What I admire most about Renee's writing is her paragraph. Unlike Malcolm Lowry's paragraph, a baroque structure littered with broken bottle clauses (often to great effect), Renee favours leaner smoother lines, a paragraph that rarely exceeds four sentences.

Where some writers strive for aphorism (the hot licks of our times), Renee, like Monk, gives us the space between. (Monk was often playing in her store.)

Here is the fourth paragraph from the fifth chapter of Subject to Change:

"That evening on my way home I almost missed the obviously lost puppy shivering and shaking by the curb. It didn't take much persuasion to get him to walk with me into a pizza parlour so I could read his tag. The name and number on it corresponded with George Puil the city councillor who'd been responsible for the recent four-month transit strike that had wrecked havoc in many lives."

Renee Rodin launched her memoir Subject to Change (Vancouver: Talonbooks, 2011) yesterday afternoon at the Billy Bishop Legion in Kits. About sixty came out for an event made enjoyable first for editor Karl Seigler’s increasingly mysterious introductions, then Renee’s fabulous thank yous, which are artworks in themselves.

I received my copy of Subject to Change last month, and devoured it in a couple of sittings. Renee’s style is spare yet elegant, her narratives deceptively simple. And what a life! -- enriched as it is by her arrangement of it, as literature. Montreal, Vancouver, San Francisco, New York; the 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s and 00s.

Subject to Change is a book I will keep alongside two of my favorite memoirs: Harold Nicolson’s Some People and Bruce Chatwin’s In Patagonia. I look forward to return readings.