The Wild Girl

 

“Wild by name and wild by nature,” Dortchen’s father used to say of her. He did not mean it as a compliment. He thought her headstrong, and so he set himself to tame her.

I picked up The Wild Girl because it was mentioned in a nonfiction book I recently read about the storytellers behind famous fairy tales (The Fairy Tellers), and focussed as it is on the story of Dortchen Wild — a childhood neighbour of the Brothers Grimm and the eventual wife of one of them — author Kate Forsyth does a wonderful job of bringing her research to life. Set during the Napoleonic Wars (it was the years-long French occupation that prompted the Grimms to collect and preserve German folklore), this is a rich and exciting time period for a romantic Historical Fiction, and while I was never bored by the details, I didn’t find this particularly literary. I am delighted that this book brings Dortchen’s contributions into the light (hers is the first known version of “Hansel and Gretel” to feature a gingerbread house; why wouldn’t we know her name?), this was certainly not a waste of my time, just not entirely to my tastes.

As she put her cloak on and gathered up her jug and bowls, Wilhelm said to her, “I’d like to hear one of your stories some time. I’m interested in old stories and songs and such things. Friends of mine are collecting folk songs at the moment, for a book they are writing. Do you and your sisters know any songs?”

Because Forsyth has a PhD in Fairy Tale Studies and based this novel on documents that she uncovered and translated, I understand why she would feel the need to include the entire period between the meeting of Dortchen Wild and Wilhelm Grimm and their eventual marriage (twenty-some years later), but the result felt both too long (at 500 pages) and too shallow (skipping months and years ahead at a time). It really is a fascinating time period that Forsyth got to work with here, but it often led to infodumping in a nonorganic manner: would young Dortchen really be thinking the following as she learns Napoleon is marching towards Hessen-Cassel?

Dortchen thought of the Holy Roman Empire. So many tiny countries stitched together into a patchwork eiderdown, each with its own archduke or archbishop, prince or landgrave, squabbling over borders and taxes and rights of privilege, each with their own weights and measures, their own laws and curfews. Some of the princedoms were so small that they could fire at each other from their castle walls. Yet for over a millennium they had held together. What would happen now a few of those stitches were torn loose? Would the whole patchwork unravel?

Forsyth namedrops Beethoven and Goethe and Admiral Nelson, features balls at the palace, the “Year Without a Summer”, and a typhoid epidemic, but the historical highlights are the frequent reports of Napoleon (the “Ogre”) and his uncanny military strategy. After Jérome Napoleon was installed as the King of Westphalia (and locals began to wonder if maybe they weren’t better off under the new Napoleonic Codes), the wars raged on for years and years until finally, it would seem, the Little Emperor had even taken Moscow. As the daughter of the town Apothecary, there is also much rich detail about harvesting and preparing natural remedies. And, of course, this is a bosom-heaving love story:

As Dortchen finished the tale, Wilhelm threw down his quill, caught her in his arms and kissed her. Despite herself, Dortchen fell back beneath him. Her mouth opened, her hands tangled in his hair and she welcomed his weight upon her. They kissed as if the world were about to end and this was all the chance of life left to them. They kissed as if they were starving and the other was all sustenance. Dortchen lost all sense of herself. There were only their mouths and their shy hands, and the brush of flesh against flesh.

It is recorded fact that Dortchen and Wilhelm didn’t get married until they were in their thirties (despite how unusual that would have been at the time), and interestingly, Forsyth looked for explanatory subtext in the fairy tales that Dortchen recited (particularly the disturbing “All Kinds of Fur”), writing in an afterword, “I built this novel by listening to the story within the stories that Dortchen told.” That decision led the plot in some unexpected directions (“unexpected”, but not unsupported by the premise; the subtext is in the stories), but stretching this courtship over a couple decades of will-they-won’t-they (when the reader knows they’ll eventually be married) became a little dull. Again, I am pleased that this exists: Dortchen’s name deserves to be known and Kate Forsyth has given her a whole life here.

For some reason, I thought that in The Fairy Tellers this was referred to as a "remarkable novel", but going back after being a bit underwhelmed by this, I see that he called this "beautiful". I do want to note that both the author of The Fairy Tellers, Nicholas Jubber, and the author of The Wild Girl, Kate Forsyth, cite Clever Maids: The Secret History of the Grimm Fairy Tales as "wonderful", and as a work of nonfiction, I might be inspired to look for it one day.

This Is Assisted Dying: A Doctor's Story of Empowering Patients at the End of Life

 

I empower my patients by letting them know they are eligible for an assisted death. This doesn’t mean they have to do it, and it doesn’t mean they will. It means they can proceed if they ever feel the need to, and the result is a reduction in suffering. How do I feel when I do this work? As if I have been a part of something profound. As if I have had the privilege of helping someone in need.

 

I found This Is Assisted Dying to be quite surprising: After the Canadian Parliament legalised what it called “medical assistance in dying,” or MAiD, in June of 2016, it was up to Canadian medical professionals (doctors and nurse practitioners) to come up with the protocols and processes for offering the procedure, without precise pharmacological, legal, or bureaucratic guidance from the government. As one of the first doctors to begin a MAiD practice, Dr Stefanie Green was instrumental in setting the standards for termination of life care, and the story that she tells of her first year in this practice is fascinating and moving. Filled with stories of MAiD in action, Green brings us into the rooms of those terminal patients who insist on controlling their final moments — most often surrounded by loving friends and family, sometimes proceeding despite angry opposition — and the picture she paints is of peaceful passings; the end of suffering; the “good death” we all want for ourselves and the ones we love. Eye-opening and provocative, this is the kind of book you really want to talk to people about; totally recommended. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)

A birth plan, a death plan. It struck a deep chord. This was the first time I made the connection between my skills in maternity care and the skills required to provide a good death. Both situations involved intense emotional experiences and carried a strong sense of the event’s significance. Both called up complex family dynamics and required a patient-centered approach to care. Perhaps my expertise would be transferable after all. Perhaps I was not as inexperienced as I felt.

After over a decade in a maternity/neonatal practice — with long and unpredictable hours, middle-of-the-night deliveries, and the colleagues in her practise beginning to retire — Dr Green started thinking about changing her focus. And when the Canadian Supreme Court struck down its blanket prohibition of assisted dying, Green began to wonder what providing medically assisted death might look like. She attended a conference in Amsterdam — where she was shocked to see only a handful of other Canadian physicians in attendance — and recognising the urgency and importance of what they could learn there, this small group went to every seminar, shared notes on what other jurisdictions had settled on as best practises, and brought that learning back to Canada in order to start offering MAiD to those patients who were already clamouring for it. This was the part that I found most surprising: That this small group of doctors would have happened upon the knowledge they needed (the necessary pharmaceutical cocktails, proven delivery methods, what to expect at every step of the process), and without a lot of direction from the government — Parliamentary language states that a patient must be suffering from a “grievous and irremediable condition”, that suffering had to be intolerable, their decline irreversible, and their natural death “reasonably foreseeable” — these doctors began to provide MAiD, often to the distaste of other medical (and particularly palliative) professionals, and wary of complying with laws that weren’t exactly clear. Also surprising: When they began, the service was so new that these doctors didn’t even have proper billing codes to get paid for their work through the various Provincial Health plans. It’s amazing to think of all of those people who were suffering through painful, lingering deaths — people who must have thought, “MAiD is now legal, so I just have to ask for it” — but there were still just a few practitioners, and most of them were on Vancouver Island, like Green herself. (She writes of Vancouver Island that it’s “a region that has turned out to have the highest percentage of assisted death, not just in the province or in the country but worldwide.” WHAT?) As that first year proceeded and more Canadian practitioners began offering the service, they would discuss their experiences on an online forum and this eventually grew into the professional group known as the Canadian Association of MAiD Assessors and Providers — CAMAP — and Dr Green was chosen to be their first president. And again, it was surprising to me that all of this grew from the ground up instead of the government somehow imposing structure from the top, but as Green says, these sorts of decisions are more properly made in the clinic than in the boardroom (and while that totally makes sense, it's still surprising that the government didn't want to get involved and mess things up.)

All of this information about how MAiD first became available, and how those doctors discovered their own protocols and created CAMAP, was totally fascinating to me. But This Is Assisted Dying is marketed as a memoir, and despite my appreciation for how Green shares her personal reactions to all of the events she describes — and despite the fact that I do read and like memoir — I don’t know if descriptions of her childhood and family life added much to this topic for me, but others' reactions might vary:

In my mother, I saw the seed of my own emotional fortitude. I’d had a turbulent childhood at times, and I’d learned at an early age to protect myself by building some emotional armor, some emotional walls to help keep the intensity at bay. Although this coping mechanism had not always been helpful in my personal relationships — making me more cautious about becoming vulnerable — it was perhaps due to this inner toughness modeled on my mother, and the lessons in protecting myself from difficult feelings, that I was able to compartmentalize my life, such that I could do my MAiD work and not be wrecked or overwhelmed by it.

Also: I was moved by all of the stories Green shares about her patients; specific cases are, naturally, more affecting than general debate. So, while it wasn’t totally unexpected, it was a little disappointing to read in the Author’s Note, “other than where I have obtained express consent to describe real events, characters and cases have been purposefully altered — including name, age, gender, ethnicity, profession, familial relationship, place of residence, and diagnosis — and in some instances reflect fictional composites.” On a more positive note: It was very interesting to read the other information Green adds at the end — how Canadian termination of life care compares to other countries (I had no idea how few countries have legalised the procedure or how comparatively liberal our rules are), what legal issues are still being debated (whether MAiD should be offered to mature minors, if it should be offered to those suffering debilitating mental illness, whether it can be asked for in advance for dementia patients), and how COVID protocols affected the delivery of service.

Fascinating and surprising, This Is Assisted Dying makes for a compelling, necessary, read. Rounded up to four stars.

The Fairy Tellers

 

All of the storytellers in this book had enormous challenges to face, from poverty to political turmoil, from psychological afflictions to the horrors of war. Some succeeded in overcoming these challenges, but not all of them did. As we’ll discover, ‘happy ever after’ is a cliché often spurned by the tales themselves. Many of our most beloved stories end sadly, and so, unfortunately, did many of our fairy tellers. But all of them lived, and most of them loved; several of them travelled, experiencing many different shades of the world, and a couple of them succeeded beyond their wildest dreams.

Making the point early in The Fairy Tellers that many of the tales best known to us in the West can trace their roots back to the Bronze Age, travel writer Nicholas Jubber endeavoured to discover why so many of those tales seem to now be “time-locked inside a bubble of medieval Europe”. As Jubber travelled through France and Germany, India and Syria, Russia and Denmark — seeking out the former homes of both famous and lesser known fairy tellers and interviewing local literary experts — he was surprised to learn how many fairy tale themes and details seemed to repeat across time and cultures, and perhaps less surprised to discover that each teller would imprint the old stories with details from their own lives. As it turns out, these fairy tales, in the forms we know them today, have been “time-locked” thanks to those who had access to publication (generally: white European men), but they weren’t always the tellers of the tales, and Jubber does a genuine service to bring the uncredited fairy tellers themselves (generally: women and non-Europeans) out of the shadows. This book contains many shortened versions of fairy tales, the biographies of their tellers and collectors, and vivid geographical writing from Jubber’s travels; and while that’s a lot to pack into one volume, I found it all very interesting — perhaps lacking in insight and analysis, but Jubber has collected so much of interest here that I’m rounding up to four stars. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)

From the global to the local: the most popular fairy tales are astonishingly agile at aping each other’s structures while transplanting themselves to new locales. As we’ll discover with some of the other tellers in this book, there’s an eerie parallel between the trajectories of disease and the pathways of stories: virulently contagious and cunningly adaptable.

From an early Cinderella-type story found in China (I suppose the impossibly tiny shoe does make the most sense in a foot-binding culture) to the long history of women telling stories about princesses being tricked into marrying beasts, Jubber learned that every time he found the “first” version of a fairy tale, he would later discover an earlier version of it in some other culture’s tradition. And because of that, the popular fairy tales that we know (like those attributed to the Brothers Grimm or Charles Perrault) can only properly be said to have been “collected” by them — except for those written by Hans Christian Andersen, which Jubber considers original creations (and the last true “fairy tales”). I picked out quite a few interesting tidbits about the fairy tellers behind the well known tales, and I’m putting it all here with apologies because it’s just. so. much. 

The young woman forced to labour for her horrible stepsisters, whisked by magic to the ball, who simply can’t hold on to her shoe — for European readers, Giambattista got there first. The princess in the tower, whose hair becomes a ladder so her handsome lover can climb up to meet her — that’s one of Giambattista’s. He provided one of the earliest known versions of the comatose princess in the forgotten castle; and of the brother and sister, abandoned in the woods by their woodcutter father, who can’t make their way home because their trail’s been eaten.

Born around 1575 in Naples, a contemporary of Shakespeare and Cervantes, Giambattista Basile wrote The Tale of Tales: the first written collection of many familiar fairy tales. Giambattista wrote in the Neapolitan dialect, knew people who knew Galileo and the feminist painter Artemisia Gentileschi, and died from an air-poisoning eruption of Mt Vesuvius in 1631, catching the “fatal infection” at age fifty-six.

Genies and treasure caves, cities of sumptuous palaces and bustling markets, sorcerers disguised as wandering dervishes, cunning slavegirls outwitting thieves and cross-dressing princesses defeating viziers at chess: these were the tales pouring out of Europe’s fledgling bookshops. So it was perfect timing for a traveller from Syria to arrive in Paris with a heap of tales in his head. His name was ‘Abd al-Qari Antoun Youssef Youhenna Dyab — or Hanna for short — and he landed in the West like a rusty old oil lamp: modest on the surface, but harbouring magic.

By 1708, The Thousand and One Nights had already become “the literary phenomenon of the age”, but Hanna would be the one to add “Aladdin” and “Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves” to the canon (and despite French translator Antoine Galland becoming famous for his version of 1001 Nights that included Aladdin and Ali Baba, Hanna was not credited in the book and was only rediscovered in 2015).

Which brings us to the scandalous life of the Baroness d’Aulnoy — salonnière, spy and spinner of tales — and the mischievously imaginative members of her circle: a countess accused of lesbianism, a lady-in-waiting who disguised herself as a bear, the pipe -smoking princess to whom they dedicated their works, and the court secretary who outsold them all.

Before Hanna Dyab made it to Paris, fairy telling in France had already gone viral. Around ninety tales from the 1690s have survived, two-thirds of which were written by high society women. “Beauty and the Beast” was written by Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve: an impoverished aristocrat, widowed young, who became the housekeeper and mistress of Crébillon (the age’s most famous playwright and the official Censor), but despite helping Crébillon with his literary duties, she was unable to get a licence to publish much of her own work. Writing about the Disney version of “Beauty and the Beast”, Jubber notes “the credits listed more than thirty writers for the storyline, script development and dialogue, but there wasn’t a single mention of the original author. It was as if the animators had invented the tale from scratch.”

It was no sugary idyll, with its fair share of family tragedies, including the early deaths of several siblings as well as of her first-born, and the loss of both her parents by the age of twenty-one. But Dortchen did live a kind of fairy tale. Not only did she narrate some of the tales that would count among the world’s most beloved (including ‘Rumpelstiltskin’,‘The Elves and the Shoemaker’ and — probably — ‘Hansel and Gretel’), she ended up marrying the man who jotted down her tales, and lived with the brothers as the closest witness of their success. Long rendered voiceless like the nameless heroine of ‘The Six Swans ’, she is able, increasingly, to speak to us. And if we turn our ears towards her, we might just hear what she’s saying.

The Grimms might be the most recognisable name in fairy tales, but they didn’t invent stories — they collected them; particularly from the young women of their neighbourhood. The Wilds lived across the street, and not only would Dortchen Wild eventually marry Wilhelm Grimm, but she recited for him between 12 and 20 tales of his collection. The three Hassenpflug sisters — Marie, Jeanette and Amalie — who between them provided twenty-eight stories for the first edition (including “Little Red Riding Hood”, “Sleeping Beauty” and “Snow-White”), were Huguenots whose ancestors had fled France; it’s ironic that in an effort to preserve German folklore in the presence of the Napoleonic occupation, the Brothers Grimm would include so many stories that the Hassenpflugs adapted from their own French background. In a stark example of how fairy tellers’ personal circumstances coloured their tales, Jubber contrasts the type of stories told by Dortchen (whose homelife was one of drudgery and likely abuse) and those told by the more genteel Hassenpflugs:

In more than half of the tales attributed to Dortchen, the heroine’s hard work is key to the narrative — from Gretel preparing the witch’s oven to the bed-making drudge of ‘Mother Hölle’, from the uncomplaining travellers in ‘Sweetheart Roland’ and ‘The Singing, Springing Lark’ to the miller’s daughter’s hopeless spinning in ‘Rumpelstiltskin’. In this respect, Dortchen’s tales are strikingly different from those of the storyteller who on the surface appears most similar to her: Marie Hassenpflug. The latter gives relatively little attention to work (Snow White, famous these days for keeping house for the dwarves, isn’t described in the original version carrying out any of her chores). Which is just as you’d expect from the well-off daughter of a government official.

Further afield, Jubber tells the story of a Brahmin called Somadeva Bhatta — a court poet in the valley of Kashmir around the year 1070 — who wrote a collection of tales (as long as the entire Lord of the Rings series) that would include the precursors to many of our most recognisable fairy tales: “To read these tales in Somadeva’s collection is to experience the free-wheeling vitality of stories younger than other versions we know, and older than we could possibly imagine.” And turning our attention further to the north and east, Jubber shares traditional stories of Baba Yaga in her hut perched on chicken legs, deep in a snow-covered birch forest:

It’s a cliché of nineteenth-century Russia: the young idealistic intellectual, trampled by the cruelty of the tsarist system, spat out to Siberia to die a gibbering wreck in a mental ward. But Ivan Khudiakov was more than that. He was a teenage prodigy who published, in 1860, his first and most significant collection, Great Russian Fairy Tales, at the age of just eighteen. As an example of the collision between fairy telling and tawdry political reality, Ivan is one of the most fascinating fairy tellers who ever lived. He was far from the only collector to gather tales from oral sources in the wake of the Grimms, but none lived as tempestuous a life. And none would connect their fairy telling as actively to the siren call of revolution.

And I feel like I should note something of Hans Christian Andersen but what most sticks with me is his self-made rise from crushing poverty and the underwhelming reactions he got from other writers: the Grimm Brothers having no idea of who he was when he knocked on their door, unannounced, in Berlin and the sign that Charles Dickens famously placed in the guest room where Andersen had stayed: “Hans Christian Andersen slept in this room which seemed to the family AGES”. Again, I wish there had been more of an analytical focus in this book because I’m not entirely certain why Jubber states that Andersen wrote the last of the “true” fairy tales, but it’s argued for, somewhat, in this:

He had been perfectly situated between the old world of preindustrial Odense and the commercial opportunities of prosperous Copenhagen. No later fairy teller would be able to harness that perfectly calibrated alignment of traditionalism and originality that made Hans so unique.

Obviously, fairy tales have something vital to relate or else our ancestors would not have been spinning the same basic tales for the past five thousand years. Based on his research for this book, Jubber concludes that to be considered “fairy tales” stories must include magic, appeal to children, and have an element of orality (even if printed). Ultimately, what makes fairy tales, and their tellers, so essential to the human experience is the journey they take us on “to the enlightenment at the heart of the forest”:

Some people come back with jewels pouring out of their mouths, some are covered in pitch or charred with fire. Whatever their experience, everybody returns from the forest knowing more about themselves than when they set out. Tales and trails intertwine, and every one of them is a magic mirror. Like the tellers, we can look into this mirror to see the world — in its splendour and madness and brutality — and if we look carefully enough, we see ourselves peering back.

 

Run Towards the Danger: Confrontations with a Body of Memory

 

What follows are some of the most dangerous stories of my life: the ones I have avoided, the ones I haven’t told, the ones that have kept me awake on countless nights. These are stories that have haunted and directed me, unwittingly, down circuitous paths. As these stories found echoes in my adult life, and then went another, better way than they did in childhood, they became lighter and easier to carry. These stories don’t add up to a portrait of a life, or even a snapshot of one. They are about the transformative power of an ever-evolving relationship to memory. Telling them is a form of running towards the danger.

For this collection of six autobiographical essays, the title of Run Towards the Danger comes from the advice that a doctor recently gave to Sarah Polley: after suffering for nearly four years the brain damage and migraines resulting from a concussion — four years of respecting the boundaries of what would cause her pain or discomfort and retreating to dark rooms when the world around her got too stimulating — a concussion specialist in Pittsburgh told Polley that caution was exactly the wrong approach. After providing her with exercises that would work to rewire the pathways in her brain, Polley was advised to “pin her ears back and run towards the danger”. And within six weeks, her brain was healed. This idea of confronting the things that cause us pain and discomfort makes for a wonderful metaphor for what Polley has crafted here: in each of the six essays, Polley tells the story of a painful episode from her past, and with finely crafted prose and layers of self-reflection, she turns each grit of ache into a perfect little pearl to share with the world. The writing is skillful, the stories are compelling and affecting, and their lessons are universal: who could ask for more?

I’ve had a lot of illnesses and physical problems, many of them invisible: endometriosis, scoliosis, placenta previa, and now a concussion. I think it’s starting to get on people’s nerves and make them suspicious.

I won’t go over every essay, but will start by noting that I (and probably most other people) would never have realised that young Sarah had scoliosis, or that while she was a child television star, she was wearing a painful spine-straightening brace under her period costumes. With a number of other medical issues over the years, and several stories about people doubting her recollection of events, the subtitle “Confrontations with a Body of Memory” is also perfect; this is ultimately about the body and memory. Perhaps the best example of this is on Polley’s experience with disgraced CBC radio host Jian Ghomeshi:

I’ve been writing and rewriting this essay for years now. It’s difficult, when you’ve resisted telling a story for so long, to know where to start. Especially when it has haunted you not to tell it. When it has knocked around inside your brain, loudly in the middle of the night, asking why it didn’t deserve to be told, asking you who you might have hurt by not telling it, who you might truly be, deep down, because of your decision not to.

As other women who had been abused by Ghomeshi started coming forward with accusations, Polley heeded the advice of lawyer friends to not join their ranks: not just because being cross-examined in a sexual assault case is a terrible experience, but because Polley had been obliged to appear on Ghomeshi’s radio show over the years and her flirty/giggly performances would likely have only undermined the Crown’s case. Polley tells a harrowing story about her encounter with Ghomeshi, but the essay is more about how trauma affects memory and actions and how the victims of abuse can be incapable of acting as “perfect witnesses”. Another standout was the essay on Polley’s only foray into live theatre — when she was cast as the lead in Alice Through the Looking-Glass at the Stratford Festival — where she developed crippling stage fright as the season went on:

By this point, it may be obvious that a nervous breakdown of epic proportions was in the offing. This dichotomy between my womanly body, which was in a kind of collapse, and the oddness of experiencing a sort of reversal of puberty and hard-won independence, twisted with the knots of a story written by a likely pedophile that contained echoes of my relationship with my father, was a powder keg for my subconscious.

At fifteen (and having lived in Toronto with her boyfriend for a year by this point in the wake of her mother’s death and her father’s ensuing apathy), Polley was in the strange position of staying with an aunt and cousin in Stratford (who took loving care of her in a way her parents never had) and playing the part of a much younger girl on stage, but also playing the lead in that show and having the fate of the entire production rest in her untrained hands. The story of Alice and Lewis Carroll had a particular strange resonance for Polley and the pressure and the dissonance did lead to a breakdown (which saw Polley begging a surgeon to perform the long-dreaded spinal surgery that would get her out of her terror-inducing role.)

In an essay on her time filming The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, Polley tells a crazy story of the danger, neglect, and disregard she suffered under director Terry Gilliam. And while in her memory she blamed her parents (who were on set with her in Italy) for not protecting her, Polley eventually realises that even as a little child she had bought into the mythos of the “mad genius” that allows white, male directors to get away with unchallenged abuse on Hollywood films. Even when she tries to discuss the trauma she suffered on set with Gilliam as an adult, he responds by gaslighting her into not trusting her own memories:

So much of coming to terms with hard things from the past seems to be about believing our own accounts, having our memories confirmed by those who were there and honoured by those who weren’t. Why is it so hard for us to believe our own stories or begin to process them without corroborating witnesses appearing from the shadows of the past, or without people stepping forward with open arms when echoes of those stories present themselves again in the present?

Polley doesn’t write much about her time filming Road to Avonlea (other than making sure we know she hated the experience and the notoriety), but when she has a dream that convinces her to take her family on a vacation to Prince Edward Island, their time there will help her come to terms with the Avonlea experience:

Things have become murky for me on this island in a way they couldn’t have when I was younger — murky in the best possible sense, where whatever sharp narrative I’ve been spinning for years about parents and childhood and lost things has dissipated into foggier outlines. I wonder, now, if I escaped my childhood to arrive in this beautiful life, as I used to believe, or if I should be grateful to that childhood for leading me, so precisely, here.

Sarah Polley has had an outsized public life, and while the stories that reference those public achievements makes for interesting reading, it’s her private struggles and how she learned to live a meaningful life in the midst of trauma and chaos (and concussion!) that makes this feel essential. I wish her the best and much success in future projects.

Immortal North

There’s language to the woods and it’s speaking to those capable of listening, to ears taught to decode meanings mild or malignant. Geese flying, bees buzzing. Howl of a wolf, height of the clouds, face of the moon, colour of the night and the morning sky, movement of game, snowfall heavy or light — things mostly lost on most people. Where others heard the winds in the maples, the trapper smelled the sap on the breeze. A wind veered northerly and where another might think the evening cold, he knew frost was coming early and the temperatures would stay cold for a week and the bears would feed heavily before the berry bushes died and the deer would be more active at dusk, at dawn. Inflections of the forest, cadence of the wilderness, language of the North.

Oh my heart. I want to start by saying that author Tom Stewart reached out to me and, based on the kinds of books I appear to like, suggested that I just might enjoy reading his first novel, Immortal North. And: yes, yes, yes; this is the sort of thing I like. That I love. It’s about nature and about people and about how a person attempts to live in the world and create the meaning he cannot find there. The story of a widower, a trapper in the northern wilderness doing his best to raise a ten-year-old son alone — to make him tough enough to survive while protecting the sweet kernel at his core — written in prose both lyrical and meaty, the plot is intelligent and propulsive and touched my jaded heart. I also want to note that I wasn’t given a review copy — I bought Tom’s book in order to support an indie author and can say that the novel didn’t feel amateurish or unpolished — and I want to stress my purchase because I am not beholden to the author for anything and my opinions are my unencumbered own, and saying that, I would encourage others to pick this up. Absolutely recommended.

In the hospital of the small town when she gave birth and he saw for the first time this new little human they had made, crying eyes and flushed skin and fingers and toes and everything so tiny that they couldn’t even be real at all, in this newborn boy he saw those same divine contours as his wife’s, the artist’s telltale style and signature apparent at this second unveiling of holy work. Though he’d mostly lost his belief by that time, seeing the child being born nearly returned it like a dam broke and that belief came flooding in. So what did that make him? Some keeper of godly artifacts. And that was his working definition of father, of husband. So carve him in stone and give him a sword and set him outside the walls.

Immortal North is primarily the story of the trapper and his son — with memories of his wife and how she died and how that shrank his tender heart; with memories of the family line that was on this land before him and the lessons that they passed down for him to impart to his own child — and every bit of it worked for me. I was enthralled by the detailed (not graphic or lurid) hunting scenes, I was charmed by the father-son interactions, and it actually brought a heart-touching mist of parental relatability to my eyes when he gathered his sleeping child, “picked up the noodleboy somehow gone limp in every muscle and cradled him with the crook of his own elbow supporting the boy’s head and gently carried him up the stairs to the loft.” The mix of tough and tender and thoughtful consideration of a child’s quest for understanding his world made me love the character of this trapper; this man who read from his dead wife’s bookshelf because “he got some respite from the heartache by reading her favourite books, his eyes moving over the same words hers once had, being moved by what she’d been moved by.” The trapper may have been a backwoods survivalist, but he’s literate and contemplative and discusses seriously with his young son the ideas of god and fate and reality:

“I asked your mom something similar. I asked her if she thought things happened for a reason. That’s what you and I are talking about here. She said to me yeah but not the way people mean it. The reason might just be something big exploded a long time ago and we’re bouncing around like marbles now. Complex marbles that somehow feel things...But she thought the world was beautiful too, regardless if someone was writing it. Regardless of chaos and marbles. Not always. But in lucky places. That’s what she believed.”
“What do you believe?”
“That’s what I believe too.”
“Yeah, me too,” said the kid.

I was emotionally affected at many points during this story, and the author’s writing style — coming slightly sideways at an idea and making me think for meaning — is exactly the kind of writing I admire, but if one is simply looking for an adventure tale, Immortal North doesn’t disappoint on that score either: my heart was thumping as the story reached its climax and the ending felt inevitable and true. 

In the North that night blew a mean wind in the mean woods where trekked a snowshoed man looking for violence. Walk back the steps of how it grew up within him and eventually there’d still be the question of why. Because the boy, but the boy because the bear, but the bear because this, and this from that, and eventually we’re back to a time we never knew and it’s turtles standing on turtles all the way down. Some causal never-ending story of infinite regress, or some circular one like a world of Penrose stairs, or could be beginning-and-end and time itself are human constructs, or there are many worlds or one infinite one. Regardless of where it all started and who’s guilty and who pushed whom first, he was pissed off and his intentions were cruel ones. 

 

Oh my heart. Rounded up to five stars because, yes, this is the sort of thing I like.

The Trees

Southern trees bear strange fruit
Blood on the leaves and blood at the root

The Trees is a horror/satire/revenge fantasy (my local library has it filed in the Mystery section) that goes a long way towards illustrating the banality of evil (and that that “banality” is subject to one’s point-of-view): If you have a problem with the frequent, grisly murder of racist white men in this book, I hope you have a bigger problem with the history of frequent, grisly murder of innocent Black men; pulled from their homes by hooded thugs, beaten, lynched, and left for dead without consequence for the perpetrators (and as one character states that police shootings should be considered the modern lynching, that history persists). The inkiest of black comedies — like a fantastical mashup of Jordan Peele’s Get Out and Paul Beatty’s The Sellout — author Percival Everett peoples this novel with foul-mouthed, bumbling white people and patient and intelligent Black folks, and it all feels justified and cathartic; a schadenfreude-laced fantasy of karmic justice in a world that tends to lack justice for people of colour. The first half of this novel got my heart pounding (short chapters and incredible circumstances certainly help), and the insertion of a list of names of real-life victims of lynchings threw cold water (in the best and most appropriate way) on whatever “enjoyment” I was getting out of the absurdities, but as much as I wanted to love this whole thing, I felt there was a lack of payoff in the end; my interest fizzled as the circumstances exploded (and if this is meant to be, as my library suggests, a mystery, the solution wasn’t novelistically satisfying). I would give this three and a half stars and am rounding up because I love that this exists; I just wish I had connected better with it.

Money, Mississippi, looks exactly like it sounds. Named in that persistent Southern tradition of irony and with the attendant tradition of nescience, the name becomes slightly sad, a marker of self-conscious ignorance that might as well be embraced because, let’s face it, it isn’t going away.

Money, Mississippi is best known as the site of the 1955 lynching of Emmett Till: a fourteen-year-old African-American boy whose murder was widely publicised and would become a unifying catalyst for the Civil Rights Movement (no one would ever be brought to justice for his death). The Trees is set in the town of Money in 2018, and when a series of gruesome murders (with impossible settings and otherworldly circumstances involved), seem beyond the powers of the local redneck Sheriff and his Deputies to solve, two Black Special Detectives from the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation (the MBI) are sent in to investigate. Eventually joined by another Black agent from the FBI, the three African-Americans will discern the connection to Till’s unavenged death, even if they can’t initially figure out who’s doing the killing or how to prevent more murders. And that’s all I want to say about the plot (except to note that the people who die probably had it coming; good riddance to bad rubbish.)

Most of the humour and colour in The Trees comes from the interactions between a wide-ranging cast of characters, and unusually for me, most of what I marked as noteworthy was dialogue. Just a sampling (with, hopefully, the least offensive language.)

Old Granny C. providing foreshadowing in conversation with her yellow halter-topped daughter-in-law (known in the CB world as Hot Mama Yeller):

“I wronged that little pickaninny. Like it say in the good book, what goes around, comes around.”

“What good book is that?” Charlene asked. “Guns and Ammo?”

The Sheriff when he learns that the MBI would like to partner with “local law enforcement”:

“Mr Mayor, this here is the sovereign state of Mississippi. There ain’t no law enforcement, there’s just rednecks like me paid by rednecks like you.”

MBI agent to his boss when asked what he knows about Money, Mississippi:

“It’s chock-full of know-nothing peckerwoods stuck in the prewar nineteenth century and living proof that inbreeding does not lead to extinction.”

One MBI agent to another, warning against flirting with a local waitress:

“She could have some crazy-ass husband or boyfriend. You know, a stupid redneck with a gun.”

“That’s redundant.”

The local morgue assistant, who’s had “some college”:

“I was a creative writing major at Auburn. Poetry. I always wanted to be a Beat poet. Wrong generation. Now I stick dead people in drawers. I suppose it’s the same thing once you get down to it."

A local at the first KKK meeting they’ve had in a while:

”We don’t do nothin’ now,” a man complained. “I don’t even know where my hood is. I don’t even own a rope.”

Along with the absurd interactions and dialogue, I noted that character names become more and more self-consciously bizarre as the story proceeds: We have Herbeta Hind, Chester Hobnobber, and Helvetica Quip; doubled names like Junior Junior, Mister Mister, and McDonald McDonald (“no relation to the restaurant”); and names that make you think, “Why would an author go there?”, like Wesley Snipes (“no relation and White”) or Pick L. Dill (“school was tough”). But when a character (a Black academic invited to Money to bear witness to what’s going on) is shown a roomful of dossiers on every lynching the 105-year-old Mama Z has collected since 1913 (more than seven thousand names), he can’t help himself but write out those names in longhand, explaining:

“I write the names they become real, not just statistics. When I write the names they become real again. It’s almost like they get a few more seconds here. Do you know what I mean? I would never be able to make up this many names. The names have to be real. They have to be real. Don’t they?”

And that passage did make me gasp with recognition at what Everett had been playing at with his made up names and it made me pay more attention to the real names that he lists — including everyone from Emmett Till, to several “unnamed male”s, to names we would all recognise from recent history — because, at its heart, this is not so much a work of fiction as a mental reckoning for actual events.

Everybody talks about genocides around the world, but when the killing is slow and spread over a hundred years, no one notices. Where there are no mass graves, no one notices. American outrage is always for show. It has a shelf life.

I appreciated The Trees as an act of witnessing more than I loved it as a literary work, but again, I am grateful that it exists and think that it should be read by all.

The 2022 Booker Shortlist

The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida by Shehan Karunatilaka (the winner)

Oh William! by Elizabeth Strout

The Trees by Percival Everett 

Treacle Walker by Alan Garner

Glory by NoViolet Bulawayo

Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan

I found I didn't really have the interest to read the rest of this year's longlist, but I did read:

The Colony by Audrey Magee (my favourite overall)

After Sappho by Naomi Alderman

Nightcrawling by Lelia Mottley

Two Lumps of Sugar for Mr Anxiety

 

I sat in the easy chair. “Aftab,” I said, “would you like to join me for a cup of tea?” My anxiety did not respond. I waited a while, picturing its face. It had an egg-shaped head and small, dark eyes on the sides rather than at the front. A long, slim nose and a narrow mouth beneath. Its skin was pale and smooth, except for a wrinkled frown on its brow and more wrinkles around both eyes that made it appear older than it should. Perfectly bald, it had no facial hair or eyebrows either. “Aftab,” I repeated. Still, my anxiety did not come out to meet me.

What a perfectly moody read: Two Lumps of Sugar for Mr Anxiety follows a fifty-year-old British man, Jed, in the aftermath of his lonely old mother’s death — as he realises that he could have treated his Mum better; that he could have treated his wife and children better over the years, too — and as he grows to despise his job, Jed decides to take a three month contract in India; for the extravagant salary and the break from his incessant daily grind. But while Jed might think he can run away from his problems, some of those problems insist on being acknowledged; even if they need to take physical form and watch Jed while he sleeps, and follow along with him to the office, and join him in endless cups of tea. As a narrative of one man’s slow slide into anxiety and despair, author Eli Wilde has written an affecting account of a mind turning back on itself, but this is also an entertaining book filled with dark humour and witty characters. Perfectly moody and touching and sharp; three and a half stars rounded down, but definitely recommended. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)

I continued to read, despite the Thing. No, not despite the Thing. I had a word for the Thing now. Anxiety. Naming my tormentor didn’t make things any easier. Maybe that would change if I found out more about the condition.

In the Acknowledgements at the end, Wilde notes that he “found both Claire Weekes and Barry McDonagh immensely helpful in my battle against anxiety when I was working in India,” and that explains not only why Jed employs tips from these real-life experts as he deals with his own mounting anxiety, but also explains why Jed’s experience — with mental health and with working in India — has the definite ring of truth. Everything from noting that the pale, egg-headed “Mr Anxiety” (AKA “Aftab”) looks like he could have been drawn by Russian illustrator Anton Semenov (Semenov created “Other People’s Secrets”, used as the cover art for this novel) and that Aftab speaks in the voice of Stephen Fry, to the descriptions of Indian beaches and traffic and street beggars (who might be grifters or might be lepers; more info on leprosy is provided at the end), all root this fantastic-sounding tale in the real world; one with real pain. As for the title, by way of Barry McDonagh’s philosophy of Dare: if anxiety is hiding in the shadows and taking jabs at your well-being, invite it to show itself — join you for a cup of tea, even — and invite it to do its worst; you never know what it might be trying to tell you:

I held onto him tightly, as his body wracked with the force of his sobs. After a moment, I wept too. If I had looked deep into myself, I would have known why, but I didn’t. I didn’t want to face the thing I had kept hidden since the first day I came to India.

Much of this really worked for me — the details, the tone, the characters — but something just missed in the plot for me (maybe it felt too true: like, a person can move to India for a three month contract and have interesting interactions with coworkers from around the world in real life, but in a novel, there needs to be a narrative reason for all of this. And I will, as ever, acknowledge that I have a particular narrative taste that isn't universal; this will certainly be a five star read to others.)

Unmask Alice: LSD, Satanic Panic, and the Imposter Behind the Worlds Most Notorious Diaries

 

Go Ask Alice, by Anonymous, said the rounded font, along with three new words: A Real Diary. Inside, on the splash page, a little piece of brilliance:

Sugar and spice
And everything nice
Acid and smack
And no way back.

Thomas Midgley Jr is widely known as “the most dangerous inventor in history” — being the one who proposed adding lead to gasoline to prevent “knocking” (which led to workplace poisoning and widespread air pollution) and inventing CFCs for refrigeration (which caused the hole in the ozone layer) — but a name less generally known is Beatrice Sparks; perhaps the most dangerous author in history. As Rick Emerson explains in the fascinating Unmask Alice, Sparks’ two most famous works — Go Ask Alice and Jay’s Journal — would go on to have long-lasting, damaging effects on American society and bring wealth and professional esteem to a woman who was a fraud and exploiter of others’ pain (and not even a very good writer). Emerson tells a compelling story here, underpinned by thorough research and legwork, and while it may come as cold comfort to the people that Sparks hurt during her lifetime, there is some level of satisfaction in unmasking an impostor and properly defining her legacy. Recommended for all, but especially for those of us who grew up on the lies. Spoilers beyond this point. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)

Even before its whiplash ending, Alice was brutal, shoving your face in shit. If you made it past the drugs and teenage hookers (and neglected toddlers and gang rapes), Alice’s final meltdown was a long, shrieking nightmare.

I was a little girl in the Seventies — too young to have been exposed to the “real diary” Go Ask Alice when it was released, but I did see the TV movie (at least in part, many times over the years) and remember the dire warnings about LSD and flashbacks and poor Art Linkletter’s daughter who jumped off a roof because she thought she could fly. What I couldn’t have known (what nobody knew) was that in the immediate aftermath of Linkletter’s loss, a diary “discovered” by an unknown fifty-something wannabe author would capture the grieving celebrity’s attention, and this diary would so perfectly explain what insidious forces led to his daughter’s death because Sparks created it based on Linkletter’s own story. At a time when “the average American runaway was a white, middle-class, suburban girl who was barely fifteen”, and the evening news was filled with a horrific murder trial where, “Manson, the prosecution and defense teams agreed, had used LSD as a psychic crowbar, prying open the women’s minds and rebuilding them as monsters,” America was primed for action on what LSD was doing to their daughters. And although no drugs were found in Linkletter’s daughter’s toxicology report (although, to be fair, apparently there was no test for LSD at the time), Linkletter became an avenging angel and brought Go Ask Alice (which he published and put his endorsement on) to Washington, where Nixon was delighted to have a friendly face to put on his incipient War on Drugs. So, to be clear, Beatrice Sparks, in order to become a breakthrough author, made up a diary that the President of the United States would hold up as evidence for a program that pretended to be about drug safety but was really about getting hippies and civil rights protestors off the streets:

“We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or Black,” Nixon’s domestic policy advisor, John Ehrlichman, admitted in 1994, “but by criminalizing [drugs] heavily, we could disrupt those communities . . . arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. “Did we know we were lying about the drugs?” asked Ehrlichman. “Of course we did.”

Unfortunately for Beatrice Sparks’ ambitions, the publishers insisted on listing the author of Go Ask Alice as “anonymous” (in order to make it more relatable to fellow teens, even Sparks’ name as an “editor” was nixed), and despite it becoming one of the best-selling YA books of all time, she received no official credit and continued to have no success in getting work published under her own name.

Unmask Alice then pivots and tells the tale of Alden Barrett; a sixteen-year-old with undiagnosed depression who ended up killing himself in 1971. Alden’s devastated mother found her son’s tortured diary and decided to give it to local author Beatrice Sparks (surely if Sparks had a hand in Go Ask Alice — which was doing such good work warning teens off drugs — there could be some good in a book that calls attention to youth mental illness), and although Sparks assured Marcella Barrett that she’d let her read anything she made of the diary before it was released, Marcella never heard back from Sparks; never heard anything at all until locals started whispering about Jay’s Journal — the thinly-disguised “true” writings of a disturbed young man who was obviously the late Alden Barrett. The biggest shocker: according to the book, Jay/Alden had been deep into witchcraft and Satanism, animal sacrifice, cattle mutilation, midnight orgies, and frenzied drug use. And while none of that was true — Sparks interspersed Alden’s actual pain-filled entries with her fantasies of graveside rituals and demonic possession — Jay’s Journals would spark the Satanic Panic of the 1980’s; ruining the lives of countless people as the FBI, police departments across America, and respected psychiatrists acting as expert witnesses assured the country that Satanism was real and rampant and seducing the youth. The worst consequences were doled out to childcare workers who were accused of using the children in their care for Satanic rituals, usually charged after narratives of abuse were implanted in the children by social workers and psychologists, as in the following case:

Dan and Fran Keller, the owners of a small day care center in Austin’s Oak Hill suburb, are accused of Satanic ritual abuse. Among the allegations: forcing children to drink blood-laced Kool-Aid, cutting out the heart of a baby, throwing children into a shark-filled swimming pool, and “using Satan’s arm as a paintbrush.” The initial accuser retracts her statement, as does the primary “eyewitness,” but it doesn’t matter. Jurors convict the Kellers, who spend twenty-two years in prison before an appeals court overturns their sentences, freeing the couple. In 2017, district attorney Margaret Moore finally declares both Dan and Fran Keller “actually innocent.”

One woman started both the War on Drugs and the Satanic Panic, and her only remorse was that neither of the “true diaries” she wrote were allowed to have her name on them. Sparks released a few other books over the following years (about teenage pregnancy, AIDS, and other social issues), and although she had been a Depression-era dropout and runaway, she eventually started referring to herself as a psychotherapist, a youth counsellor (explaining that she had access to so many diaries because they were actually based on case-notes from her nonexistent therapy practise), and her final books were allowed to be published with “Dr. Beatrice Sparks PhD” emblazoned on their covers. If her nonexistent credentials were never questioned, you have to wonder about an industry that unleashed such harm on the American public (with cultural spillover to us in Canada) without fact-checking anything at all about these books.

In most industries, this would be a shitstorm. In publishing, it’s barely an anecdote, and that’s the real warning. When obvious fraud no longer rates attention, let alone rebuke, things get ugly fast, and even good people can believe the very worst.

This was such a surprising investigative journey to me — Emerson unspools his narrative carefully and compellingly — and I have to note that this book may have ultimate impact for Gen Xers like me: I told my girls this story (to which they nodded along and gave me a respectful “wow” or two) but they don’t have the context of growing up during the early days of the War on Drugs (and having been very affected by both the story of Linkletter’s daughter and the image of “Alice” in a closet clawing at invisible spiders while she was supposed to be babysitting) or the Satanic Panic (and watching several episodes of Oprah about repressed memories where she said the only two possible answers to the question of whether or not you had been abused are “Yes or I don’t know”). I thought that Emerson was thorough and respectful in his approach to the material, and while there were some overwrought metaphors and unnecessarily smirky/sweary asides, the writing was, overall, appropriately journalistic. My mind is blown by what Beatrice Sparks wrought on the world; surely one of the most dangerous authors in history.