Claremont
By Wiebke von Carolsfeld (Linda Leith Publishing)
Reviewed by Kate Finegan
In Wiebke von Carolsfeld’s debut novel, Claremont, nine-year-old Tom knows what death is because he sees it in excruciating detail. After a tense dinner, Tom’s mom kisses him goodnight six times and assures him, “Everything’s gonna be okay.” Still, Tom can’t sleep, so he’s awake to hear his mother’s screams, his father’s footsteps outside his bedroom door. He’s awake to hear the gunshot blast downstairs, to find his mother bleeding, to tell the 911 dispatcher, “We’re dying.”
Although the violence happens off the page, its aftermath is terrible. This novel bravely deals with that aftermath, as Tom’s maternal aunts and uncle struggle to give him a safe, stable home in which to grieve and grow. This effort is complicated by Tom’s traumatic mutism. As time conspicuously passes, Tom’s silence remains constant. What he cannot say, he wails out on a stolen harmonica. Otherwise, he sucks his thumb with “wet, sloppy, disgusting slurps.” However, as von Carolsfeld boldly employs multiple perspectives, the reader is privy to Tom’s thoughts as well as those of his aunts and uncle. On the page, Tom is anything but silent. Indeed, his coping mechanism of counting, which chillingly echoes the counting of his father’s footsteps on that horrific night, is ever-present and complements the use of months as chapter titles to highlight the division between linear time and the cyclical nature of grief, which can feel more like treading water than making forward motion.
This novel deftly inhabits the timeline of the family’s grief while exploring the diverging backstories. While Tom loved both parents, he lived with the outbursts and anger; he couldn’t look away, couldn’t ignore the warning signs. His aunts and uncle, who fully embraced his father, begin to see how they ignored the signs of an abusive relationship. As a filmmaker, von Carolsfeld knows the power of the smallest gesture, the importance of every minor prop, and this attention to detail shines in her handling of the detritus—physical and emotional—that the grief-stricken must sort through.
The ending veers somewhat toward sentimentality, and the resolution to the central question of how to keep Tom safe within the family is handled off the page and relies on a social worker who takes an unusual interest in Tom, which seems too easy. What I’ll remember from this novel, though, is neither the horror of the beginning nor the clean resolution of the ending; it’s the messy, interminable middle, when every imperfect person struggles mightily, when those struggles sometimes look like acquiescence, when the family repeatedly falls apart, only to fall back together, and to repeat that process, within and without, again and again and again, and the honesty of the mess is a gift to anyone who has ever had to grieve.
Falling for Myself
Dorothy Ellen Palmer (Wolsak & Wynn)
Reviewed by Neil Price
Dorothy Ellen Palmer’s Falling for Myself is a compelling and fearless memoir that forms a testament to survival, endurance, activism, and the ongoing struggle to live a life of dignity and freedom in the face of ableism and ageism.
Palmer, who was adopted as a child during the 1950s with congenital deformities in both feet, crafts an unflinching and bitingly funny account of how she shaped her life as a mother, educator, writer, and disability activist in Toronto and Durham, Ontario, at a time when claiming those combined identities seemed unlikely.
The book opens with scenes from Palmer’s childhood, where her adoption and all its attendant unknown genealogies form the basis of a quizzical and eventful life rooted in uncertainty, otherness, physical pain, and a constant sense of having to deal with the limitations of her much-discussed feet, which she lovingly calls Herkimer and Horatio.
Palmer perseveres and becomes a determined realist-optimist. “When you’re in chronic pain, you can’t end it, or beat it. You can only befriend it,” she writes. It’s this remarkable ability to reframe adversity that constitutes the main thrust and tone of a book that can teach those of us who have had little to no experience with disability a great deal.
Sections of the book are harrowing. We learn that Palmer is a survivor of childhood sexual abuse. We also see her endure multiple surgeries and the troubling relationships that are often defined by all the ways in which people see her as someone worth pitying rather than loving.
Palmer leaves home as a young woman and studies at university, where feminism and socialism become ideas that anchor her life. She marries, becomes the mother of two children, and takes up teaching English and drama in high school at a time when people living with disability are mostly viewed as abnormal or invisible. As a teacher, Palmer deals with the impacts of erasure at her workplace and points out that disabled people can’t possibly share their lived experiences if educational materials don’t include them. “You can’t teach books by disabled authors if none are published,” writes Palmer.
While memoirs that present stories of overcoming odds often slip into maudlin predictability, Falling for Myself never feels contrived or set up to induce what Palmer calls “inspiration porn.” Instead, her story is really about a personal journey of learning and never becomes overly preachy or didactic. We are let in on Palmer’s delight in finding and developing her ability to shape her own narrative. “Writing also unveiled another unexpected, pain-combating gift: I was funny,” she declares.
It is this tongue-in-cheek, humorous style that informs the book’s fighting spirit and language. Whether it’s coming to terms with the painful realities of her feet and aging body, or dealing with a divorce that leaves her impoverished, or battling the fat-shaming society in which she lives, or putting the emotional pieces of an unknown family past together—Palmer has a way of getting the last laugh. In doing so, she offers a hopeful take on whatever obstacles she and the broader disabled community have faced or have yet to face.
Pallbearing Stories
By Michael Melgaard (House of Anansi Press)
Reviewed by Vinaya Gopaal
Michael Melgaard’s short story collection, Pallbearing Stories, is an intriguing debut that beguiles the reader by offering a sense of the familiar while revealing deeper truths about the human condition. With each story, one yearns to learn more about the characters who inhabit scenes and landscapes that appear unremarkable on the surface but harbour simmering tensions and conflicts, both internal and interpersonal.
In “Rob and Jane,” a young man faces his inner turmoil as he goes about his day-to-day routine. As with many of the book’s characters, we’re not sure what’s eating away at Rob, but we follow him around as he starts his day with a hangover and finds himself unable or unwilling to be of any help to his wife and three children. With his drinking and excessive spending habits taking a toll on everything in Rob’s life, Melgaard allows us to see his symptoms but not the causes. What got him here? Was he always so?
“Coming and Going” tells the story of Barb, an aging divorcee who lives by herself in a trailer, nurturing an obsession for noting down licence plate numbers of cars that pass by. Having lost most of her money in a divorce, she also loses faith in people around her, including her son Mark, whom she feels bitter toward, given his relationship with his father. Barb can be mean in commenting on her son’s “stupid fat body” or describing him as a “lump of dough slopping down the wall.” But we still find her endearing, and in many ways we sympathize with her painful sense of loss.
Debbie’s addiction to gambling, and the turmoil it brings into her life, forms the central storyline in “Little to Lose.” Caught beneath mounting debts, Debbie is forced to seek her brother’s help when her car is impounded. The confrontation that ensues causes her to reckon with what she will do in the face of strained relationships and an unravelling financial status.
Through sparse yet poignant description, Melgaard tells the story of everyday people living everyday lives. What may appear as simple or unadorned narratives at first glance are actually deeply layered human experiences that threaten to tear off the facades of normalcy that we employ.
I Hope We Choose Love
By Kai Cheng Thom (Arsenal Pulp Press)
Reviewed by Shazia Hafiz Ramji
“This is a book about revolutionary love,” declares Kai Cheng Thom in the introduction to her book of essays, I Hope We Choose Love: A Trans Girl’s Notes from the End of the World. She continues: “Love that might not save us at the end of the world but that might make it possible to live through.”
Appeals to love in the context of social justice often carry the danger of universalization, of erasing the specificity of one’s experience and pain in the guise of “love.” Appeals to love can be grandiose and sentimental, afforded only by the privileged, but Thom’s essay collection offers a love that is radical in theory as well as practice. She interrogates justice and its communities, unravels the ways shame enables trauma to replicate itself. She shows us what it means to choose love and how to practise it.
Dividing the book into three parts—Let Us Love, Let Us Live, and Let Us Believe—Thom dives deep into her own past to articulate the struggles she’s experienced within the social justice movement. She articulates her own positionality and the truths that she holds as self-evident: “We live in a world fundamentally shaped by the systemic exploitation and abuse of many oppressed peoples […] TRANS WOMEN ARE WOMEN.” She admits that she’s much more interested in the “grey area” within the left itself: “I think we are seeing an increasing fragmentation and oversimplification of identity politics via the Oppression Olympics: harsh competition for resources, like funding, attention, and legitimacy […] in Social Justice Land we emphasize our marginalized identities and downplay our privileged ones to seem cooler and more important.”
It takes guts to express these nuances. In “Chronicle of a Rape Foretold: Holding Queer Community to Account,” Thom probes further: “But what do we do about individuals who happen to be both survivors and perpetrators?” She tells us about a queer punk community in Montreal and how her “own experiences of living through violence within queer community went unnoticed for so long.” She speaks of silence within communities who were her chosen family, of an unwillingness to act, and she transforms these struggles into a poem that closes on the question “how has queer community loved you?”
Essays throughout the collection are interspersed with poems, enacting a fluidity that puts theory into practice; they respond to an observation Thom makes about the social justice movement’s neglect of the creative in its focus on the critical. The result is a candid journey that is wholehearted and generous in its storytelling. There are many layers of research on trauma and counselling, but the tone is never didactic. The clarity and intimacy of Thom’s voice places story at the heart.
It is not an easy task for any writer or activist to critique their own communities, but Thom has done it—I Hope We Choose Love is a collection of essays that exceeds itself because of its expansive nuance that makes room for the monsters and high priestesses that reside within each of us. This book is a how-to guide for fighters who are also lovers.
