Read an Excerpt

I thought it might be fun to give you a little sneak peak of my memoir, The Reading List: Literature, Love and Back Again, before it's released in February.  Click here to read an excerpt.  An overview of the book as a whole can be found here.

A Writer's Death

Feeling a bit melancholy this Labour Day weekend.  The weekend got off to a sad start, when I had drinks with some of the other writers in my writing circle at a pub in the queer village.  Normally, when I see them it's to workshop our writing or clink glasses at a book launch.  But this time, we were having drinks because one of the writers in our group recently died in what appears to have been suicide. 

Wendy was a fascinating woman - warm, funny, anxious, vulnerable, fragile.  I recall her sexy librarian glasses and dimpled smile and insistence that she "wasn't a writer," even though we all insisted her writing was improving greatly; she was well on her way to finding her voice.  But what made Wendy particularly fascinating was that despite her fairly normal exterior, she came from a troubled past, to say the least: she'd been a child sex worker.  And she talked very openly about it.  After escaping an abusive home, she aged out of the foster care system and found herself on the street working as a sex worker (Wendy was always careful to use the word "sex worker," rather than "prostitute" - she'd made a career for herself as an activist working to advocate for sex worker protection and child protection, and was even pursuing her law degree at Osgoode, when she died).

The memoir that she was working on chronicled parts of her painful past, which, however turbulent, she captured with a good shot of humour.  I recall her reading aloud scenes of sex and violence that made my own life feel incredibly tame (one scene involved a hermaphrodite), yet the overriding feeling that came through in her writing, I would say, was a sense of horrible loneliness and searching.  Here was a woman who desperately wanted to be loved - because she'd never felt loved - and that made her susceptible to being exploited by a certain man, who occupied a central part of her memoir.

Yet it seemed to all of us that Wendy was at a really positive place in her life, despite the fact that she'd missed the past few workshops, and maybe been languishing in depression.  I was stunned by the news of her death.

One of the writers draped a bright pink feather boa over the chair at the head of the table, and we toasted to Wendy's life.

Although her memoir will probably never be shared with the world, I'm glad she wrote what she did.  Her words will stay with me.

Photo from: here

My New Book Cover

A couple months ago, my publisher asked me if I'd had any dreams or fantasies about how the cover of my book would appear.  I racked my brain ... but nothing came to me.  Or nothing terribly original, that is.  All I could see in my head was a stack of books (which seems obvious enough, since my book is a literary memoir about finding myself through reading), juxtaposed with a martini glass (since during the tumultuous period I write about I was consuming quite a bit of Grey Goose, indeed).

I guess this is why I'm not a graphic designer.

A big thank you to Natalia, my publisher's graphic designer, who read my book and came up with this cover.  I liked it as soon as Sandra showed it to me; it seems to capture the evocative, melancholy, searching-for-happiness mood of my book perfectly.  The sepia photo is meant to represent my grandparents, whose turbulent romance casts light on my own journey of self-discovery. 

After deciding upon the cover, Sandra and I spent a lovely, somewhat anxiety-ridden morning, drinking coffee and bouncing around ideas about the blurb on the back of the cover.  After a few more rounds of revision, which involved chopping a couple hundred glorious words (I'm definitely way too subtle and verbose to ever make my living writing promotional material), this is what we were left with - my book in a nutshell:

"Leslie Shimotakahara is a young, disenchanted English professor struggling to revive her childhood love of reading.  Her father Jack, recently retired from a high-powered corporate job, finally has time to take up reading books for pleasure.  The Reading List tells the story of Leslie’s return home to Toronto to rethink her life and decide what to do next.  At the same time, she bonds with her father over discussions about the lives, loves and works of the novelists on their shared reading list – Wharton, Joyce, Woolf and Atwood, to name a few.  But when their conversations about literature unearth some heartbreaking, deeply buried family secrets surrounding Jack’s own childhood – growing up Japanese-Canadian in the aftermath of World War II – Leslie’s world is changed forever.  Could discovering the truth about her father’s past hold the key to her finally being happy in love, life and career? 

As captivating as The Jane Austen Book Club, and as inspiring as The Film Club, The Reading List reveals how literature can sometimes help us expose our past, understand our loved ones and point us toward our future."

So there you have it.  Having the cover and back blurb in place definitely makes my book feel more real.  Until this point, I suppose there's still been something kind of abstract or dreamy about the concept of my first book.  But now, the book's become a material object and I'm filled with excitement and anticipation.  At the same time, another form of anxiety sets in.... No one in my family has read my book yet.  I wonder what they will think when my book is published in September?

Book #44: Looking Back on Thoreau, One Year Later

“I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life….”
                                                                                          -Henry David Thoreau, Walden

It’s amazing how much my outlook on life has changed since I started this blog almost a year ago. My aim was simple: I wanted to blog about the books that have uplifted and inspired and occasionally infuriated me – particularly at crisis points in my life. I wanted to explore how reading has pulled me through some really difficult times – my career change, my search for love, my grandmother’s death, which unearthed some dark family secrets – and most importantly, I wanted to share my experiences with a community of avid readers, rather than erudite scholars.

When I moved back to Toronto a few years ago, I was walking away from the only world I’d known for the past twelve years – the Ivory Tower. After two years as an English prof in small town Nova Scotia, I’d had a breakdown and burnt out for a variety of reasons, including a couple of bad love affairs, academic politics, and the humiliation of having some students name me “The Worst Professor Ever” on the worldwide web, to name just a few of my troubles. And worst of all, after my three degrees, I’d somehow lost along the way my love of literature. That was what I wanted back most badly. My childhood love of reading and writing.

As I go back and reread my first post on Thoreau from a year ago (you can read it here), I’m struck by how much happier I am now. That post was based on musings in a notebook I’d kept while at the depths of my misery as a professor, so my amazement in looking back is doubly refracted through my remembrance of the “me” I was a year ago and the “me” I was three years ago, as I stared out my university office window at a beautiful, bucolic landscape and could see nothing but my own entrapment in the wilds of nowhere…. At the time, I’d been reading and teaching a lot of Thoreau, and it incensed me that his grand vision of Nature did not, through my depressed eyes, live up to expectation. And his snobbish view that the “works of the great poets have never yet been read by mankind, for only great poets can read them” rankled me – it was precisely this view of reading-as-the-art-form-of-the-elite-few that I so desperately wanted to get away from.

Funny how my impression of a text always has so much to do with my mood.

Over the past week, I’ve been rereading Walden, as I put the finishing touches on my own memoir, The Reading List: Literature, Love and Back Again, being published this fall (something else that's making me happy these days....  Not that I'm not still prone to bouts of bluesiness and depression). This time around, I met a different Thoreau, one whose bedraggled beard and constant, poignant searching for some deeper meaning to life filled me with sympathy. What reader isn’t hoping to find some marvelous, inspiring insight springing from the world of literature, lifting her above the drudgery of everyday life? This way of reading isn’t only for the elite few, I see now – it’s for readers as diverse as me and Thoreau.

Photo from: here

Book #40: The Risk of Writing Honestly

Diana Athill: A sort of shudder of guilt still goes through me about being so - not indiscreet - but about myself.  I shouldn't be doing it.  But if you're trying to write about something because you're trying to get to the bottom of it, whether it's your own life or something else, there is no point in doing it unless you try as hard as you can to do it honestly, and to say how it really was.

Alice Munro: Well, I got things right, but it didn't always please the people I got it right about.  I can remember really hurting people.

                                    -A Conversation between Diana Athill and Alice Munro, Finding the Words

A couple weeks ago, I went with some friends to the book launch for Finding the Words, an anthology of personal writings by various writers who support PEN Canada.  Although I went to the event not knowing much about this non-profit literary organization, by the end of the evening I'd learned a bit about its work defending freedom of expression in Canada and abroad, and I was sufficiently intrigued to buy the book (from which all profits go to supporting the organization).

Last night, when I couldn't sleep, I began reading a transcribed conversation between Diana Athill and Alice Munro - two great writers interviewing each other.  I don't know why I began reading in the middle of the book, but their conversation instantly grabbed me.  Their frank discussion about the risks of writing honestly - the emotional risks of hurting others, the writer's own paralyzing sense of self-exposure - struck a chord indeed. 

I suppose it must have something to do with the fact that yesterday I finished editing the final chapters of my own book and sent the manuscript off to my agent and publisher for their feedback.  So later that day, I was left lying on the sofa, feeling bored and antsy, and my mind started wandering to the fateful prospect of how my writing would be received.  I'm not talking about the requests for revisions that Sandra and Sam are bound to throw at me, I'm talking about the more terrifying question of how the people depicted in my memoir will respond.  My parents, my surgeon (now deceased, it turns out, according to Google), a smattering of ex-boyfriends some of whom I'm still friends with (and all of whose names have been changed, don't worry), a cast of dead relatives who come alive in my imagination, et cetera.  How will these people and ancestral ghosts respond to their afterlives on the pages of my notebook?

It came as something of a relief to discover via Athill and Munro that I'm not the only one to feel awkward and embarrassed about having undertaken this unabashed exercise in narcissism in writing a book at all.  While I was immersed in writing it, I was simply luxuriating in the freedom to write and I felt it was important to allow myself to write in a way that felt authentic and uncensored, as I journeyed back through my defection from the Ivory Tower, my breakdown, my sense of failure, the toll that my career blues took on my love life and all the rest of the emotional turbulence stirred up during that miserable period.... 

Paradoxically, while writing, I wasn't thinking about the eventuality that others would read my words.  But I'm thinking about it now.

Fortunately, just as I was prepared for a night of insomnia, I discovered another essay, "The First Time," by Stacey May Fowles, who reflects at length on the beehive of neuroses presented by publishing her first book.  Plenty of alcohol and cognitive behavioural therapy, she recommends. 

Photo from: here

   

A Friend's Funeral

Over the weekend, I attended a friend's funeral.  Jean's death was sudden and tragic - after a long battle with cancer, she appeared to be in remission.  The last time I saw her for dinner over the Christmas holidays, she was laughing and quaffing wine and showing off her new shawl.  She told me about her most recent trip to Argentina where she'd bought five pairs of boots (she had extremely long, narrow feet and usually had to get boots custom made, she said, but Argentinian women had her kind of feet).

A woman who fears being on the cusp of death doesn't buy five pairs of boots, I thought at the time, with a sigh of relief. 

At her funeral, I found myself thinking about those unworn boots and how naive my assumption had been.  Her show of living life to the fullest and carrying on in her delightfully showy manner was a means of trying to put others at ease, as she always did.

Before the eulogy, her best friend - also named Jean - read Maya Angelou's "Phenomenal Woman."

I came home from the funeral and stared at my bookshelf for a long time.  I pulled out a book that Jean had given me a couple years ago, My Maasai Life.  Tears filled my eyes as I realized I'd never even bothered to read it and now I never would be able to read it and discuss it with her.  It was a memoir written by her friend whom she'd met while doing volunteer work for Free The Children.

Jean, see you back in Kenya one day??! read the handwritten note above the author's signature.  (Had she  meant to give me her own copy?  Perhaps she'd only been lending it to me and I'd misunderstood?)

Last year, when I'd told her I was writing my own memoir I recalled how excited she'd been, and a couple years before that, I recalled how supportive she'd been when I told her I was leaving academia to do my own writing.  "So creative writing's your passion," she'd said somewhat quizzically (an Iowa farm girl by birth, and an entre preneur at heart, she was amazed by how little pay writers will work for). 

I could write more about Jean, for she certainly continues on in my imagination - her candid advice on men, her funny stories about travelling home and running into her old high school boyfriends, her incredible ability to draw others out and make an impression.  Maybe one day I will write more about her.  But right now writing more would be too sad.  

When My Mother Was My Age

When my mom found out I'm writing a memoir about my relationship with my dad, she was very supportive - partly, I think, because she was relieved I wasn't putting our relationship under the microscope.  But the truth is that I've always found my mother a deeply fascinating woman, and I'm hoping in a future literary work to use her as a source of literary inspiration.  Thus when I found out that Jane Friedman of Writers Digest was hosting a mother-daughter interview series at her blog, called "When My Mother Was My Age," I jumped at the chance to participate.  It seemed like a great opportunity to get to know my mom in a role other than "mother" and at the same time, stash research notes for the future.  As it turns out, she suffered from similar sources of turbulence in her life at my age.  My interview with my mom and my reflections can be read at Jane's blog.

Book #32: My Ideal Therapist

"From the beginning, I wanted to be a difficult case.  I wanted my therapist to feel as if she were being challenged, taken to the limits of her psychotherapeutic powers.  I wanted her to have her mind blown by my psyche."  -Micah Toub, Growing Up Jung: Coming of Age as the Son of Two Shrinks

Back in grad school, I took seminars on Freud and Lacan, but no one seemed to be teaching Jung.  If such a seminar had been offered, I probably would have taken it, because psychoanalytic approaches to the study of literature/film greatly interested me at the time.  On the other hand, I have to confess that there always seemed in my mind to be something kind of hippy-dippy about Jung - I don't know exactly where I got this impression, but maybe it has something to do with how he's fallen through the cracks of the Ivory Tower.

Thank god that I've hightailed it from the Ivory Tower.

Coincidentally, it must have been three or four years ago, just as I was becoming disenchanted with the academic monastery, that I first met Micah Toub, a friend of my cousin Alex.  She took me to a party at his house and it must have been Alex who told me that he was working on this memoir about growing up as the son of Jungian psychologists, because I don't recall Micah and I exchanging more than an introductory greeting.  At the time, I was intrigued by the book concept, particularly because I'd just started therapy myself (sadly, my therapist wasn't a Jungian). 

Last week, when I saw Micah at a Spoke Club event discussing his memoir, I couldn't resist buying the book and this time we chatted about the vicissitudes of the memoir genre.  Over the weekend, while taking periodic breaks from working on my own memoir (chapter seven just about killed me), I read his at a leisurely pace and, I must say, reading about his neuroses was a lovely distraction from my own.  And I stand corrected in my earlier impression of Jung as hippy-dippy at all!  Jung emerges in Micah's book as offering a creative, flexible repertoire of tools for analyzing the self and tailoring an identity - so much less off-the-shelf than Freud.  The memoir skillfully cuts back and forth between elucidations of Jungian concepts and poignant, revealing anecdotes in the author's life, capturing the awkward, fumbling quality of identity formation and sexual experiences of all kinds.  I found myself laughing and indulging in that weirdly pleasurable embarrassment of self-recognition, recalling parallel moments in my own development, so excruciating at the time.

So now I'm ready to start therapy again.  Three years ago, when I was tormented about whether I should throw in the towel on my career as an English prof, and seeking utopian compensations in a bad affair, I started seeing my therapist, Harriet, but my treatment was not altogether successful.  She was a disciple of the new "positive psychology" which did not, so far as I could tell, have any philosophical depth at all.  I recall showing up at my first session with a little Moleskin notebook; over the past week, I had been assiduously recording fragments of my dreams.  But Harriet looked at me as if I were as outdated as a character from a Woody Allen movie.  I was disappointed to learn that according to "positive psychology," dreams don't occupy a special status or seem to be accorded much meaning at all. 

Too bad I'm not still depressed.  If I could do it again, I'd google a Jungian.

Photo from: here        

Book #31: Not So Hard-Boiled After All

"I regret that in one respect my father and I were too much alike.  We both have a great natural reserve that makes it almost impossible to open ourselves to others.  I think he would have liked to confide in me more, but I wasn't ready at that time to push for a more revealing relationship."   -Jo Hammett, Dashiell Hammett: A Daughter Remembers

Yesterday evening, I was puttering around the library doing research on Dashiell Hammett.  It almost felt like back in my geeky grad school days.  But no, I'm not working on some dry dissertation, I'm writing what I truly want to be writing - my memoir about how reading changed my life.  One chapter deals with The Maltese Falcon.  My dad and I read this novel together a few years ago, during a rocky period in both our lives, when everything was spiralling out of control like in film noir.  As my dad and I were reading it together, I came to see him as bearing some remarkable similarities to the cynical, hard-boiled anti-hero Sam Spade, and the question of what had made him this way compelled me to delve into his past and discover some family secrets....  (More on this later....  I'm writing this chapter as we speak).

Anyway, I have to confess that the chapter feels like it's missing something, and I'm starting to feel very anxious about it.  Nauseous, actually.  I get that way when I'm writing.  Insomnia, teeth grinding, bizarre cinematic dreams.  So this was why I found myself at the library late last night....  I found myself wanting to know more about the author himself, because I'd gotten it into my head that the key to understanding my father lies in gaining insight into Hammett and Sam Spade.  Not exactly a logical leap, I'll admit.  But this is how my mind works.  

How lucky I was to stumble upon a memoir written by none other than Hammett's own daughter!  Jo Hammett's Dashiell Hammett: A Daughter Remembers gives an unflinching look at the man and the convoluted dynamics of father-daughter relationships, where the daughter is caught between idolization of her old man, guilt at having not done enough when he was dying, and an ever-present yearning to have been closer to him when she had the chance.  Hammett was no model father, indulging in bouts of drinking and womanizing and plagued by illness, yet Jo Hammett gives a surprisingly balanced portrait of her eccentric dad.  What emerges is a portrait of a very shy, self-conscious person, who needed drink in order to be around people at all, and his solitude was intrinsically tied to his ability to write.  Lillian Hellman, his long-time lover, understood this about him and often remarked on how his lust for solitude had taken its toll on her, cutting her off from society, especially as the couple aged. 

In a particularly moving scene, Jo Hammett writes about visiting her father at his San Francisco Post Street apartment, where he wrote The Maltese Falcon; she remembers the elevator, with its folding brass grille, closing.  For anyone who has read the novel, this memory is clearly reminiscent of the final scene, where the femme fatale is led out in handcuffs, yet Jo Hammett focuses instead on how trapped her father must have felt in that elevator - stomach constricted, air sucked out of his lungs.  He suffered from claustrophobia all his life.  Not a tough guy like Sam Spade, the Hammett she brings to life is full of vulnerability and depth.  Exactly the characteristics I want to bring out in my dad.

Photo from: here

Book #30: The Travelling Life

"But the truth is also that there is an answering impulse of subservience in him, part of him wants to give in, I see shadows thrown up in grappling contortions on the roof of the cave."  -Damon Galgut, In a Strange Room

I was planning on giving this book to a friend for her birthday, but now, a third of the way in, I don't know, I just might have to get her something else.  Even if In a Strange Room weren't a finalist for the Man Booker Prize, I still wouldn't have been able to put it down.  What is it about this dark narrative that immediately drew me in?  The first novella "The Follower" is deceptively simple: a young white South African man named Damon treks through the mountains of Lesotho under the spell of a mysterious German man named Reiner, a philosopher of sorts.  Although Damon claims not be in love with Reiner - preferring to think of their relationship as a "dark passion," an accidental interlude - it soon becomes clear that he's deeply, obsessively in love with this man and his every attempt to maintain emotional distance is bound for failure.

So intense are his feelings that he's devised a strange technique for telling his story.  The story is for the most part told in the third person, but every so often it slips into the first person, as in the passage above.  While this technique at first throws the reader off - for a moment, I thought there were three characters, a menage-a-trois - it's well worth the experiment.  For the technique pays off by opening up meanings and raising questions about what happens to you when you travel and fall in love.  The minimalist prose conveys perfectly the way that life and your identity get pared down to the bare essentials and the feeling of weightlessness can be very liberating at first; it's as if you have the freedom to create yourself anew, be anyone, try anything.  In this sense, it's as if Damon, the narrator-traveller, is watching himself in a film.  (I remember that feeling from my year in Berlin.  Back in grad school, I suddenly sold all my possessions, except my laptop and two suitcases full of books, and moved to Berlin, not knowing anyone, having chosen the place more or less randomly because I'd fallen out of love and I'd overheard some artists talking about how it was easy and cheap for foreigners to rent short-term housing there.  And all the while, I didn't feel like me, I felt deliciously free of me, like a girl in a film). 

This sense of distance, it seems to me, is what Galgut is trying to convey in writing most of the work in the third person.  And yet the "I" surfaces at key moments of passion, memory, betrayal - exposing how the work isn't entirely fiction, it hovers on the cusp of memoir.  

Photo from: here

At Last ... My Book Has a Home!

I probably mentioned some time ago that I've been working on a book.  It's called The Reading List and it's a memoir about my miserable career as an English professor and search for a new career, which pushed me to the brink of a breakdown three summers ago, and all the while I was seeking distraction from my career blues by looking for love in all the wrong places, drowning in the Grey Goose.  My father, grappling with his own demons, decided to take up reading as his new hobby and who better to recommend a reading list than his erudite daughter?  Except I wasn't feeling very erudite at the time. 

Still, we bond over literature in other - unexpected - ways and this opens a whole new dimension to our relationship....  (More on this later).

Anyway, a few months ago, I sent my book proposal around to a few publishers and then waited.... and waited.... and faced some perfectly diplomatic rejection emails, which pointed out its merits and drawbacks, but no matter how many times I read them amounted to the same thing.  I pretended that I was fine with it - really, I was, I wasn't grinding my teeth at night more than usual, despite my throbbing jaw - and I could accept that my memoir (half written) might never see the light of day.  At the urging of a friend, I began work on another project, an historical novel, and half convinced myself that I'm a novelist at heart, not a memoirist after all.   

All this changed the other night, when I was at a friend's birthday party (my agent actually) and he introduced me to a lovely young woman, Sandra, who turned out to be a publisher.  She runs a small press that focuses on next generation multicultural literature. 

"She wants to publish your book," my agent whispered to me. 

I blinked and the room began to spin gently, even though I hadn't had a drop of wine (I was on cold medication, feeling very uncool to be at a party not drinking), but yes, my cheeks were getting hot, as if I might have quaffed an entire bottle.

"I've read your manuscript and I love it," Sandra said, smiling warmly.  "Let's do it!  Let's publish your book."

Sandra and I stood by the wall chatting in our high heels for the next four-and-a-half hours and we exchanged many giddy emails last week and this morning we signed a contract.  She and her father, who founded the press, shook my hand and hugged me and the room was filled with good karma, if I may say so myself, and I'm not the kind of person who usually says things like "karma."

Ever since I was six years old, you see, I've wanted to be a writer.  Much more than I ever wanted to be a professor.  That first godawful career was just a detour (which, ironically, has given me something to write about).

So now the clock is ticking.  I have until April to complete the second half of the book.


Photo from: here

Book #17: Wayson Choy's Phantom Homeland

"I close my eyes: older, long-ago faces, a few of them barely smiling, push into my consciousness. I hear voices, a variety of Chinatown dialects, their sing-song phrases warning me: 'You never forget you Chinese!'" -Wayson Choy, Paper Shadows

Wayson Choy's memoir Paper Shadows opens with the startling discovery that he was adopted. The woman whom he buried eighteen years earlier turns out not to be his mother - sparking a series of vivid flashbacks. Sometimes idyllic, other times frightening, his childhood growing up in Vancouver's Chinatown appears a mishmash of half-remembered fragments: a violent father, who was away for long stretches building the Canadian Pacific Railway; a vivacious mother, who liked to play mah jong until the wee hours, despite her husband's dark moods; and bachelor uncles and aunties who claimed to be family, for lack of any real blood ties in Canada. As the secrets of this community come to life in Choy's memory, the past appears ever more mysterious, estranged. Despite the warnings of the Chinatown elders, what it means to be "Chinese" seems to be slipping away, even as they speak.

Mother, motherland. Both are elusive. The woman he thought was his mother appears in his memory as a ghost - "a length of warm shadow stretched out along the far edge of the bed." She was his last tie to his ancestral homeland, but even that tie turned out to be based on a concealment, a lie.

Although I'm not adopted, Choy's feelings of loss and disorientation are familiar. There must have been a moment when I came to view my Asian heritage with this mix of fascination and fear. Growing up in Toronto as a fourth-generation Japanese-Canadian, my connection to Japan never seemed to go much further than dinners at sushi bars - where California roll was always my favourite - and the annual Japanese New Years celebration when we would all crowd around the Formica table in my grandmother's tiny kitchen, the oily stink of tempura and daikon radish filling the air.

And yet, my grandmother insisted that I was Japanese. We all were, in her mind.

The idea of our Japanese homeland was replete with meaning for her. I could sense it in her excitement, as she talked about growing up in Vancouver's Japantown, where she had run her father's restaurant and grocery store, before the place was razed during the Second World War. As she reminisced, her black curls quivered over her pointy ears, the skin smeared with indelible streaks of dye. She longed for the rugged beaches of the Queen Charlotte Islands, where she had been born, shortly after her father immigrated to Canada working as an "explorer" for the Japanese government. Supposedly, the government wanted information about the ways and lives of the Haida Indians.

Years later, I thought back to her stories and wondered whether they were entirely true, but at some level it didn't matter, for her words had caught hold in my imagination. Her memories were charged with the sadness and magic of a place that no longer existed.


Photo from: here

Book #10: The Missing Leg in Anthony De Sa

Sometimes I find myself thinking about my grandfather's old girlfriends. Is that weird? But everything about his life is weird. He died of some mysterious, unspecified illness before I was born, and my father only ever refers to him by his first name, "Kaz." Where other girls had grandpas who'd been struck down by cancer, all I had was this faded, black-and-white image: a man with a vivacious smile and a debonair wave to his hair. The photo must have been taken in Japantown, before the war.

According to my great aunt, Kaz was quite the "bad boy" - drinking, womanizing, leading a louche existence when he was barely out of high school. Apparently, there was a jazz singer named Lily, whom he fell in love with. My great aunt giggles as she remembers this, but something nervous and almost hysterical undercuts her show of boisterousness. I want to know more, but her lips tighten, and she says mockingly, "Look at Leslie, so bemused, taking it all in."

Perhaps these childhood memories have something to do with why I'm tantalized by Anthony De Sa's Barnacle Love. This collection of linked short stories tells the tale of the Rebelo family, beginning with Manuel, a young fisherman, fleeing the insular confines of his Portuguese hometown. He washes up nearly drowned on the shores of Newfoundland, ready to make a new life, but where does he fit in? What does it mean to follow his dreams? Caught between tradition and the surging pulse in his blood, he falls under the spell of a fisherman's daughter, who, despite being a cripple, is strength and sexuality incarnate:

"Her hands blur as they weave the leather straps and secure the metal brace to her thigh - the moulded cup meets the hardened flesh where her leg should be. He's not sure how he feels about it - she is not whole. But when she brushes by him he is caught in her smell of cotton sheets and the peppered sweetness of cinnamon. There is intrigue in her difference - something fragile that needs his tending. Manuel wants to hold her, touch her."

With her missing leg and her slight figure - so slight that she appears almost an apparition when he first sees her - she represents mystery and the beauty of something lost. Her atrophied flesh and severed bone embody something unknowable about her past, in the same way that Manuel's own ties to Portugal are being torn away.

I find myself wondering about my grandfather's past and what it must have been like growing up in the shadow of Japan. He bristled under his father's expectation that he carry on the family tradition by becoming a doctor. I remember my great aunt alluding to his thwarted musical talents. She said that his personality dissolved after the war.

I want to ask my dad what happened, but something stops me. He already looks edgy, lying on the couch, flipping the channels, and I haven't said a word.

So instead I simply ask him if he would like to read Barnacle Love.

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Theory Hungry

This morning, reading The New Yorker, I came across Jeffrey Eugenides “Extreme Solitude.” A wave of nostalgia hit my chest. The story is set at Brown, my alma mater, and written from the perspective of a hyper-self-conscious Semiotics student, Madeleine, who hangs out at all my old haunts (the Ratty, the Blue Room, Level B in Rockefeller Library where “the stacks exuded a vivifying smell of mold”). Perhaps “nostalgia” is the wrong word, for I don’t deny feeling a good deal of ambivalence, too. But the story actually made me miss academic life. That fragile, convoluted, cut-off-from-reality life that pushed me to the brink of despair.

No doubt, my short-lived career as an English prof was a debacle (if my therapy bills are any gage). Still, grad school was fun. Undergrad even more so. There’s something delicious about spending one’s days lounging around seminar tables discussing concepts like “subalterity,” “coevalness” and “queer theory.” Sitting at a sidewalk café with Althusser propped on a bookstand, Moleskin notebook open. Not a bad day’s work.

But ultimately – as Eugenides brilliantly illuminates – too much thinking and theorizing is a killjoy, especially when it comes to love. Madeleine is having a tryst with a classmate, Leonard, debating whether it’s mere sexual attraction or something more. When she reads Barthes’ A Lover’s Discourse, she’s struck by how the text casts light on her own predicament:

“The necessity for this book is to be found in the following consideration: that the lover’s discourse is today of an extreme solitude.”

“Waiting

attente / waiting

Tumult of anxiety provoked by waiting for the loved being, subject to trivial delays (rendezvous, letters, telephone calls, returns). . . .

Waiting is an enchantment: I have received orders not to move.”

The more Madeleine reflects on it, the more she understands “that extreme solitude didn’t only describe the way she was feeling about Leonard. It explained how she’d always felt when she was in love. It explained what love was like and, just maybe, what was wrong with it.”

It’s the anticipation of love and rapture that becomes alluring in itself. Put simply, Madeleine only wants him if she can’t have him. Some barrier to fulfillment is necessary – such is the perverse structure of desire. She would rather be burying herself in a book, thinking about him, longing for him, luxuriating in pure solitude, than getting it on.

I recall having a conversation with my therapist about my own need for distance. It was curious, to say the least, why I always gravitated, for the longest time, to lovers who lived in different cities, boyfriends on the other side of the continent. Rather than face-to-face contact and flesh-and-blood intimacy, I craved love letters, witty emails, kinky text messages…. spelling out a kind of scenario that followed the formula of: if you were with me now, I would do X…. It was sexier in my mind.

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Book #9: Musing on Photography via Sontag

I made a resolution to put together Daddy’s reading list by the end of the week. Just because I was initiating my practical-to-a-fault father into the world of high literature, while desperately investigating every possible alternative career to being an English prof, didn’t mean I had to lose my mind. I was giving myself the summer to get my shit together. If I hadn’t figured out by August how to reinvent myself – flight attendant? speech pathologist? librarian? esthetician? – then I’d be condemned to the gulag of academia for another year.

Ugh. The lecture podium. The thought turned my stomach.

Daddy was trying to snap me out of my malaise by drawing on his life experience. “Remember the two years we spent in Trinidad? That was no picnic.”

He was talking about the job he’d accepted in Port of Spain in the late 70s, shortly after I was born. The company had been building a steel plant there and the opportunity to live in a tropical paradise had struck my parents as a grand adventure.

The first few months were the honeymoon phase, but then reality set in. Power outages. Cultural isolation. TV programming for only one hour a day. The supermarket rarely had onions, cheese and diapers.

Daddy’s point in raising Trinidad was obvious: everyone has to pay career dues. I was paying mine teaching out in the boondocks of Nova Scotia. Things would get better. Think positive.

Yeah, whatever.

I dug up an old photo album. “You didn’t have it half as bad as me.” I pointed at a photo of him lounging on the beach, eating a shark bake sandwich. Mommy was sunbathing in a turquoise paisley bikini.

“Oh, you have no idea what was going on behind the scenes,” Daddy said. “I was losing my hair.”

“No you weren’t.” I pointed at the photo, at his peculiar 1970s hairstyle. Long bangs brushed forward, layers falling over the ears.

“Trust me – the place was a gong show.”

Yet deep down I didn’t believe him.

Later that day, I was surfing the New York Times online archives and I stumbled on Susan Sontag’s brilliant 1974 article on photography. Each sentence hit me with a new insight, illuminating my reaction perfectly:

“Photographed images do not seem to be statements about the world so much as pieces of it, miniatures of reality that anyone can make or acquire.” “To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed.” “Photographs furnish evidence.”

This illusion of utter transparency, as Sontag explains, is a frank difference between photography and writing. Where writing is assumed by its very nature to be an interpretation, photography has the guise of being an immediate representation of reality, a window on fact.

Although I understood on a rational level that this effect was photography’s sleight-of-hand, the photo still asserted its visceral force.

Daddy’s unhappiness paled compared to mine. I had photographic evidence.


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Book #8: Unpacking Daddy's Library

"When are you going to put together my reading list?" Daddy asked.

A hush fell over the kitchen. He'd been asking me about this for weeks now, and wasn't it the least I could do? After all, I'd taken his handouts during not one, not two, but three degrees in English Literature.

Recently retired, Daddy had decided to take up reading for reasons that were characteristically quantitative. The house was crammed with novels, memoirs and anthologies that my mom and I had been reading all our lives and their sheer number had convinced my dad that there must be something to this reading thing.

Now that he was no longer building steel plants, it was time to roll up his sleeves and delve into the world of literature.

"Why don't you just go online?" I said. "Google 'reading.' A bunch of lists should come up."

"That's no good." His cheeks hardened. "Those lists are impersonal - based on polls or the whims of some critic who doesn't even know me. I want a list that's just for me."

I rolled my eyes. With everything else on my mind, did I have time for this?

Then I recalled an essay I'd read in grad school, Walter Benjamin's "Unpacking My Library." What drives someone to read and collect books, Benjamin suggests, is anything but rational:

"I am not exaggerating when I say that to a true collector the acquisition of an old book is its rebirth. This is the childlike element which in a collector mingles with the element of old age. For children can accomplish the renewal of existence in a hundred unfailing ways."

Despite Benjamin's mystical language, his point is simple, I think. He's saying that what draws a person to one book over another cannot be explained purely in terms of the book's reputation. Rather, the reader yearns to connect on some deeply personal, childlike level with the world in miniature that the novel brings to life imaginatively. This is a matter of the novelist being able to predict - almost magically - your idiosyncratic fantasies and wishes that go back to your earliest memories and desires.

It's a beautiful coincidence when reader and book unite in this way, the beginning of a lifelong relationship.

So my old man wanted a reading list. But what did I know about his earliest memories and unconscious drives?

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Book #6: Kureishi's Eloquent Movements

A detour.

What made me want to become a prof in the first place? As I desperately searched for a new career, it was a question people often asked me.

Ten years ago, while finishing my undergrad, I’d stumbled across a novel that wasn’t on the syllabus for any Honours English seminar. Hanif Kureishi’s The Black Album. It’s a novel about Shahid Hassan’s journey through the peeling halls of a London community college known “less in the academic area but more for gang rivalries, drugs, thieving and political violence.” Shahid is bedazzled by an alluring, tormented prof named Deedee Osgood. As soon as he walks into her locker-sized office, she interrogates him with “difficult questions about Wright and Ellison, Alice Walker and Toni Morrison,” all the while tantalizing him with her body language:

“Off he went, being exemplary, until, that is, she crossed her legs and tugged her skirt down. He had, so far, successfully kept his eyes averted from her breasts and legs. But the whole eloquent movement – what amounted in that room to an erotic landslide of rustling and hissing – was so sensational and almost provided the total effect of a Prince concert that his mind took off into a scenario about how he might be able to tape-record the whisper of her legs, copy it, add a backbeat, and play it through his head-phones.”

Years later, while standing on the other side of the lecture podium, I tried to rationalize why I coveted having this effect. Was it sheer boredom? If Henry James wasn’t quite cutting it, then lecturing in stilettos gave my mood a boost? Since the dusty town had nary a single man, I found myself lost in my own libidinal energies, which sought compensatory expression in fashion and makeup. Or perhaps I had such fond memories of my own university crushes – on strange looking men in shabby jackets and balding like smurfs – that I thought, How much more potent, if the erudite train of thought comes delivered in a sleek black suit, smelling of jasmine.

No doubt, there were certain kids who came to my office hours and glued themselves to a chair. It was amazing how the most banal comments – “The Waste Land was shaped by World War One” – set their faces alight. But up close, their youthful, innocent expressions started to make me feel like a tawdry, old woman. In the end, I was too much of a goody two shoes to be a Mrs. Robinson. Unlike my heroine, Deedee Osgood, I would abstain from absconding with a student into the hallucinogenic world of the London club scene.

Deedee is a terrible role model as a professor, but as a complex literary character she knows how to get under the reader’s skin. Not afraid to expose her vulnerability, she hesitates when Shahid asks what drives her: “I’m trying to find out. Other things. Culture. When I can, I do a lot of nothing. And I make stabs at pleasure. Yes.” She's as lost as her students, stumbling along some path to self-discovery without any grand epiphanic moments. Yes, it was time to admit it. So was I.


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The Myth of the Joycean "Epiphany"

I stood outside the house where my father grew up, snapping pictures. A stout woman in a house dress came out and scowled. She swept the porch, practically beating it.

"I'm not a speculator," I said. I explained that my great-grandmother - "Granny Shimo," as everyone used to call her - had bought the house in the 1950s. The woman's face softened in recognition. Evidently, her father had told her about Mrs. Shimo driving a hard bargain.

The woman invited me in. Walking around inside, I found myself imagining my grandfather, Kaz, in various stages of decline. Staggering around the house, bumping into furniture. Passed out on the sofa, drunk and high. Bundled up in a rocking chair, catatonic and shaking, his face ashen. I felt like the boy in James Joyce's “The Sisters,” haunted by the ghostly memory of Father Flynn:

“I imagined that I saw again the heavy grey face of the paralytic. I drew the blankets over my head and tried to think of Christmas. But the grey face still followed me. It murmured and I understood that it desired to confess something. I felt my soul receding into some pleasant and vicious region and there again I found it waiting for me."

There's something moving about the crazy old priest, whose beliefs have fallen by the wayside. The “idle chalice” he clasps in his coffin – an eerie reminder of the chalice he broke shortly before his death – crystallizes the story’s central theme of mania and malaise at the centre of the church.

I wished that Kaz's life could be grasped according to some similar symbol or “epiphany.” Joyce is famous for creating these beautiful epiphanic moments where the ideas of his stories converge on their exact focus and the implications of all events become ironically clear.

But nothing came to mind as I peered into the dusty corners of the house. No flash of insight. My grandfather remained a blind spot, as always.

“Where did Kaz die after his stroke?” I asked my father later that evening. I was thinking of that cramped bedroom, the smooth white bedspread stretching out.

Daddy’s eyes twitched like he’d been given a shock. I watched his bewildered expression from the corner of my eye.

What wasn’t he telling me? Did he think I couldn’t handle the truth?


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Book #5: Imagining the Old Neighbourhood through Joyce's Dubliners

Tinsel-shot scarves floated by. Men with jutting bellies swaggered past. I bumped into a shoulder and a face spun around, scrunching up like a bulldog. Swearing at me in some language I didn't understand.

But beneath the show of arrogance: a small, hard kernel of disappointment. I could see it glowing through the lines etched into his face.

As I turned onto St. Clarens, I was thinking about my grandfather, Kaz. I was thinking of him tripping on the cement cracks, whiskey bottle in hand, laughing into the empty air.

By the time he'd moved here in the 50s, he'd reached the end of the line. He'd dropped out of dental school, messed up as a bookkeeper, and had the wrong temperament for managing a dry-cleaning shop. After a while, he stopped trying in favour of strolling up and down the street. That was when he started hearing the voices in his head.

As my own career prospects narrowed, I feared that I had a similar self-destructive impulse ticking away.

And I kept walking. The sidewalk flowed into the distance, an endless white line.

Earlier that morning, I'd been reading "The Boarding House," a short story by James Joyce in Dubliners. I love how Joyce brings to life all the oddballs of Dublin - their funny, sad lives. Take, for instance, this description of Mr. Mooney, the man who owns the boarding house:

"He drank, plundered the till, ran headlong into debt. It was no use making him take the pledge: he was sure to break out again a few days after. By fighting his wife in the presence of customers and by buying bad meat he ruined his business. One night he went for his wife with the cleaver and she had to sleep in a neighbour's house."

My grandfather had been a Mr. Mooney. Strange things that no one wanted to talk about had happened on this street.


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Book #4: Enigmatic Houses in V.S. Naipaul

Boarding houses have long fascinated me with their louche, transient quality. In his memoir, The Enigma of Arrival, V.S. Naipaul reflects on the boarding house he first inhabited upon immigrating from Trinidad to London in the 1950s:

"I felt that at one time, perhaps before the war, it had been a private house; and (though knowing nothing about London houses) I felt it had come down in the world. Such was my tenderness towards London, or my idea of London. And I felt, as I saw more and more of my fellow lodgers - Europeans from the Continent and North Africa, Asiatics, some English people from the provinces, simple people in cheap lodgings - that we were all in a way campers in the big house."

People of diverse backgrounds live in close proximity - fragments of their pasts butt up against each other, all the while remaining largely unreadable. Ironically, it is only years later, after Naipaul has become a celebrated writer, that he realizes the boarding house would make prime literary material. At the time, as a fledgling writer, he was obsessed with validating another "idea of London," one that he confesses was drawn from Dickens. A London based on class and hierarchy, the very principles being eroded upon his arrival in the 50s.

Until recently, my father's childhood was veiled in mystery, too. He grew up in 1950s Toronto, at Bloor and Lansdowne - not an easy place to inhabit amidst the post-war discrimination against Japanese-Canadians. While researching my own memoir, probing my dad with questions, I discovered that the house at Lansdowne had been a boarding house. My pulse quickened. One day, we went there together and as I stood in front of the sagging porch, the place caught hold in my imagination. Ancestors and family members came alive as characters, from my fragile, ex-beauty queen grandmother to the grandfather I'd never met. He'd died under mysterious circumstances the year before I was born, and no one in the family liked to talk about him, save the rare allusion to "Kaz's dark side." Later that evening, I started a short literary piece to explore a family in decay.

But now I want to find out what really happened. To connect with the past. Later this week, I plan to revisit the house.


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