As a huge fan of books about houses and home, I fell in love with Jenny Haysom’s debut novel KEEP and was swept away by this story of three lives connected by the very unlikely occupation of real estate home staging, this inspired by Jenny’s own experience with this job a long time ago, as she explains to me in our BOOKSPO conversation. And this was a conversation I enjoyed in particular because Jenny’s BOOKSPO pick is a book by one of my all-time favourite authors, the wonderful and brilliant Carol Shields, who is due for a renaissance, Jenny asserts, and I agree entirely.
In our discussion, Jenny makes the case for SWANN being one of Shields’ best novels (I required a bit of convincing!) and talks about her favourite parts of the book, especially the Emily Dickinson connection, which found its way into KEEP. She tells me what she had to learn in order to make the transition from poetry to fiction, what she learned about fiction (and life itself!) from Carol Shields, and confesses that she wishes readers would pay as much attention to the language in her fiction as in her poetry, as her choices there are just as careful and deliberate.
A timely tale of ownership and loss, loneliness and connection, and a meditation on all the stuff in our lives.
Home staging is an art of erasure. But in some cases—no matter how much clutter you remove, or how many coats of white paint you apply—stains bleed through, and memories rise from the walls like ghosts. Harriet, an elderly poet whose eccentricities have been compounded by years of living alone, must sell her beloved house. Having been recently diagnosed with dementia, she is being moved into a care facility against her wishes. When stagers Eleanor and Jacob are hired for the job, they quickly find themselves immersed in Harriet’s brimming and mysterious world, but as they struggle to help her, their own lives are unravelling.
Keep is a meditation on all the stuff in our lives—from the singular, handcrafted artifact to indelible, mass-produced plastics. As Jenny Haysom excavates the material of our domestic spaces, she centres the people within them and celebrates the power of memory, even when it falters.
JENNY HAYSOM has published her writing in magazines across Canada. Her debut poetry collection, Dividing the Wayside, won the Archibald Lampman Award and was shortlisted for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award. Jenny lived in Ottawa for nearly thirty years, on the unceded, ancestral lands of the Algonquin Nation, and has recently returned to Nova Scotia, in Mi’kma’ki, where she grew up.
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