Two Books

Forged from a night of reckless drinking -- that great tolling bell known as The Hangover. That's what I awoke to yesterday, what I feared would get worse, not better, as the day tolled on. But no! Two aspirins, a glass of lukewarm water, and voila -- good to go! I reviewed the nine previews I wrote for the April-May issue of Preview Guide to Galleries + Museums, took out the semi-colons, pressed SEND, then sent myself out for a walk ...

... west ... down the lane just north of Kingsway, out at 16th, across Fraser, past Little Montparnasse, Robson Park, the two car lots, the former Biltmore Hotel/social housing complex, the new market housing condo, the Best Western Hotel, Kingsgate Mall to East Broadway, a block west to Main, half a block north to Pulp Fiction...

Chris and JP standing behind the counter. Like bartenders, I think. Pulp Fiction is a bar and bottles line the shelves.

Notes from a Feminist Killjoy: Essays on everyday life (Book*hug, 2017) is showcased, and because I have heard of its author Erin Wunker (a social media casualty after Christian took a screen grab from her private correspondence and sent it to Angie who sent it to Jonathan who made it public), I read the first pages of her "Introduction: Some Notes for You, Reading". "Who do I think I am?" asks Wunker three pages in (13), after noting the consequences of her opening line: "I have a bitchy resting face." I return the book to the shelf for a less-thumbed over copy, when Chris is suddenly beside me.

"This!" he says holding up a copy of Terese Marie Mailhot's Heart Berries: A Memoir (Doubleday Canada, 2018), and in his impatiently anxious way, he tells me why.

Later that night, savouring the first brief chapters of Mailhot's fiercely spare prose, I am reminded of Denis Johnson's Jesus' Son (FSG, 1992). Only it isn't booze and drugs shaping Mailhot's lyric line -- it's more primary than that. Mailhot provides all sorts of examples rooted in patriarchy, colonialism, but the word that recurs more often than others is that most intersectional of descriptors -- "context."

After her grandmother dies, Mailhot writes: "nobody noticed me. Indian girls can be forgotten so well they forget themselves."

A few lines later Mailhot's mother brings a healer to their house:

"He knelt down. I thought I was in trouble, so I told him I had been good. He said, 'You don't have to be nice.'

My mother said that was when I became trouble."

Permission granted? A curse brought on by her "healer"?

Thank you for your books.