Fear of Fighting by Stacey May Fowles (illus. Marlena Zuber)

It’s pretty much part of Dating 101 that you keep your crazy under wraps for as long as possible. It’s best to wait until there’s an L-bomb or a ring involved, when it becomes harder for the other person to make a clean getaway. (I always think of Carla’s advice on Scrubs: “He doesn’t know that I cry sometimes because I’m not sure there’s a cat heaven!”) One would think that the same thing would apply to the protagonists in the books we read (after all, we don’t want to sacrifice hours of our lives to a complete screw job), but there are plenty of exceptions. In a book, sometimes crazy can be charming. Or sometimes it allows us to see our own crazy writ large on the page, making those deep darks seem a little less menacing. And sometimes, as with Stacey May Fowles‘ Fear of Fighting (Invisible Publishing, 2008), it does both.

After a devastating break-up, Fowles’ protagonist, Marnie, admits to being “bat shit crazy,” confessing, “I obsessively save all the evidence that I’m alive, and, when I’m satisfied, collect evidence from the nearby Goodwill that other people are alive as well.” Such moments of passive melancholy are interspersed with moments of rage: she wants to hurl lemons in the supermarket, write “Fuck You” in kitty litter in the feminine hygiene aisle. And though some of her responses are a tad unusual, her problems are actually garden variety — something we can all relate to and still delight in its alternately funny and heartbreaking (and sometimes both) manifestations.

In order to understand Marnie’s Urban Fresh rage and sense of invisibility, Fowles takes us to the source, acquainting us with Marnie’s personal romance case file, from learning to kiss boys, to falling in love for the first time, to her first major relationship with Ben, the catalyst for Marnie’s downward spiral. And as Marnie nosedives into depression, we revisit the watermarks of her relationship with Ben, from the drunken night they met to Marnie’s bout of food poisoning to the petty arguments at the end. And as Fowles fearlessly airs all of Marnie’s quirks and insecurities on the printed page (her list of reasons why she’s not a “cool” girlfriend is one of the highlights), we start to identify with Marnie’s plight, for who isn’t lulled by the buoyant gaze of love? Who isn’t wooed into that deceptive shared identity, in which your old self slowly fades away? Who hasn’t opened themselves up fully, only to be rejected? Marnie explains, “Maybe I didn’t want to see or speak with anyone because I didn’t want to explain how miserable I was that the only person I felt had understood me had left me because he couldn’t stand me anymore.” I’d venture that there are very few people out there who haven’t had that feeling, and if they haven’t, they probably should.

So yes, while not all of us may be reduced by heartbreak to a shut-in who passes the day with Internet-fuelled hypochondria, Netflix, and Jim Beam,  but I think most people have flirted with this kind of despair, using masochistic reminiscing and mounting depression to hang on to the last tattered shreds of something glorious. I think most people have felt unworthy of their partner, kept a lid of their crazy and tried to be the “cool girlfriend” (or boyfriend). We’ve felt judged by our parents, by our former classmates, by the people behind us in the line at the Urban Fresh for being alone.

But we are not always judged harshly, and one of the most beautiful touches of Fear of Fighting is the handful of chapters written from the perspective of Neil, the man across the hall, who loves Marnie without reason, without limitation, even as she is deep in the throes of despair and self-loathing. Neil is an embodiment of our own tender feelings for Marnie, and a reminder that there is a softer side to love’s fickle attentions, that love can be simple and undemanding, and that even when we see no reason to greet the day dressed and sober, when we may be hopeless, jobless, and generally unfit for human contact, it is still possible to be loved, and not just by the people that have to.

This kind of thing isn’t easy to write well. It’s too easy to descend into live journal melodrama, but Fowles punctuates biting prose and wry humour with moments of unguarded sweetness and sincerity. Fowles’ range is remarkable, and she captures the detachment as well as the decadence of love. The directness of her sentences is often disarming, as Fowles rips off the band-aids we’ve been using to cover our own love scars. Take her explanation of Ben: “I didn’t want anybody but instead I got Ben. And I slept with Ben immediately and loved Ben instantly.” Yet Fowles is also capable of more lush, rhythmic descriptions, when they’re called for. Take Marnie’s description of her golden days with Ben: “With Ben, skin was frontier and words no longer translated, we simply hummed to a rhythm in the perfect afternoon light. I lost all my boundaries with him; there was no feeling of end, no lines drawn in chalk to outline us and them, you and me. Everything became everything else, blended and bleeding like a watercolour stain, gradations of light and dark.”

Fowles’ prose is beautifully complemented by the illustrations by Marlena Zuber, which channels a sort of childishness with a darker edge, though they do sometimes also add a welcome levity. It’s a beautifully produced book, and the printed inner covers are not only aesthetically pleasing, but carry the book’s message as clearly as what lies between them: You can hang your own wallpaper.

It’s a book you can read in one sitting, and a book you’ll want to. A book that explores what it means to be a couple, what it means to be alone, how to care for others and how to care for ourselves, and most of all, the delicious scars of love — how we make them, and then pick them, and eventually, how we heal.

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Want to join the fray and talk Fear of Fighting with the author and other readers? Join the inaugural Book Madam Book Club today at 1 p.m.! (There are prizes!)

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Come, Thou Tortoise, by Jessica Grant

I’m not sure when Come, Thou Tortoise first grabbed my attention. I could been wandering through a bookstore, and locked eyes with a new Kelly Hill design (who is so brilliant that all of her covers convince me a brief TPL loan just will NOT do). It may have been the review from the much-admired (by me and others) Kerry Clare. And then one day, thanks to my thoughtful BF, I received the book as a gift, and as Audrey Flowers would say, I would not say no to a book.

As it turns out, the book’s physical charms were perfectly fulfilled by the book itself, which is a unique, refreshing delight. The story has a sense of whimsy equal to its cover, though not without a darker edge. For this is a story greatly concerned with loss, as it starts with Audrey Flowers taking a terrifying plane ride home to Newfoundland where her father is in a com(m)a. She arrives to discover that her fantasy of a rousing and restorative speech at his bedside will not come true — and while her father told her to assume that life can go on indefinitely, it has not.

Audrey (affectionately known as Oddly) is a curious character a “leapling” who functions as an adult, but has only had six birthdays and has what she finds out is disappointingly low IQ. She has a sophisticated sense of wordplay (declaring her father in a comma — a pause — rather than a coma, and never missing an opportunity for a good pun), and yet fails to grasp some of the larger realities of her daily life. The resulting interplay between the innocence of a child and the wariness of an adult is what makes Audrey such a fascinating character. She is someone who sees ballerinas in corkscrews, treble clefs in suburban streets, and knows that every prized  turtle should have a papier-mache castle. Her unique voice of simple sentences always ending in periods is alternately direct and playful, often making me laugh out loud and staying with me long after I closed the book. It’s an amusing voice to have in one’s head, and I would LOVE to hear Jessica Grant read from her book.

There is one other narrator, Winnifred, Audrey’s tortoise, who is just as endearing, if far more self-aware than her owner. Winnifred has been left behind in Portland while Audrey is in Newfoundland, and being an animal with a long life span, Winnifred gives us new insight into Audrey’s past and her character (goodwill toward tortoises is a very likable quality in a person). Winnifred is Audrey’s rock, and her short narrative bookmarks also help reinforce some of the novel’s larger themes. As someone who takes her home with her, Winnifred should be at home anywhere, and yet her rotating caretakers prove that home is about people as well. Like the safety-obsessed Audrey, she’s also hard-shelled, carrying a protective layer with her everywhere she goes, though it is the warmth of human contact that is the most necessary (It seems being put under an armpit is the tortoise equivalent of spooning).

But most importantly Winnifred, in all her wisdom, understands the cycles of life, its ebb and flow, which in one particularly key passage, the tortoise relates to her infrequent heartbeat. She explains that “The Ebb [the space between heartbeats] is rather sad, I do admit. And when the heartbeats are few, the Ebb stretches on. The Ebb is like a path that becomes less a path the farther you travel along it.” And there could be no more perfect metaphor for Audrey’s journey as she struggles to deal with her father’s death, her beloved uncle’s sudden departure, and the mysterious disappearance of her cherished lab rat. But, Winnifred notes, “When the heartbeats do come, they are magnificent.” And such are the emotional peaks of Come, Thou Tortoise, and though the rambling path of Audrey’s ebb can be sad, it is equally enchanting.

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Good to a Fault, by Marina Endicott

A confession: I thought Good to a Fault was going to be a literary slog — something akin to stomping through knee-deep snow. Bleak and exhausting, with a risk of losing sensation in the extremities. It had a lot of strikes against it: sad, middle-aged woman, extended moral dilemmas, cloying domesticity, even the prairies for crying out loud (I’m so sorry prairie dwellers). It looked suspiciously good for you, like you could get your recommended fibre intake just reading it.

Basic premise? Clara Purdy gets in a car accident with a the Gage family, who were living out of their now-demolished car. It’s likely Clara’s fault, and she takes them to the hospital to ensure they’re okay. While in the hospital it’s discovered the mother, Lorraine, has late-stage cancer, and Clara agrees to look after her three children and their venomous crone of a grandmother while Lorraine gets treatment.

That description still wouldn’t make me want to read it. But I was wrong about Good to a Fault. It wasn’t a slog. Despite the fact that this tragic, hollow female protagonist is my worst nightmare, I was surprisingly empathetic. And despite the fact that nothing major happens after the first couple chapters, I wanted to keep reading. This is in large part due to Endicott’s deft characterization, her ability to make us not only see Clara’s sadness, but to feel it by sharing her constant guilt and self-doubt, her aimlessness, her emptiness of her mausoleum of a home, her outdated work apparel and her utterly deadened emotions. And then to see her find a purpose, to witness her struggle and delight in the tiniest domestic details, to rebuild her life on shifting sands, to see her transformed from a too-young spinster to someone loving and loved, is shockingly moving. She is no longer Clara, but Clary. The whole thing felt like the cake that Clary made for Paul’s Christmas party — so fragile, so carefully constructed, holding so much promise of goodness — that you just knew in the pit of your stomach that it was destined for disaster.

Because of course, this transformation is built on a stolen life, it requires the death of an innocent woman for it to become permanent. And each person caught up in the situation is torn apart by guilt, each happy moment coming at a heavy price. The children are afraid to be happy. Lorraine is afraid of the tremendous debt she owes Clara, and even more that she is being replaced. And Clara is afraid to lose the children, the new life she has built for herself, but knows that no good person could ask for such a thing. But Endicott pushes beyond this dilemma, and about 3/4 of the way through changes the rules in one of the most chilling exchanges I’ve ever read. (Hear Civilians Read panelist Sarah Labrie read it here.) SPOILER ALERT! Lorraine will live. Although she has no money, and no real prospects, and a spineless and unreliable husband, the children are hers, she loves them, and they must be returned. Now this is the point that sold the book for me. Not any debate about the nature of goodness, but rather how our reactions to this shocking turn of events force us to face our own deep-rooted prejudice that we may not have even known, or been willing to admit, existed.

Endicott’s chief accomplishment is in characterization, and even more so, her penetrating insight into interpersonal relationships and human frailties.  For while Clara is our protagonist, we also experience the point of view of several other characters, some more engaging than others (I never really warmed to the bland, poetry-spouting Reverend Paul despite substantial passages in his point-of-view, though I was fascinated by the utterly vile Mrs. Pell’s few moments as narrator). But it’s the very complex, often incredibly subtle push and pull between these characters that is fascinating, and unerringly accurate, if unsettling.

Good to a Fault is still a considerable undertaking to read, and probably not for everyone,  but it thrums with surprising vigor beneath quiet domesticity, and much like its characters, hides much beneath its outward appearance of civility. And though I hate to say it, I think it even was good for me, even if in this case, that meant questioning my own goodness.

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And here it is, the last pitch for my Canada Reads series. Thanks to everyone who tuned in and offered their support. Who knows, I might just get back in the saddle and bring some KIRBC flair to my recommended picks in the future, so stay tuned . . .

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More for Canada Reads keeners:

Marina Endicott on writing and public readings

The book’s designer on coming up with both covers (Particularly interesting to me because I really disliked the austere, washed-out, minimalist look of the first one, though having read the book I appreciate it much more now)

Reviews: Quill & Quire, Globe and Mail, Toronto Star,  Bookslut, Inklings, Something Lemon, Mel’s Reads and Reviews

(Have a review? Leave your link!)

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