How You Were Born

The night you were born I dreamed of a train that surged out of the dark, headlights blazing, furious with light. It bore down on the world, shrieking, a great and terrible movement. You stared, unblinking, and your eyes were fixed on the fading afterimage of wherever you were before we are. You were more awake than anyone I had ever seen, your hands waving lightly in the new air. And I thought: this is how you were born.

Back when How You Were Born first won the 2015 Trillium Book Award in June, I heard the most charming story (taken here from The Globe & Mail ):

When the finalists for the (award) were announced last month, Kate Cayley and her partner explained to their 7-year-old daughter that Cayley was nominated alongside some of the best writers in Canada, including Dionne Brand, Thomas King and Margaret Atwood – all past recipients of the prize.

“My daughter, without a beat, said, ‘Well, you’re not going to win.’”

I love that story because, as a reader, I just see the finished book and hear about awards as abstract ideas and I can like this or not because it's just a consumer product in the end, but to Cayley's daughter, this book represents everyday life, maybe the nights when supper was late because Mom was on a roll, and the finished book isn't a product so much as an artefact, and how, therefore, could one's own Mom possibly compare with Margaret Flipping Atwood? I'm thinking the win (and subsequent additional nomination for the Governor General's Award for Fiction) also came as a surprise to Cayley's small Newfoundland publisher because it took me this long to get a copy of the book to read, being totally unavailable to order from the library or online bookstores until now. Consisting of eleven short stories over 150 or so pages, this collection felt, overall, a little light to me compared to the other heavyweights Cayley was competing against, but there's something – some uncanniness – that lingers after this book is closed that feels like it may have affected me more than I consciously realised.

Filled with unusual characters – acrobats and freak show performers, Appalachian folk legends, a Buchenwald survivor afraid of his nursing home and another old guy fighting back against his doppelgänger – it was often difficult for me to make a real mental connection with the stories. But when Cayley wrote from a familiar perspective – as in the eager little sister, ready to play spies with her ASD brother in The Summer the Neighbours Were Nazis or when the 11-year-old shy girl fell for the man with the dragon tattoo in Acrobat – I was totally connected emotionally. Ultimately, there were enough of these connected moments to raise my estimation of this collection, especially in afterthought.

Classics scholar – I've been educated to believe in fate, not the happy resolution kind, but the older kind in which something happens to you and you bow your head and live in it, there's no other choice.

These stories all feel like the slices of fate that you bow your head and live in; not huge dramas but the small events that make up a life nonetheless. The two stories that bookend this collection – Resemblance and How You Were Born – are both about the same lesbian couple and the child they have together, and it seems fitting to me that it's hearing about Cayley's own daughter that made me seek this book. Four stars is a rounding up.

So, yeah, written by a lesbian author, I was often startled when a character in one of the stories would demonstrate same sex affections, but "startled" doesn't mean "put off"; there's something refreshing and appropriate about having my assumptions gently challenged. One story -- Boys -- did make me uncomfortable and that was made doubly worse by this review:

The most startling and devastating tale is Boys, about a man who enables his brother’s pedophilic tendencies, not carelessly but out of love. It’s a deft portrayal of two kinds of human frailty told with uncommon compassion.

In this story, a mentally slow man -- James -- has a fixation on young boys and he tries to befriend them and get them to go for a ride in his car with him. It's never made clear whether James is interested in the boys sexually or whether he's mentally stalled at the age of a young boy himself (and therefore looking for an appropriate playmate?), but the facts aren't clear to Jim either (the man's cousin who is being paid to keep an eye on James), and to the degree that Jim is enabling "his (cousin's) pedophilic tendencies", I didn't find that a loving act of uncommon compassion. 

*****

Finalists – 2015 Trillium Book Award

Margaret Atwood : Stone Mattress
Dionne Brand : Love Enough 
Kate Cayley : How You Were Born
James King : Old Masters
Thomas King : The Back of the Turtle
Edmund Metatawabin : Up Ghost River 

Of these, my favourite read was Up Ghost River, but congrats to Kate Cayley for the win.

Governor General's Literary Awards English Fiction Finalists: 

Kate Cayley - How You Were Born

Rachel Cusk - Outline

Helen Humphreys - The Evening Chorus

Clifford Jackman - The Winter Family

Guy Vanderhaghe - Daddy Lenin and Other Stories

Happy to see Daddy Lenin take the GG!