Two Truths and a Lie
The Pickle Me This Digest, win a book for your bestie, and a bumper crop of titles you should know about
A little game, for no real reason at all.
Two truths and a lie: which is the latter?
I once got in a fight with an elephant, and did not emerge the victor.
The actor who played Natalie on “The Facts of Life” has me blocked in Instagram for being a white supremacist.
There have been long periods of time in my life when I’ve found it hard to read.
The first person to guess correctly and email their answer to klclare AT gmail DOT com will receive the very cool prize of A BOOK FOR THEIR BESTIE! I will mail a friend of theirs a copy of my female friendship novel ASKING FOR A FRIEND on their behalf (North American addresses only, please!) with a note explaining why they’re lucky enough to be receiving a random novel in the post. (‘Tis the damn season, though!)
And I just wanted to take the opportunity to, once again, thank every single one of you who is reading this. Building a presence on Substack, especially with my podcast (a whole new realm for me!), has been a really satisfying creative project. (Note too that this week’s podcast is particularly timely as Deepa Rajagopalan reflects on how her debut collection of stories was partly inspired by the great legacy of Alice Munro. Listen at Substack or at Apple Podcasts.)
Thanks especially paid subscribers who are supporting my monthly essays—writing these has been a fantastic experience, and you can look forward to my latest (on Toni Morrison’s Sula) coming your way at the end of this month. June’s essay will be about L.M. Montgomery’s The Blue Castle. And after that…who knows? (I am excited to find out!)
On Being Chosen
…And I’ve been reflecting on this a lot, how much of the reality of publishing is often about the experiences of being chosen, or otherwise. Finishing your book, signing with an agent, getting a book deal, getting an impressive book deal, a book deal with a big press, becoming a bestseller, sustaining bestsellerdom, continuing that success with your next book, winning prizes, getting reviewed in all the best places, being “picked” by Oprah, Heather, Reese or Jenna, and on and on and on. And even when you get chosen on one level, there are all kinds of tiers and ways to still feel like you’ve been chosen (or that you’re falling short) and it’s all so urgent and arbitrary and so little of it (as with most things) is actually within any of our own control. Who gets to matter, to be important, and the pressure—even if you happen to be one of the ones—of staying on top, remaining relevant. (Read the whole thing here)
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Light
…I keep thinking of that line from a book I read two weeks ago: “Wisdom is valuable. But the ability to find understanding is a gift that all creation enjoys… In some ways, you can think of wisdom of light. But it is understanding that carries the light. Understanding is what wisdom travels through.” (The author is Michael Hutchison, and it’s a line of dialogue delivered by a Cree Elder.) (Read the rest)
Books I’ve Loved Lately
Maybe it’s not just “all in her head,” but also sometimes it is, or else it’s in her body, or her family, or her workplace, and that’s not nothing. All this tangle of understanding and experience resulting in loud binaries like SSRIS for everyone vs. anti-psychiatry movements, but Pratt manages to blaze a path through the noise to suggest a kind of middle-ground to contend with the inherent complexity of mental illness (that anyone who’s thinking about it has to be contending with all kinds of threads or else they’re kidding themselves) which necessitates care and precision in applying treatments, as well as the message that women themselves are not broken. (Read the whole thing)
But I’m not actually sure that this is what the story is “about” at all, and instead have a sense that this is a novel intent its own unique trajectory, intent on the propulsiveness and sharpness that results from Rose’s off-beats, and the terrific momentum created by her narrative voice and the remarkable ways that (in her experience) one thing leads to another, questionable choices culminating in a rich tapestry of experience, insecurities, lessons and longings. This novel is such an achingly hilarious story of tender humanity, with Munro-country vibes and the literary influence of Alberta, and yes, unconventional motherhood is where we finally arrive long after the runaway train has left the station on the wildest of rides…. (Read the whole thing)
If you’ve read my second novel Waiting for a Star to Fall, in which Dirty Dancing features as a plot point, then you’ll know that this movie means a lot to me, and Andrea Warner’s The Time of My Life: Dirty Dancing, a contribution to the ECW Pop Classics Series, only deepened my affection and admiration. (Read the whole thing)
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 preservation is starting to seem pretty futile, particularly as a string of arsons take down one listed building after another. (Read the whole thing)
In my conversation with Lefler, she mentions how life itself is stressful enough and therefore, in her fiction, she strives to give readers a holiday from all that and provide fun and pleasure instead, which she definitely accomplishes, but I also want to emphasize that this book is so good. That excellence and being a pleasure to read can go hand-in-hand, as they do in this “shipwreck rom-com” (I didn’t even know that was a thing!) in which the cast of a 20-year-old teen drama en-route to their reunion show end up stranded on a desert island. (Read the whole thing)
And this is the neighbourhood that Gruber is exploring in her essays, writing about the various ways that bringing life into the world is tangled with death, dead pigeons on the sidewalk. She writes about her pandemic pregnancy, about the challenges of unruly toddlers and being able to hold a child’s gigantic and ferocious feelings, about being stuck in a two bedroom apartment with small kids due to wildfires that have made the air outside unhealthy to breathe. (Read the whole thing)
And subverting expectations is what this book is all about, in terms of the characters, but also the stories themselves, each of which comes with the most devastating pivot, sometimes on an epic scale, sometimes unbearably subtle (the push of an elevator button at the end of one story that I will never get over). As a reader, I want things to work out for these characters, but Fofana, a public school teacher in New York City (as well as a celebrated short story writer out of the gate—not everybody gets a blurb from Lorrie Morrie), does not give us the satisfaction, the catharsis. (Read the whole thing)
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 Department, a partnership that’s solidified with Lane’s relationship and eventual marriage to Inspector Frederick Darling a few books into the series. And now we’re on Book 11, Lightning Strikes the Silence, and it seems that Lane’s life hasn’t been quiet for a moment… (Read the whole thing)