite me to your karaoke birthday parties, just don’t ask me to sing.)

Why don’t I write poetry? I don’t know.

Is it because when I was in grade 11 and accustomed to winning such things, I brazenly submitted entries to both the fiction and poetry categories in my high school writing contest and wasn’t even honourably mentioned for my (almost certainly quite poor) poem? I remember thinking, when the list of winners had been read and I had heard my name only once, not twice (please, don’t hurt your eyes as you roll them), I am not a poet.

Was that it, then? Am I really so fragile, so vain?

Whatever it is, I have never felt compelled—not even then—to write a poem. It is true that when I was nine and ten and eleven years old I used to rollerblade down the hill on our street and pretend I was flying into the sunset, and as I roller-flew I thought Wordsworthian thoughts about sherbet-coloured skies and pink-bellied clouds (mostly I just wanted to be a Lucy Maud Montgomery character; they had a lot to say about the bellies of clouds). And certainly I have felt compelled to write, to find language for what I see, to find eloquent, surprising, relatable expression for what I feel. But I have never felt that only a poem could say what I wanted to say.

I admire poetry profoundly—its concision and precision, its wordplay, its lyricism. I read poems and they knock the wind out of me. I feel awe, and even, sometimes, a palpable inflation of the heart, new feelings accumulating like ants racing towards a puddle of ice cream. I love poetry.

It is entirely possible, even probable, that I am intimidated by poetry, or by poets. That I think, oh I could never do that.

What is “that”?

I would like to know what poetry is, so that I can qualify my answer about not writing it.

Six-and-a-half years ago I went to Salt Spring Island and visited the poet Phyllis Webb. While we waited for our dinner to arrive in the hotel restaurant in Ganges (fresh vegetables plucked from the garden behind the hotel that afternoon, I wrote in my journal later, with the delighted satisfaction of one who has found this Gulf Island to be exactly as she had imagined), I asked Phyllis why she never wrote fiction.

“Do you see the doorknob over there?” she asked. It was a brass doorknob on a window-checkered door that led out to the lobby. “I have no interest in who has touched it, who has come in and out of that door, who put it there. I am just interested in the doorknob as a doorknob.”

This was the most poetic explanation of poetry that I had ever heard.

Now when I see doorknobs I think: do I want to know who has come in and out of that door?

(This kind of navel-gazing thinking might explain why I have written more personal essays and literary criticism than I have either fiction or poetry.)

I don’t understand how you can write about poetry if you don’t write it yourself, a friend said to me as we rambled along a gravel path one thundery summer afternoon. This friend is a poet. I thought perhaps I was being accused of something.

It was strange, like being accused of violence when what you feel is love.

I didn’t have an answer that would help her understand.

Right now I am taking a creative writing workshop. A few weeks ago our homework was to write a poem.

Oh no, I thought.

I procrastinated all week. Finally, the night before, I did it. I took a scene that I had written a few days earlier, about eating cheesecake in a park, and rewrote it in three short stanzas. Basically, it seemed to me, I took out some words and put in some line breaks.

I was pretty sure that this was not writing a poem.

It is also possible that my previously written scene already was a poem.

Have I been writing poems this whole time?

What is a poem?

My winning story in the high school writing contest was called “In the Garden If You Need Me.” It was about a man named Harold who learns that he has a parasite and will live only three more days. The story takes place on the last day. He eats cornflakes and reads the newspaper, goes back to bed and meditates on his life, and then dies.

I think perhaps this was the most “plot” a story of mine has ever had.

I’m not so good with “plot.” Do I care what happened before there was cheesecake in the park, or after? I think that I do. But do I need to say it? How little can I say and still call it a story?

Do I want to know who has touched the doorknob, who has come in and out of that door? Or do I just care about the doorknob as a doorknob?

When the Canadian writer P.K. Page was having trouble composing poetry in the late 1950s, she jotted down these lines—part of a fragment that remains unpublished:

Write, & imagine a poem that list of trees
if you will, if you want; / the list is still a list
is not dissimilar to the laundry slip

What is the difference between poems, lists of trees, and laundry slips?

One of the reasons (as I say in some of my non-fiction, non-poetry writings) that Page fell into a decade-long period of poetic silence—beginning around the time that she wrote these lines—was that she lost faith in her own authority as a poet. A fundamental condition for writing poetry is that the poet must be able to “imagine,” as Page says here, that what she is writing can be a poem.

So what is a poem?

One answer is that a poem is what you believe it to be.

It is as simple and as maddening as that.

I don’t believe I have been writing poems this whole time. But if I did believe it, maybe, at least in some cases, I would have been.

To be clear, I am still Laura and I still don’t write poetry.

But.

In November 2019, the Globe and Mail published an essay of mine in their “First Person” section. It was republished in August 2020 as one of the five most-read essays of the year.

It is about a strange experience that I had at the Canada-US border, but also — and more importantly — about being a woman travelling alone through the world, the assumptions she must navigate, and the simultaneous privilege and burden of self-sufficiency. It was originally titled “There’s Someone in No One.” Read it here!

On my last birthday, in May 2017, I decided I needed a project for the year ahead. A kind of low-stakes, easily achievable project. I was, after all, entering my thirties, and it seemed as though the time had come for something a little more sedate than writing dissertations or racing Ironmans. So—the solution was simple—I decided that I would keep track of all the books I read between that birthday and the next one. The year is now up, and the results are in!

It was an exciting year in my reading life, because for the first time in a long time, I was not totally committed to academic and work reading. Between my previous two birthdays (2016-17), I taught nine (9!) university literature classes, so almost all of my reading was class prep. This year, I taught just four classes, which just happened to involve much less reading. So I was free to meander! I was interested to note in retrospect, though, how much the list still shows the effects of my teaching: many of my favourite writers and time periods are absent, because I had already spent a lot of time with them in the classroom. More positively, the list shows the clear influence of some of my favourite book conversationalist friends. In a year when I was restless to wander and hungry for recommendations, I was more grateful than ever for their enthusiasms and insights.

The list below is also a little skewed because I only recorded full books; I also, of course, read many articles, essays, poems, and especially short stories, which I was not diligent enough to track. I often ramble in and out of story collections and The New Yorker in between more ambitious reads, and when chance or nostalgia leads me to poetry I greet it like an old friend or a favourite sweater in the fall.

I finished almost every book I started; a few unfinished titles are listed here but not included in my “statistics” for the year. I wrote a very brief and very rough comment for each book immediately upon finishing it, mostly intended as personal reminders of my own impressions. These are copied here almost directly, in their original fragmentary form (except for a few editorial comments in square brackets); this will probably make them distinctly unsatisfying to read, so feel free to ask for more fully formed thoughts if you’re interested. Keeping more cogent reviews will be a goal for another year.

**

Some statistics:

–I read 62 full books this year. I also read one book (The Handmaid’s Tale) a second time in preparation to teach it. Three other books were for teaching, and three were in preparation to write a book review for Canadian Literature.

–The list includes 29 books by men (two by J.D. Salinger) and 33 books by women (four by Alice Munro, two by Rachel Cusk, and two by Heather O’Neill)

–I have read only books by women in 2018 so far—this started out as a coincidence, and became a goal. It was not at all hard to do.

–I read 46 books between May and December 2017 and 16 between January and May 2018. The biggest reading months were July 2017—eight books, probably because I spent two weeks alone at my parents’ house with no internet, patchy phone service, and a dock over a river on which to read in the sun—and November 2017, probably because I read four work-related books and several very short novels. The lightest reading month was March 2018, only two books, probably because I spent two weeks preoccupied by navigating the Toronto apartment rental market (the opposite of a dock in the sun).

–I read 19 books by Canadian authors this year.

–The list includes 48 books of fiction (nine of them short story collections), 4 books of non-fiction (including two memoirs; I did not include, however, the bulk of my class reading, which would fall into this category), 5 graphic novels, 3 collections of poetry, and 2 plays.

–The books were published between 1817 and 2017. There are 8 from the 1800s, 30 from the 1900s, and 24 from the 2000s.

My favourites? This is hard to say. I appreciate books for diverse reasons, usually to do with elegance, originality, precision, and big-heartedness. My preferred authors tend to be those who teach me something about writing. In any case, ten titles I’d definitely recommend, with few to no reservations, in no particular order, are:

Katherena Vermette, The Break
Rachel Cusk, Transit
Jay McInerney, Bright Lights, Big City
Garth Greenwell, What Belongs to You
Jane Austen, Persuasion
Alice Munro, Who Do You Think You Are?
James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room
J.D. Salinger, Nine Stories
Heather O’Neill, Lullabies for Little Criminals
Lydia Davis, Varieties of Disturbance

**

And so, here are the books I read during my thirty-first journey around the sun. Tell me what you think! Have you read any of these titles? Do you want to? What else should I read? What should my reading goals be this year?

May 2017:

Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep — [For my Twentieth-Century Novel class;] amazing similes which could be clunky and decadent but aren’t (“I was as empty of life as a scarecrow’s pockets.” “The purring voice was now as false as an usherette’s eyelashes and as slippery as a watermelon seed.” !)

James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room — Also for class; I want to write sentences as elegant as Baldwin’s [this has recently become the book I recommend to everyone when asked (and when not)]

 

June 2017:

Alice Munro, Who Do You Think You Are? — Rose is a remarkable central character; the early stories in the collection are better; Munro asks: what parts of our identity are “real,” and what parts are performed, and what if these are the same, in the end? [this is one of the enduring questions of her oeuvre]

Christopher Cameron, Dr. Bartolo’s Umbrella, and Other Tales from My Surprising Operatic Life — Read voraciously immediately after grading exams; beautiful similes; the word “stentorian” repeated several times (appropriately operatic); above all, the fleshing out of characters vaguely imagined in childhood; read with a spreading sense of relief that it [my father’s book] was as good as I assumed it would be

Patricia Highsmith, Strangers on a Train — Psychological thriller, less good—as in, less thrilling—than expected (only previously knowing Mr. Ripley); read at the cottage, on the deck at the new house under construction, finished in Nashville

William Faulkner, The Unvanquished — Read very vividly in Mississippi, at the bar (bartender said: “I’ve seen a lotta people reading a lotta Faulkner in here but I’ve never seen anyone reading that one”) and on a bench in the central square in Oxford (where Luster takes Benjy the wrong way around the monument), playing chicken with a thunderstorm to finish the penultimate story before the downpour, finished in a rocking chair on a porch by the tiger-lilies in front of the gothic Tennessee Williams inn [where I stayed] in Clarksdale

Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood — Encountering others’ skepticism while reading is an interesting experience—the boy in the airport, the boy in the bar, everyone who saw me reading it had an opinion and those opinions weren’t favourable (“it’s not my favourite Murakami” they both said; they probably use that on all the girls); read in San Francisco, including at the Vesuvio Café; absorbing, but his protagonist is too un-self-aware, and I’m not so sure the girl is believable (but maybe because she’s filtered through the un-self-aware protagonist’s gaze?)

*William Faulkner, The Hamlet — half-read in San Francisco, Toronto, and Montreal; very good but long and rambling; decided to take an indefinite hiatus while Ike Snopes pursues his cow (meticulously documented)

 

July 2017:

Alice Munro, Friend of My Youth — Alice Munro at middle age; stories of womanhood, affairs, and divorce; how can she feel so much and sweep it all into thirty pages?

J.D. Salinger, Franny and Zooey — Read quickly, marvelling at Salinger’s detailed blocking and conversation (as in, theatrical); Buddhism and finding Christ; I don’t mind the pretentiousness of the Glasses; a little boring while reading but strangely missed when finished

J.D. Salinger, Nine Stories – Hungry for more Salinger (see above); delightful effects, New Yorker story-style and thus maybe a little same-y and facile, but oh they do work

Leonard Cohen, The Favourite Game — Reread alone in Campbellford with no internet; looking for connections to “A Ballet of Lepers”; indeed there are many

Alice Munro, Lives of Girls and Women — Reread also alone in Campbellford with no internet and barely any phone, remembered little about it despite the first-year Canadian Studies essay; delightful old aunts reminiscent of Lucy Maud Montgomery stories; memories of first reading returned in grim sexual awakening stories; interesting female counterpart to Favourite Game

Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale — Read very quickly in two days (also alone in Campbellford, no contact with world etc.); surprisingly suspenseful; typical Atwood; some cheap insights and too-easy patterns but a good (and obviously important) story; to teach or not to teach?

Daphne du Maurier, Rebecca — Read v. quickly also isolated Campbellford etc.; annoying/frustrating narrator (worse because I knew I should like her) who lacks self-confidence (but of course this is the point; be more sympathetic?); despite this, the story lingered… haunting me for days, like… Rebecca herself (!)

Evelyn Waugh, Scoop — Mean (!); how ironic is the racism?? (probably not ironic, which is rather troubling); but funny and entertaining (maybe Ricky Gervais-style, whom I have just seen at Massey Hall?); does William Boot come off okay in the end?; also read quickly in Campbellford, lying on the dock in the sun

*John Updike, Rabbit Run — unfinished; no sympathy whatsoever for Rabbit Angstrom, the high school cool kid gone to seed…

 

August 2017:

Mike Mignola, Hellboy (first volume) — Magic and mythology; I wish I could draw

Alan Moore, V for Vendetta — Very good, surprisingly literary, so much (!!) in common with Atwood (Handmaid’s Tale), too…

Jennifer Egan, A Visit from the Goon Squad — Read all in one go on the train back from New York; not as original as the reviews claim, but readable, smart; linked short stories (not a novel, despite marketing); memorable impressions, especially of the spaces, New York, apartments, offices…

*Henry James, Washington Square — unfinished… will it ever be?; persisted forever (read on a bench in Washington Square, but to no avail); Catherine is really a terribly dull character, whose redeeming qualities are hard to locate, for me, and Morris Townshend is (purposely, admittedly) inscrutable

Frank Miller, The Dark Knight Returns — Old Batman, a reluctant hero story; pretty-boy Superman and young-girl Robin; solid

Art Spiegelman, Maus I & II — Whoa; very depressing, good; engrossing; kind of amazing that he manages to capture all that in black and white mouse drawings (what are the effects of the mice? An easy question; but what were they, for me?)

 

September 2017:

Marjane Satrapi, Persepolis — Basically the same reaction as to Maus, very similar; left thinking: must learn more about Iran. Thus ends a series of graphic novels recommended by Claudine, must read more.

*Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran — unfinished; see ambition above [about Iran]; but actually so similar to Persepolis (and captured in graphic novel with greater impact) that it might have lost some of its effect

George Bernard Shaw, Mrs. Warren’s Profession — Who’s better (/worse), New Woman Virgie or her brothel-madam mother? Is Frank (suitor) likeable? Are any of them? Shaw’s strange spellings and the excessive stage directions: the playwright who wanted to be a novelist; satisfying chat with Alex, who noticed the emphasis on hands (significance? work and capitalism…)

Alice Munro, The Progress of Love — very very (very!) good; complex mature Munro with lots of jumps in time, lists of adjectives like brush strokes, big feelings; especially liked “Monsieur Les Deux Chapeaux”

George Gissing, The Odd Women — Rhoda and Monica were interesting enough characters; is it redeemed (or, gasp, ruined!—which of course would be missing the point) by the lack of marriage?

 

October 2017:

Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure — Not as depressing as everyone says? Or was I just over-prepared? Jude is a good character: Hardy has the (virtuosic) Faulkner ability to inspire sympathy, huge, gut-wrenching sympathy, satire and pathos at the same time. The story lingers, is memorable.

Madeleine Thien, Do Not Say We Have Nothing — Big, sprawling, impressive, sometimes beautiful; to think how much research she must have done, on music, on revolutionary China, and then folding it all in to a family saga with a million different kinds of love, heartbreak; some memorable moments, but perhaps in an impressionistic (rather than stark/vivid) way—like, who dies and when, who is related to whom; I can’t remember (the book is long), but this was okay

Bret Easton Ellis, American Psycho — Does he murder or not? A surprisingly sympathetic character; alas (like so many critics) I did not like the music chapters; but quite an achievement, a la Lolita; also, the 1990s version of Dorian Grey? (end-of-century decadence, criminal misfit… many parallels; read for this reason, with this in mind)

Bram Stoker, Dracula — Uneven, but actually pretty suspenseful; but why are all the women so excluded? Is that… the point? (I hope so! Otherwise… :/ )

Jane Austen, Persuasion — At last!! [supposed to read in class in 2010, didn’t; supposed to read in class in 2011, didn’t; promised self to read by Anne Elliot’s age of 27 or by end of PhD, didn’t, so, too old & two years past PhD, at last] Occasionally a little boring, but very good tension between Anne and Wentworth—how does Austen do it?; first reactions were to wonder about the point of Lady Russell and to appreciate, perhaps despite myself, Captain Benwick; very good discussion with Megan, who talks so fluidly of Austen and answered many questions (ie. point of Lady Russell, problems with Captain Benwick, pronounced “Bennick”…)

 

November 2017:

Oscar Wilde, Salome — Interesting, liberated, short, Biblical

Sheri Fink, Five Days at Memorial: Life and Death in a Storm-Ravaged Hospital — To teach in the Business Writing course. A mammoth account of the events that transpired at Memorial Hospital in New Orleans—alleged euthanasia (or, lethal doses of morphine) of the sickest patients—in the desperate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Too big and unwieldy as a book (too many characters), but it sets out to raise big ethical questions, and the unwieldiness is part of that

F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and the Damned — Such lovely writing, as always; Fitzgerald has a big heart; though maybe lacks range—Anthony basically is Dick [Diver]. This one ranks after Tender and Gatsby; while enjoyable, also so depressing it’s hard to read at times…

Kurt Vonnegut, Cat’s Cradle — Recommended by Claudine as My First Vonnegut (!); fast-paced, ironic, often funny; Bokononism; the cat’s cradle is the meaninglessness of everything. Is there hope??

Garth Greenwell, What Belongs to You — Recommended by Toby (fastest following up of a recommendation ever: bought and begun next day, finished three days later); lyrical; the intense connection between the narrator and Mitko beautifully rendered; Greenwell makes us urge him out of his situation as we would a friend—we sympathize—and we feel his pain as he tries so hard to be kind; very [James] Baldwin, very much a contemporary Giovanni’s Room, right down to the American abroad trying to shake his past

Mary Shelley, Frankenstein — As with Persuasion: at last! + another excellent discussion with Megan whose thoughts open doors; best part definitely the Creature’s story in the middle; easier to read than I expected: easy to see why it’s taught all the time: defining Romanticism… Also, read on the first properly wintry weekend of the year, on couch, under duvet.

Shane Neilson, Complete Physical, On Shaving Off His Face, Dysphoria — Three volumes of poetry for a Canadian Literature review. Interesting experiments writing about illness and grief, giving eloquent voice to patients, sometimes in counterpoint with doctors.

H.G. Wells, The War of the Worlds — Not very memorable; also not what I was expecting (not Tom Cruise—why was I expecting this??); but impressive considering the originality at the time—imagine imagining aliens in the 1890s, and describing them for the first time ever, no movies for reference…

Zadie Smith, Swing Time — Compelling, but too long ([successful] contemporary novelists need harsher editors! No need to write so much!), occasionally heavy-handed; vivid descriptions of Africa and pop culture redeem it; she gets away with too long because she’s a good storyteller

 

December 2017:

Octavia Butler, Kindred — Very interesting concept—time-travelling to the era of slavery, as a black woman—and compelling, but much more YA than I was expecting; also very 70s/80s, had the feeling of a Raymond Carver / John Updike / Stephen King story, but with feminism. Good for high school students.

Philip Roth, American Pastoral — Also too long, too many long confused meditations; seems obvious we should not side with the Swede, but then, how many Americans probably would? Interesting that it can probably be read straight or ironically, to totally different effect; wondering, thinking of [student] Emily’s essay, are accusations of misogyny fair? [no conclusive answer, but her essay on the topic was well done] As with the Fitzgerald, the big heart behind the story is palpable; it feels as though these characters have real lives

Muriel Spark, A Far Cry from Kensington — So delightful, sarcastic; there’s a sort of cheap surface-level mystery story but lots more besides that too; above all the novel is interested in judgment (literary and personal—more importantly personal): what does it mean to form judgments of others?

Teju Cole, Open City — Meditative, often interesting, but (too) often lost me, very dark; about genocide, pain; very interesting decision that Julius did a terrible thing and forgot about it, and Cole leaves this quite un-dealt with, which made the ending unexpectedly impactful

Jay McInerney, Bright Lights, Big City — Quite good; (impressive) second-person narration; the world of American Psycho but a more (obviously) sympathetic protagonist (with a cool fact-checking job…); left wondering: how do they all have enough money for so much cocaine???

Elizabeth Taylor, Angel — Didn’t terribly like it, much to my disappointment; read at Christmas and kept failing to focus; Angel was annoying, but not in a way that really inspired sympathy—just a sad story of a sad person who lives in a fantasy world and fails to connect with anyone… (is this assessment inspired by my own mood?)

 

January 2018:

Heather O’Neill, The Lonely Hearts Hotel — Not sure what I think; incredible similes, as ever with O’Neill; the story didn’t really hold my attention, perhaps because Pierrot and Rose were such fairy-tale characters; but the end packs three quick punches—last 70 pages read breathlessly under a too-bright light in a chain coffee shop in Quebec City while the snow fell outside, kept meaning to leave but kept turning pages, which must mean it was good; recall connections with The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, watched at the same time as reading

Rachel Cusk, Outline — Very smart; like short stories—the writer listening (that old advice: writers must listen!!) to others around Athens; her plane neighbour, too trusting going on boat rides with him (would I go on a boat ride with a strange man all alone in a different country? kind of wish I would), her students; a very interesting narrative mode, never seen before—this is impressive

Rachel Cusk, Transit — Better than Outline (which is to say, quite good); wondering if the ending is resolved when she drives away from the house, the fog having lifted; all about families in houses (and “renovating” both), the relationship between renovations and fate (to what extent can lives and selves, like houses, be renovated?), also about the life of a novelist—reading, teaching (Jane the student was a memorable character); and about translations—of books and lives and experiences; Cusk’s mode of narration is itself a translation, a filtering through the narrator-author’s perception

Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life — So long! 814 pages… (see above about contemporary novelists needing editors / editors needing to be hard[er] on contemporary novelists… be more like Rachel Cusk!)—didn’t like it, though found it very readable nevertheless; poor Jude, but his misfortune is extravagant (…like Jude the Obscure); but she writes herself into corners, there isn’t really any way for the ending not to be what it is; also very flawed in that JB and Malcolm largely disappear, after appearing like main characters in the first 50 pages… I’d like to read a novel that is actually about male friendship (which this one seemed at first to be), not just about Jude; that said, interesting echoes of O’Neill here, orphans, abuse, overcoming (or not) extraordinary circumstances (O’Neill and of course Dickens et al)

Eden Robinson, Son of a Trickster — Entertaining but far too much like the first in a trilogy (which it is), so doesn’t stand alone effectively; Jared is a typical Robinson character, tempted by ordinary adolescent desires but mature beyond his years, “keeping it all together” (as Claudine says—excellent discussion over eggs and coffee at Universel) for his troubled family and community; curious to see where she’s going with him

Joan Didion, South and West — Bought in City Lights bookstore in San Francisco in the summer, seemed appropriate as I was at that point West after having been South. Even Didion’s rough notes are poetry; I wish I had written down such observations while in the South (“The endless green of the Delta, the flatness, the haze in the mornings. The algae-covered ditches alive with mosquitoes.” That was pretty well exactly my impression too, only I didn’t write it.)

Patti Smith, Just Kids — Quite beautiful, and very moving, especially the end when he [Robert Mapplethorpe] is dying (read vividly under dim lights in a coffee shop armchair while rain fell outside in Vancouver after a nearly-all-day-long walk, waiting for dinner, rapt and racing phone clock to cram in last pages); so amazing that they had artistic communities like that in the sixties, where everyone important knew each other (as discussed with Adrian, do such communities exist now? What are artistic communities now?); the importance of play in art-making, too, is vividly clear here

 

February 2018:

Katherena Vermette, The Break — Very good after a slow start; worthy of all accolades it received; important book about women’s stories, women’s communities, but also their complicated dynamics (they are not blameless or unfailingly supportive of one another); cycles of violence (and the tragedy of Indigenous communities); the overwhelming importance of grandmothers and children (listen to them!); vivid winter descriptions; to teach, if opportunity arises

Lydia Davis, Varieties of Disturbance — Short stories that remind you anything is possible as a subject; interesting women, lots of mothers and babies and elderly people (who keep on having stories!); the one with Helen and Vi was good, as was the one with the letters from school children, and Kafka getting ready for a dinner date, and also (of course) the tiny ones that say so much

Stella Gibbons, Cold Comfort Farm — Delightfully written, amusing; thought it would be more like Northanger Abbey, but she treats the heroine more straight (as in, this heroine has less to learn than Catherine does); straight-up enjoyable

 

March 2018:

Dorothy Sayers, Murder Must Advertise — “Easy” was my adjective; though Sayers goes on too long (ah, my penchant for brief, impressionistic modernist novels)—was it really necessary to dedicate A WHOLE CHAPTER to a cricket match?; but of course Peter Wimsey is an easily graspable character; the murderer is more or less who you think it’s going to be; read largely in Toronto while apartment-hunting

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah — Didactic… but a good story; big, both warm and angry (this is an achievement); I like Obinze’s sections much better than Ifemelu’s, because Adichie’s own voice (the didacticism) is less loud/obvious

 

April 2018:

Clarice Lispector, two books (Family Ties and The Foreign Legion) and scattered stories in The Collected Stories [compromise: counted as “one full book” here] — So many vivid, precise emotions, so meticulously rendered! Like she has an emotional magnifying glass; language is for her an emotional magnifying glass. Do we really feel all that? Yes! Similar to Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield, Eudora Welty, Elizabeth Bowen, Mavis Gallant, Ethel Wilson—interesting all these mid-20^th-c. women in different parts of the world were writing and thinking along similar lines

Kathleen Winter, Lost in September — The protagonist is not James Wolfe… much better read with this in mind; an interesting concept/conceit (contemporary Jimmy thinks he’s 18^th-c James Wolfe), but sometimes clunky—better in idea than in execution, maybe; it is a lovely and troubling meditation on PTSD, though, and very vividly Montreal: important to read before and while moving away…

Amy Jones, We’re All in This Together — A solid story; she seemed to identify most with Finn; the shifts in focalization worked with the compressed time frame (though maybe too many minor characters had their own chapters?); Katriina’s story was interesting, as was Shawn’s (more compelling, to me, than Finn’s sections); the shark symbolism makes sense—the power we all have, the feelings we all feel, shadow lives, just below the surface…

 

May 2018:

Heather O’Neill, Lullabies for Little Criminals — Heather O’Neill makes me want to write; when you read her and then look up, the orange in the fruit bowl seems a little brighter than it was before (to paraphrase Lisa Moore, whose writing has the same effect; also my favourite way of defining what makes a story work); I liked this one less than The Girl Who Was Saturday Night, which felt tighter; but then this was the original, and she is doing something no one else does (a little like Mordecai Richler but not at all Mordecai Richler); she knows how to pack a sentimental punch, especially about missing mothers.

**

And that’s it!

Are there any broad patterns or trends in this list? It’s hard to say; the randomness of my selections was part of the point. I’m interested to see that contemporary fiction drew me back in the second half of the year. In the fall there was a strange conglomeration of troubled young men wandering city streets (Ellis, Greenwell, Cole, McInerney; also Salinger, Fitzgerald, Baldwin, and Hardy in their ways). In the winter there were a lot of stories told from interesting or fragmented points of view (Cusk, Vermette, Lispector, Winter, Jones). I read with a particular kind of focused attention when I travel, especially alone; the importance of place—where I read the book—in my experience and memory of a particular text comes across in my notes (this year: Mississippi, San Francisco, Montreal, Toronto, Quebec City, Vancouver, rural Ontario). My reading over the past twelve months has been eclectic and open-minded, although I think there’s room for much more geographic and generic variety; more translations, more nonfiction, might take me there in the coming year.

To be continued!

“What I was really hanging around for, I was trying to feel some kind of a good-bye. I mean I’ve left schools and places I didn’t even know I was leaving them. I hate that. I don’t care if it’s a sad good-bye or a bad good-bye, but when I leave a place I like to know I’m leaving it.”

—Holden Caulfield in The Catcher in the Rye

I have moved.

Monday was my last full day in Montreal. I rode the 80 Parc bus through an ice storm one last time and taught my final classes at McGill. Tuesday I watched movers carry all of my worldly goods onto a truck, ate one last St-Viateur bagel, and bid farewell to the city where I lived for nearly nine years—just shy of a third of my life. And last night I slept for the first time in my new apartment in Toronto.

How does one “feel some kind a good-bye,” as Holden Caulfield put it? Even if it is possible to know you’re leaving a place when you leave it, how long does it take before you truly understand the meaning of everything you’ve left behind?

**

A friend of mine recently proposed that maybe “Montreal” is “a time of life” more than it is a city. “Maybe we all have a Montreal phase,” he suggested. I think there’s something in this.

My Montreal phase began in September, 2009, when I started a Master’s program at McGill. One of the first significant things that I did when I arrived was to read, voraciously, two short story collections and two novels by the (wonderful!) Newfoundland writer Lisa Moore. In one story, “Mouths, Open,” Moore’s narrator explains that in order to “capture likeness,” the seventeenth-century Italian sculptor Bernini “suggests drawing the face just as it is about to speak, or after it has just spoken. That’s when the face is most characteristic of itself,” she says: “We are most ourselves when we are changing.”

I feel as though I have spent much of my Montreal phase open-mouthed, inhaling—just about to speak.

**

Two days before my MA program began, on the last Sunday in August, 2009, I was in Penticton, BC, doing an Ironman. It took me fourteen hours and forty minutes to complete. The next day, I flew to Montreal, with a stopover in Edmonton. I was reading Leah McLaren’s The Continuity Girl. I arrived late at night and joined my old friend and new roommate in our big, empty Plateau apartment. The next morning, we walked together to McGill. (That walk, which I have done hundreds of times since then, seemed interminable on that sunny September day.) I had some extra time, and I spent it surreptitiously tailing people with Tim Hortons cups in an effort to trace them to their source; my jetlagged, post-Ironman body was sleepy and starving and numb with first-day-of-school jitters. When I arrived, early, in the third-floor classroom where my Canadian Modernism course was to convene, I found two people already there. When they introduced themselves as PhD students, the floor fell out of my stomach. I hadn’t realized that Master’s and PhD students took classes together. And then, when the professor came in and told us that his name was to be pronounced “as an iamb not a trochee” (a what?), my stomach, already floorless, evaporated like a cartoon thought bubble.

And so I began life in Montreal in a state of mind-numbing exhaustion and towering fear. Happily, both dissipated as I settled. Nine years on, I am pleased to say that I now know what a “trochee” is (my name is a trochee). The professor with the iambic surname became my supervisor. And although I still find PhD students a little scary at times (being one for five years did little to alleviate that), the two I met in the classroom that morning became good friends.

**

How have I changed since I moved to Montreal? I have better clothes, I can drink coffee without sugar, I can appreciate a gin and tonic, I am less able to stay up all night, and I watch fewer MTV reality shows. What else?

When I moved to Montreal, Barack Obama had only recently come into office. iPhones were considered a novelty. Instagram didn’t exist. My cats, now decidedly middle-aged, had not yet been born. Aside from ten months in Switzerland, I had barely lived away from home.

How have I changed since I moved to Montreal? Maybe, on a considerably smaller scale, as much as the world has. I have become more myself.

**

I never quite felt at home in Montreal, and perhaps one of the reasons is that I’m just not cool enough for Canada’s coolest city.

Apparently before I moved, my uncle told my father that he hoped I would “not just stay at home but get out and take advantage of the city.” By this, I think they meant St-Laurent at 3am. I felt indignant.

One night I was on St-Laurent at 3am, fighting my way home through a blizzard. Taxis trolled serenely through the untouched snow like fishing boats in calm water. It was one of those muffled, swirly February nights that leave the world looking brittle and tired the next morning. I was walking with a friend—a significantly cooler, more fun friend—and we were chatting about coursepacks—those spiral-bound, exorbitantly priced selections of miscellaneous class readings that professors assign and students must purchase (and then dispose of; though I have kept all mine: sorry, movers). I can’t recall how we alighted on this topic while walking up St-Laurent in the middle of the night in a blizzard. But there it was: we were discussing coursepacks, when suddenly out of the darkness a snowplow, one of those golf cart-sized sidewalk plows, was hurtling towards us, engine labouring, lights blazing. If you have lived in Montreal, you know this hazard well: sidewalk snowplows travel at breakneck speeds and stop for no one. The drivers seem to have made a collective decision to ignore approaching pedestrians as though we are of no more consequence than a few rogue snowflakes. We leapt out of its path, mid-discussion, and it rumbled by like an affronted old woman in a grocery aisle.

“Oh God,” said my cooler friend, “if we had died discussing coursepacks.”

We laughed. But I was alarmed—not at our brush with death, but at the fact that here, living out the quintessence of “Montreal fun,” I had somehow (I felt responsible) sunk the conversation to the most boring and bookish depths imaginable. My friend was laughing at the irony in this, the unexpected coincidence. I was disconcerted by the predictability of it.

I have moved or changed schools just often enough in my life to know that even new surroundings do not allow for total self-reinvention. I have lugged my lack of coolness around with me like an unattractive but necessary carry-on bag for my whole life, and even in Montreal I didn’t manage to forget it under the table in a bar one night.

Don’t count me out, though. I am always game for any city’s equivalent of St-Laurent at 3am. And I had lots of fun in Montreal. I just occasionally found myself discussing coursepacks while I did it.

**

The other day I went for a farewell run around Mount Royal. It is an 11km round trip from my apartment, up through Outremont and the cemetery, around the summit by the cross, past the lookout, and back down towards the Plateau. It was an uncertain sort of day, filled with a dramatic grey sky and the rich, springy smell of wet earth after rain.

Partly due to lack of fitness and partly due to pre-emptive nostalgia, I stopped for a short break at the lookout. Fondness for the city and a bold poetic mood overtook me. Leaning over the parapet like Holden at the edge of his field of rye, I tried to “feel some kind of a good-bye.” Good-bye, I whispered audibly to the sumac bushes immediately below. Good-bye, I whispered again to the river in the distance. And then, having caught the attention of a pair of tourists loitering uncertainly nearby, I transformed the word into an exaggerated cough and continued on my way.

Possibly, although I am nearly twice his age, Holden Caulfield and I were trying to say good-bye to the same thing.

**

There is much I will miss about Montreal. The proximity of warm bagels and the mountain. The quality and price of bread and cheese in nearly every grocery store. The McGill campus at sunset during the first week of September (such hope in the air, all that beer and innocence!). Grey stones and spiral staircases. The slightly annoying and yet lovable CBC “Daybreak” personalities, whose voices accompanied my morning routine every day for nine years. Most of all, how walkable everything is; I could get nearly everywhere I wanted to go on foot, and I will mourn the loss of this freedom in sprawling Toronto.

There is also much I will not miss. Passengers staring with unabashed unkindness in the bus or metro; drivers filling a moment’s hesitation in traffic with a honk. The litter and general dirtiness of the streets. The poorly cleared sidewalks, which are covered with slickly packed snow or large lake-like puddles for at least half the year. Managing the electric heating in my badly insulated apartment. Parking rules that read like Faulknerian sentences. The awkwardness of not ever really knowing what language I should speak, accented French or just plain English; regretting my decision either way; especially feeling guilty for speaking English, wondering whether I’ll be judged or whether I’m troubling a salesperson or server… Although I love and probably took for granted the presence of French in my everyday life, this tiny drama saturated every encounter for me, and I often wondered if it was possible to be truly comfortable with the odd dynamic unless you were born in Quebec.

I wonder how this forecast sense of loss will morph and spread, as time sweeps me onward?

**

Above all, Montreal has been the city of my student-hood. For better or worse, McGill was the centre of my universe there, geographically and emotionally. I spent at least a day or two on campus every week that I was in town. I nursed a magnificent obsession with the oatmeal-banana muffins from the student-run snack stand in the Leacock Building. I shivered in the over-air-conditioned library. I have a favourite bathroom stall in at least four buildings. I grumbled at institutional injustices and strove for the approval of professors and students alike. I experienced epiphanies, and in between, wasted reams of time. Phases in my Montreal life are inextricably linked to phases in my scholarly life, years and months and seasons characterized by what I was reading or writing or trying to read and write.

But by the end, I felt no more space in Montreal for personal growth. My closest friends have all moved on, and are scattered now literally from coast to coast. I felt cramped and stifled in the city, despite all its quirky energy and charm. I had nothing more to say there. My McGill bubble had burst; my Montreal phase had come to an end. It was time for me to go.

**

I have never been great with uncertainty. My impulse when I feel it starting to pool at my ankles is usually to build a life raft of plans, answers, solutions; this is why I was so good at school, where all I had to do was follow the instructions and—thanks to a healthy dose of instinctive diligence and a dash of innate talent—someone would praise and appreciate me. “Real life,” as they say, doesn’t work that way. For the first time, I don’t know in any concrete way what will be next. I have not moved to Toronto “for” anything, except forward progress. The possibilities are endless, and yet at the same time none of them feels within my reach.

But I have moved to a city for which I feel profound affection, where I have old and new friends whose worlds I am eager to explore: these things count for something—or maybe, after all, they count for everything. And I am certain, at the very least, that I have something to offer, to that place and to those people, and to others, and that I will find ways to fill my heart and my time.

And so, armed with questions, chasing courage, I say good-bye, and move on.

Recently I was walking along in the snow, ensconced in my hood and my thoughts, and I thought: wouldn’t it be wonderful to have a device that could capture and record everything that’s running through my mind right now, impressions in surround sound, unfiltered by the unreliable choosiness of memory? Maybe it could even extract individual lines from the harmony, themes from the counterpoint, so that I could play them back later one by one. Of course, this is what Virginia Woolf and James Joyce were trying to do in their prose, and lots of other artists too in lots of other ways, not to mention all manner of scientists with their needles and nodes. It wasn’t an original wish by any means, but still I wondered: if I could hear the melodies of my thoughts, what flitting insights would I find, what deep echoes of my days?

Perhaps tellingly, this is the only thought I remember from that particular walk.

Sometimes when I want to hold onto passing ideas, I have the foresight and diligence to type them out as notes on my phone. These notes are sporadic and inconsistent; they require the right combination of circumstances—proximity of phone, body still enough and fingers warm enough to type, and sufficient distance from the moment to consider the interests of my future self—and this probably means, unfortunately, that the most important things are left undocumented. But what I do manage to record becomes such a joy to revisit—like a fragmentary archeological record of instructions and inspirations. I thought I would share some of these gems, both ancient and recent, with a little context added. Below, in chronological order, are ten representative examples.

**

I wrote my very first note on the same day I got my first iPhone, which was shortly before I moved to Montreal, eons ago. This note is a short, incomplete transcript of a conversation between my parents and my brother about the prospect of getting a dog. On August 7, 2009 at 9:22pm, I typed this:

Having a good dog requires a lot of time and energy. A good dog is a factor of the owner. It’s hard to say, ‘I want a good dog.’

The point is we’re getting a dog and it will be fantastic.

As soon as you move away I will run over it in the driveway.

The first line is my mom (who is always reasonable), the second line is my brother (who wanted the dog), and the third line is my dad (who didn’t).

To be very clear, my dad was JOKING about his murderous intentions. Evidence: they got the dog, whose name is Seamus, and every morning my dad shares a banana with him in the kitchen (Seamus eats more than half).

I was as yet too clumsy-thumbed to transfer the full texture of their dialogue into the touchscreen of my new phone. But this is a delightful time capsule nonetheless. My mom’s thoughtful caution, thrown wildly to the wind by my nineteen-year-old brother; my dad’s hyperbolic threat, which really expresses (reluctant) assent. Seamus was still an “it”; he would be born exactly seven weeks after this exchange took place, and they brought him home eight weeks after that. Both my mom and brother put a great deal of time and effort into his care and training, and as a result, he is a very good dog. He loves eating, swimming, and car rides, and although my brother moved away several years ago, he has certainly not been run over in the driveway.

I have been through three iPhones since then. Seamus, who is now eight-and-a-half, looks a little older and stiffer every time I visit.

**

Quite some time later, there was this note, which I typed on December 12, 2013 at 6:46pm:

I am in my class’s exam right now.
Boo!
🙂

Rather juvenile, I know. I confess: I anticipated a certain amount of gleeful pleasure, when I taught my first class in the fall of 2013, in sitting through their final exam with computer, notes, phone, and books all at my fingertips. It would feel, I expected, like floating on a lifeboat in a sea of anxiety. Such notions were not without their masochistic dimensions, I am ashamed to admit.

When I entered the classroom, a few minutes after the exam had begun (professors do not actually have to attend formal final exams at McGill), the invigilator came rushing over, sign-in sheet in hand. “There’s a free seat over there,” she hissed, gesturing to the end of the back row. “No, no,” I whispered, understanding her confusion; “It’s okay; I’m the professor.” She looked at me, puzzled, maybe not hearing. “The pro-fess-or,” I whispered again. She frowned. “I’m the PROFESSOR.” The last one came out very loud. It seemed to hang in the air for a moment, like an accidental and full-throated belch, before dissipating in the buzz of the fluorescent lights. Several of the students turned in their seats. The poor invigilator looked mortified. I had the same feeling that I get when I step on the tail of one of my cats.

I was wearing my grown-up blazer—houndstooth, and a little too big—in which, incidentally, I have three times been taken as younger than I am. But despite its warmth and flair, and the diversion of my phone (and computer, notes, books), in the end, my heart hurt for those students, my first. I remembered my time in the sea.

**

Not long after that exam came this note, typed on January 1, 2014 at 1:14am:

Happy 2014 to myself from Kait’s house.
2014’s gonna be MY year.

I had this idea because my birthday is on the 14^th, and the first time I ran in a cross-country race I got a ribbon for being 14^th, and since then I have always considered 14 something of a lucky number. It feels so familiar. I had been waiting for 2014 for years.

I wrote this quiet New Year’s assertion at one of those points in the night when the conversation fades and the music has been playing so long it seems as much a part of the room as the chairs and rug and empty glasses. Lazy, awkward, and attentive, we look at our phones in the lull, waiting for the collective next move.

2014 was okay. I’m not sure it was MINE, though.

 

**

The next note comes from a fairly substantial repository of dissertation-related thoughts. On March 29, 2014 at 11:39am, I wrote:

All poetry after romanticism is fragments, the problem is making these fragments cohere, and in middle silences they can’t reconcile the aspirational impulse—though eventually they learn to do.

Evidently I lost sight of grammar in the frenzy of my epiphany. But this was a crucial breakthrough, and it became one of the dissertation’s central arguments—and one of my favourite arguments, too.

When I’d gotten the wording sorted out (I finished the last major portion of new writing for the thesis almost a year to the day after saving this note), the idea became something more like this: The writers who emerged from the fallow periods in the middle of their careers with the most innovative new work and the most sustainable new outlooks were those who came to accept that their poetry would always seem incomplete (or fragmentary), because it would never quite live up to the visions (or aspirations) that they might once have had for it. Creative paralysis set in when they fixated on “completion” (or coherence); when they let this notion go, they felt free to move again. Phyllis Webb put it this way: “if you don’t set up any proposition about success, perfection, completion, then you’re not going to wind up with an idea of failure. You’re going to wind up with process.”

The phone note reminds me of this important argument’s origins, as a fragment among fragments.

 

**

Here’s a pretty typical kind of note. On July 12, 2014 at 4:12pm, I wrote:

5:45 st-Paul metro station, line 1
Rue de l’ecole de medecin

These are two different locations in Paris. The bottom one was the street of a café I was supposed to try (I did, and ate quiche, and also realized that I had been taken there for hot chocolate by a professor from the Sorbonne eight years earlier), and the top one was where I was supposed to meet a friend later that day (I didn’t need to write this down, but he looked at me expectantly upon delivering the directions, so I felt like I should do something—and I’m glad I did, at least for the guidance of my memory, now, if not of my body, then). I arrived at the St-Paul metro station early, and sat on a bench in the late afternoon sun reading James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room. Pigeons milled, commuters swarmed, and children played in a tiny temporary fairground nearby.

**

Many of my notes are shopping lists and recipes. For example, on September 26, 2015 at 4:09pm, I wrote this list:

Spelt berries
Red onion
Pepper
Kale
Lemon, limes
Sweet potato
Basil, cilantro
Tomatoes
Spinach and strawberries/pomegranate

Spelt berries. These proved a great challenge to find, despite the abundance of health food stores in my neighbourhood. In fact, I’m not even sure I ever did find them, although I found something like them (spelt kernels? Grocery shopping in French does occasionally trip me up). This was for an excellent spelt berry-lentil salad with a lemon-tahini dressing that I have made several times since. I kept making it, that is, until the original bag of spelt berries, or spelt berry-like grains, ran out; I have not found them again since, and the health food store where they were finally purchased has now closed.

I might have been expecting company when I wrote this, for I see also the main components of my favourite having-company salad, spinach and pomegranate—or strawberry, if pomegranates are unavailable, which is possible, though they are undeniably commoner than spelt berries.

 

**

I love this next note, and return to it more often than to any of the others. I typed it on November 1, 2015 at 9:19am:

I am always startled when a pay phone rings. It is so imperial and forlorn, like the best poem of a minor poet…
(Leonard Cohen in Beautiful Losers)

He forced all her tiny toes into his mouth, his tongue going like a windshield wiper. Francis had done the same for lepers.
BL p. 341 (note Francis)

I can’t remember why I wanted to take special note of St. Francis, here. I do know that this was weeks before my dissertation defence and I was worried that someone might ask me about Beautiful Losers, which is why I was rereading it. (No one did.)

The first quotation contains one of my favourite images ever. I think of it all the time.

I could probably fill all the gigabytes in my phone with lines from Leonard Cohen.

**

Sometimes the passages I record are meant to be inspirational. Here is an example, from March 3, 2016 at 1:01pm, typo left intact:

As you have seen,I am a writer who came of a sheltered life. A sheltered life can be a daring life as well. For all serious daring starts from within.
–Eudora Welty, final lines of One Writer’s Beginnings

I cannot overstate how much relief I find in the fact that writers I admire have had sheltered lives, as I have. They are not all Ernest Hemingway driving his ambulance or even Virginia Woolf suffering inner turmoil. They are just ordinary people, attuned to the daring of dailiness.

Eudora Welty’s house, which I visited last summer in Jackson, Mississippi, reminds me of my grandmother’s. I walked over from my hotel on a very hot Sunday afternoon. A performance of some sort had just concluded in a nearby church, and I passed through its dispersing audience—linen-suited locals with lilting Southern voices—to enter the quiet, upscale neighbourhood. There were a few dog-walkers roaming the leafy streets as well. This seemed remarkable because no one walks anywhere in Mississippi (“Where yo’ truck at, girl?” a woman had called to me from her porch the previous evening, as I panted up one of the steep hills of Vicksburg). The sidewalks outside Welty’s house were cracked and uneven. Air-conditioners whirred and birds chirped with great vigour. It smelled like humid earth and a gathering storm.

**

Here’s something from this past month. It concerns three separate occurrences, the last of which took place on January 30, 2018 at 3:43pm:

One sister giving the other sister her glove
Red-lipped boy videotaping the train coming in in the late afternoon sun, long shadows
Boy with backpack walking along the sidewalk sedately carrying a very large block of ice

The first one was on the bus. I see now, though, that my record of the event might sound misleading. This was not a moment of benevolence. Rather, the older sister, who was probably about 8, took off her glove, passed it wordlessly to the younger sister, and then did something with her bare hand—I don’t recall what, but it must have required moderate manual agility, like adjusting her hair or scarf or fishing in her bag. When she was done, she reached out and took back the glove (which was not actually a glove but a waterproof mitten, purple or black) and put it on again. The entire exchange was accomplished in silence, and I was struck by the easy, practiced comfort of it all, as though they had made exactly these gestures a thousand times. The younger girl seemed to extend her hand all the way from the depths of her daydreams, and she did so before the older one had even offered anything. It was like a little dance, I thought, the habit of intimacy.

The second scene occurred in the Brockville train station late on a Sunday afternoon. The sunlight, which might have been the most memorable part of this snapshot, could only possibly be described as thick, maybe viscous, like honey. That is a cliché but it was a cliché kind of light. The kind that poured in like butterscotch and stuck to Joni Mitchell’s senses. The kind that Emily Dickinson observed as having a “certain Slant” on “Winter afternoons.” The train was stopped, and I was dozily watching the people trundle by outside with their suitcases. What caught my attention was a camera, or maybe a phone, sitting on a tripod immediately below my window. No one seemed to be attending to it; what was it doing there? It looked like a lost child alone in a crowd—imperial and forlorn, like Leonard Cohen’s ringing pay phone. And then, as the train lurched back into motion, I noticed a boy running toward it from the other end of the platform. We were headed east, he was running west; his shadow stretched so far behind him that its tip might have been pinned to the ground somewhere in the distance. His jacket was blue and his lips were very, very red in the sunlight.

The third scene was something I saw out the window of an Uber on my way to the Montreal airport. It was also late afternoon. Again the air was heavy with an orange light that made everything—trees, snow, houses, parked cars—look very still and sleepy. School had obviously just let out, because children paraded along the sidewalk like ants. This particular boy was walking alone. His arms didn’t quite reach all the way around the block of ice. He carried it neither proudly nor resentfully, but just as a matter of course. It sat patiently in his embrace like a small dog.

 

**

Here’s the last note, again from a book, and important. On February 9, 2018 at 10:02am I wrote:

“‘I’m okay,’ is all she says. There is a big empty space where the rest of her words are supposed to be.” [Vermette p. 305]

This quotation is from Katherena Vermette’s The Break, which I have recently finished reading. I spent years studying the big empty spaces where words are supposed to be—silences—and I still instinctively pause whenever I see them described or discussed. The Break is all about silences—especially the billowing, flapping silence of the victim, who cannot speak for so many reasons—and Vermette evokes these “breaks” in communication beautifully. (The “Break” of her title refers to a snowy field in Winnipeg’s North End, which also symbolizes the “big empty space” of silence.) But The Break is also, I think, about the intimate silence among friends or family or women or people with a shared history—the moments when “all she says” is all she needs to say for the listener to grasp her meaning. This wordless understanding—the silence that connects rather than breaks—lies at the root of compassion.

Something else about The Break that I did not record but will certainly remember: Vermette writes winter with remarkable accuracy. The novel had to be set in winter, for reasons that are as varied as (but similar to) the reasons that both Fargo and James Joyce’s “The Dead” had to be set in winter. But on a simpler level, the descriptions are those of someone who knows the shapes and moods of the season. One of the characters “falls up the snow-packed front stoop” (I’ve done that). Another notices the “cloud-packed sky” at night, which “reflects light so it is almost as bright as daytime” (I’ve travelled under that sky). And another “wakes up smelling the snow. February is blowing into her small, messy bedroom.” I admire this: along with her sensitive ear and her ability to render the emotional spaces between people, Vermette has a well-developed capacity—no futuristic brain implants required—to capture the impressions that settle on her as she passes through the day’s weather—the sun, the wind, the texture and smell (the smell!) of snow.

I had forgotten all about the smell of snow.

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.

 

At the very end of Alice Munro’s “Monsieur les Deux Chapeaux,” thirteen-year-old Colin sits on top of an old iron bridge spanning the Tiplady River and has an epiphany. He has climbed up to this precarious perch because he fears—or, believes—that he has accidentally shot his younger brother, Ross. He was only trying to keep the gun out of Ross’s hands, but somehow it went off, and Ross fell. Colin saw, or thought he saw, blood pooling. But it turns out that Ross is fine; the bullet passed nowhere near him. He was only acting, or maybe startled, when the gun fired, and now here he is, lit up by car headlights and “looking cheerful and slightly apprehensive, but not really apologetic.” And Colin looks at him and thinks of the accident—though no accident actually occurred—and the epiphany descends: “He knew that to watch out for something like that happening—to Ross, and to himself—was going to be his job in life from then on.”

I have thought a great deal over the years about what makes an Alice Munro story so powerful, and I believe now that the answer might lie, at least in part, in those three words in the middle of that epiphanic sentence, “and to himself.” They seem like an afterthought, and yet they are integral both to the symmetry of the sentence (eleven words precede the opening dash and eleven words follow the closing dash—in case anyone’s wondering how to win the Nobel Prize) and to the emotion that the story conveys. Another answer lies, I think, in a key symbol in “Monsieur les Deux Chapeaux,” a car engine that might or might not be too big for the body in which it has been placed—that might, if it is indeed too powerful, shatter the drive shaft, causing the whole car to flip and placing the driver in unspeakable danger. Or it might not. Three words and the signification of an engine: these—in Munro, for me—say it all.

**

I first encountered Alice Munro on a bus in Australia when I was twelve. She wasn’t on the bus, unfortunately, but one of her books was. An older girl sitting a few rows behind me—we were a children’s choir on tour—was reading The Love of a Good Woman. I thought that it was incredibly grown up (a status I was loosely interested in attaining, at least as far as literature was concerned) to be reading a book with “woman” in the title. The cover featured a sepia-toned photograph of two people in a canoe. I was pretty sure I had seen my parents reading it, and I was suddenly impatient to get back to the right side of the globe and see if it was on their shelves. I remember thinking quite distinctly, as we rumbled through the streets of downtown Sydney: here is the person I want to be. Not the “woman,” maybe—not yet—but the kind of girl who would read about her.

In the years since then, I have often said that I found it difficult to read too many Munro stories in a row because they are so emotionally exhausting. This might have been an excuse, or it might have been true. But I did read her, assiduously throughout high school, and with a sense of confidence-rattling awe throughout university. Her depictions of 1970s and 80s womanhood in Canada, along with Margaret Atwood’s more dramatic and urban versions, defined my whole understanding of adult life for a long time. Sometimes I wonder if some part of me is still waiting to find myself in a certain kitchen, on a certain porch, dialling a certain old telephone and driving a certain old car—still assuming that I will inevitably end up there.

From Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage (2001) on, I received most of Munro’s books in hardcover as gifts, as they came out. I read the title story of that collection in full one Christmas afternoon—I suppose I would have been fourteen—stretched diagonally on my stomach across my parents’ bed and eating licorice. (I was, more specifically, breathing in and out through each licorice straw until it disintegrated and trying not to drool on any pages. Make what you will of the symbolism of that.) I still picture all train stations like the tiny, rural one Johanna visits in the opening pages of that book; incidentally it was, to my mind, the same train station where Matthew picked up Anne before taking her home to Green Gables. Fourteen years—exactly twice a lifetime—later, I taught “The Bear Came Over the Mountain,” also from Hateship, in my first Can Lit class. I have now taught it several times, always to general appreciation. The children’s song that inspired the title, “The Bear Went Over the Mountain”—sung to the tune of “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow”—will be in my head for days. (But why did Munro change it from “went” to “came”? Take my class to find out!)

Today, my personal Munro collection is robust enough that I store various valuable documents under and around it on my shelves. I have read more than enough of her work to utter platitudes, like a good Canadian, about her deft Chekhovian touch and the literary-historical significance of her attention to southwestern Ontario. But a few years ago I was at a small dinner party with five English professors—just me and them; I was a PhD student at the time; this felt exactly as you would imagine it to—and the conversation drifted to “favourite Alice Munro stories.” To my horror, I came up short. I was months away from becoming a fully fledged Doctor of Canadian Literature and I couldn’t think of a single one. Or, I could, but I couldn’t remember the title. I remembered one scene (a young woman naked in a strange man’s house), but not what the rest of the story was about. And so I offered my one insight—“They’re too emotionally exhausting,” I faltered, emotionally exhausted—and wondered if the armchair I was sitting in might be so kind as just to swallow me up until the evening was over.

(The favourite, by the way, was “Wenlock Edge,” from Too Much Happiness; oh, like the Housman poem, said one of the professors, when I had finally groped my way to this conclusion; yes, exactly, I said, like an English PhD student who might or might not have forgotten about Housman’s existence.)

And so this past year I set out to ensure that I would never be in that nightmarish situation again. I devoured five full Munro collections over the summer: The Dance of the Happy Shades (1968), Lives of Girls and Women (1971), Who Do You Think You Are? (1978), The Progress of Love (1986), and Friend of My Youth (1990). I now carry favourites around like a stack of business cards. And maybe the earlier stories from these books are shorter and thus less demanding than the later ones I had read first, or maybe (preferably) my capacity to process complex emotions has evolved, but I didn’t find it exhausting at all. In fact, I found the reading restorative. Maybe, it’s sort of fun to think (though this is far too tidy for any Munro story, ever), I’m finally becoming the grown-up I thought Munro would make me all those years ago on the bus.

**

“Monsieur les Deux Chapeaux,” first published in 1985 and then collected in The Progress of Love, is about the all-consuming sense of duty—which is actually love—that Colin feels for his brother Ross. Ross, we learn early on, displays symptoms of Asperger’s Syndrome: he is so skilled at fixing cars that his mother calls him “a genius of the mechanical kind,” and yet he also has “the other side of a genius”—he is, to put it bluntly, “weird.” Fittingly, then, he enters the story literally wearing two hats, a floppy pink straw hat on top of his seedcorn cap, and Colin is called upon—as it is clear he has been many times before—to “provide explanations.” But Colin is baffled by his brother’s double nature. Ross, it seems to Colin, has “an expression that seem[s] both leering and innocent.” Is there something sinister about him? Are his “odd getups” and uncomfortable outbursts “calculated … with an audience in mind”? Or is he, like a child, to be admired, even envied, for his happy ignorance of social norms and the untainted mode of existence this implies?

Colin’s confusion stems in part from the childhood trauma with the gun, which for Ross was only a joke, a performance, and not a trauma at all. That experience seeded in Colin a complicated mixture of guilt, exasperation, resentment, attachment, and protectiveness towards Ross which has grown into an unwieldy emotional burden. And now, in the present tense, he is confronted with a fresh danger:  Nancy, a newcomer to town—and treated with both reverence and skepticism for that reason—has taken Colin aside to tell him that the engine Ross is building into his latest fixer-upper is too big and will certainly break the car: it will be a “fatal mistake,” she insists. Colin spends much of the story trying to determine whether she is right.

Notably, at no point is Ross in any actual danger; the danger is always a threat, a potentiality. Colin had been certain that if Ross got “his hands on [the] gun, loaded or not, it would explode,” and so “[t]o prevent such a thing happening, Colin grabbed it himself.” This fear is unfounded (how would the gun explode if it were not loaded?), but Colin is guided by instinct, not logic. The final line of the story, Colin’s bridge-top epiphany, repeats the earlier wording almost exactly: Colin “knew that to watch out for something like that happening—to Ross, and to himself—was going to be his job in life from then on.”

“Something like that,” “such a thing,” might never “happen.” Indeed, as he contemplates the possible threat of the engine, Colin is aware that Ross knows far more about cars than he does; is it really likely that he would make such an error in judgment? Ross might not need any watching out for, but—and more importantly—Colin needs to watch out for him. Those three crucial Munro-defining words, “and to himself,” disclose Colin’s vague yet profound sense of their shared destiny. The brothers are, together, “Monsieur les Deux Chapeaux”: one man, two hats; if something terrible happens to the one, something equally terrible happens to the other. That is what makes the feeling at the core of this story not merely duty, not merely familial responsibility, but love.

And love, of course, is not pure, and it can be burdensome. Colin’s love for Ross is mingled with fear and guilt, and sometimes seems motivated by an insensitive act, a silly hoax. But in all its complexity and unpredictability, this love, for Colin, is like the engine that is—or might be—too powerful for the car. Put slightly differently, Ross himself might be like the car engine in the carefully ordered structure of Colin’s life. If Ross were to explode, somehow, or to come to harm, Colin’s whole world would flip on its axis.

**

This, then, is the force of an Alice Munro story: the subtle rendering of an emotion so complex and powerful that it threatens to crush the body that holds it. The three words, “and to himself,” in their perfectly symmetrical sentence, emblematize the grace of Munro’s touch, and the engine symbolizes not only the particular variety of love in “Monsieur les Deux Chapeaux,” but the intricate and overwhelming feeling that powers all of her stories. In a general sense, Munro’s characters all wrestle—as Colin does, too—with their affectionate protectiveness of a past they have made every effort to escape. Her seamless modulations of point of view whisper of their confusions and delusions, and in story after story, the hazy border between what is real and what is imagined grows hazier still as family secrets bleed into small-town gossip.

But more on that another day. There will be more bus rides; there is plenty more growing up to do. For now, I think, it is best to let the tired engine rest.