Welcome back to BOOKSPO! I am so happy to be kicking things off with my conversation with Kate Cayley about her latest novel, PROPERTY, a novel set over the course of a single day in a gentrifying neighbourhood in Toronto’s west end, as rats scuttle through the very wet basement of a house under construction, tensions mount between neighbours, three very different mothers consider their respective fates, and it’s clear at the novel’s outset that, by the end of the day, somebody will be dead.
Talking to Kate was just as much as a pleasure as the novel is. We talked about writing poetry, plays, and fiction, and how each one exercises different muscles in one body. We talked about rats, landlords, home ownership, and neighbours, and all the tensions therein. About writing a novel set over 24 hours, which leads to MRS DALLOWAY, Kate’s BOOKSPO pick. About rereading MRS DALLOWAY through the years, and all the ways it changes. About Alice Munro, and stories where the line between good and evil is ambiguous or nonexistent, and how confusing this can be for a young leader—but how finally grasping that ambiguity and its power is a kind of literary coming of age. We talked about the webs that connect us all, whether we realize it or not, and the uncomfortable burden of how our children are always, always watching.
About PROPERTY:
A spring day in a gentrifying neighbourhood begins unremarkably enough; by evening someone has died.
Nat, a middle-aged queer mother of two, feigns normalcy as she worries about her taciturn, loner son locked in his room. Her friend Maddy, a failed actress and fellow parent, frets over her missed opportunities and considers leaving her marriage. Next door, Ilya, a young construction worker, struggles to renovate a fixer-upper, but a buried stream threatens to flood the basement. An old woman eyes the street through the gap in her curtains. A lonely man wanders.
As the troubled residents stumble through their errands, navigating the thorniness of class and privilege, of queer respectability and friendship in an overstretched city, each seemingly inconsequential exchange tightens in around the neighbourhood, until finally tragedy strikes, leaving it forever changed.
About Kate Cayley:
Kate Cayley has previously published two short story collections and three collections of poetry, and her plays have been performed in Canada, the US, and the UK. She has won the Trillium Book Award, an O. Henry Prize, and the Mitchell Prize for Poetry, and been a finalist for the Governor General’s Award for Fiction, among other awards. Her writing has appeared in Best Canadian Poetry, Best Canadian Stories, Brick, Electric Literature, Joyland, and The New Quarterly. She lives in Toronto.
Pre-order my new novel, Definitely Thriving, coming March 17 from House of Anansi Press
