I do believe in love and humility and that we all deserve a transcendent life. I believe that we are all trying our best and that we are all artichokes, with our myriad glorious fucking wings. Which oceans did the textiles traverse, and how did they get to me? It’s distance from that phase of motherhood that allows me such a full and free and visceral connection to it. She didn’t find a book she wanted, but typically I found four. Perhaps I will be more restrained in 20 years time, like Margaret? We said goodbye and that we hoped we’d run into each other again, at Saver’s or at Vinnies or so ..read more

“But what’s sad in this whole thing is Wild One ain’t the criminal here. No, no, no. He jus a dude who did suttin. The criminals is us people around him, the people watching someone shake someone else awake from a dream and not doin nothin to stop it.” —”The Young Entrepreneurs of Miss Bristol’s Front Porch.” Reading Sidik Fofana’s debut Stories from the Tenants Downstairs was especially meaningful for me because my friend B. recommended it to me when I was staying at her house last week, and she reads my book recommendations all the time but it’s not so often that I get to return to the favo ..read more

This episode of BOOKSPO is guaranteed to put a song in your head, as Michelle Hébert tells me all about how revisiting Emma Donoghue’s 1997 story collection KISSING THE WITCH helped her discover solutions to problems she was facing in developing the characters in EVERYTHING LITTLE THING SHE DOES IS MAGIC, her debut novel, which is out this week and pretty magic in its own right. I’m really excited to share it with you, and hope it makes you curious enough to pick up both books (and you definitely should!). Listen here or wherever you get your podcasts ..read more

I have a file in my head I’ve started calling the “Really Important to Understand Even if (ESPECIALLY IF?) You Don’t Agree” file, and the latest addition to it is Zadie Smith’s New Yorker essay “Shibboleth.” It joins Naomi Klein’s “We Need an Exodus from Zionism,” a speech she made in New York City last month at a Seder during Passover, and the essay “Resigned,” by Dashka Slater, which I think was the piece that started it all. Someone I admire a lot posted that essay, and the weird thing about that was the people who reacted to it with comments like, “This!” and “So good,” which didn’t seem ..read more

My third novel, Asking for a Friend, is also my first novel that’s set over a long span of time, and ever since it was published, I’ve been reflecting on its seasons. That summery book cover and that it was published on the cusp of fall, and that it opens in December with snow falling outside at the end of an academic term. How sad Jess was during that first February, when she (not unrelated) wouldn’t stop listening to Natalie Imbruglia’s “Torn” on repeat. The changingness of March when Jess and Clara drag their mattresses outside and wake up dusted with snow, signs of spring ranging from cro ..read more

In his excellent, riveting, heartful and hilarious second novel, Who By Fire, Greg Rhyno pays tribute to the fact that all the best classic detective novels always include some dame. Although his dame is not just any dame, instead Dame Polara, truly an original, only daughter of legendary PI Dodge Polara, whose brain is now scrambled after a stroke. If elder care wasn’t stressful enough, Dame is recently divorced, her latest IVF round has failed, her dodgy landlord keeps demanding she catch up on rent bills she can’t afford, and her straight job at Toronto City Hall working with heritage pres ..read more

My first Substack essay for paid subscribers went up yesterday and I’m so proud to have created my fourth of these long-form essays, such a cool and fulfilling creative challenge. This one is about how Adrian Mole’s diaries have been foundational texts and my gateway to English culture. How I’ve never seen how the heather looks, but I learned about the Midlands, about the time I ran away to find an English husband, and how there was actually once a time when I didn’t know what a scone was. Paid subscribers can read it here. Thanks to everyone who has paid to subscribe—your support is so meani ..read more

There’s not much I love better than a return to King’s Cove, the bucolic hamlet near Nelson, BC, where the fictional Lane Winslow makes her home after a tumultuous WW2 during which she’d served as a special agent, utilizing her quick wits and affinity for the Russian language. When Lane arrives in 1946, England left behind her, she’s envisioning a quiet life, a chance to dedicate herself to writing, a retirement of sorts, even though she’s still young herself, but it seems that fate disagrees, as she stumbles across a body and manages to solve the crime, in partnership with the Nelson Police ..read more

This is the point where I can definitively say that I figured out what I was doing in regards to my podcast. These latest two episodes are conversations about two of the best books of the Canadian literary season (two books which have very little in common than the fact that both are excellent) and I hope you enjoy them as much as I did. Listen at Apple Podcasts or Substack, or wherever you get your podcasts ..read more

A Biblio Bash highlight is a George Pimentel portrait. Here is my photo with my Biblio Bash date, Marissa Stapley! I’ve had a very fun and action-packed couple of weeks literary-wise that continues with tomorrow’s trip to Waterloo to interview Iona Whishaw about her latest Lane Winslow book. And a highlight was Thursday’s Biblio Bash at the Toronto Reference Library, a gala event at which I was invited to be a guest author. I’d attended once before in 2017 when my first novel came out, and the whole experience was intense, awesome, very overwhelming—plus I got my makeup done at the drug store ..read more