It's Been a Long Time Coming, But...

I’m still here.

I’ve been maintaining this blog in some form or another since I was 24, prior to the advent of social media, when I had just moved from my hometown of Victoria to London for the first time and didn’t want to spam friends and family with long update emails of my travels. It felt like the need to share my thoughts here waned over the years as I became more and more active on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, Goodreads, and whatever other media platforms have come (and sometimes gone) in the past 19 years. However, over the past few of those years, I’ve felt even less compelled to participate in those “social” forms of online existence. Maybe because they aren’t really social; I could pretend that posting my thoughts in a tweet or post or comment to which friends affixed a heart or a thumbs-up emoji somehow constituted connection, and community, but it really didn’t.

In 2016, I did the unthinkable (to myself) and left Facebook - something I swore I would never do because it helped me stay connected to my friends around the world. I couldn’t stand the performative nature of the platform anymore, couldn’t stand the ads, the misinformation, and couldn’t shake the feeling that I was some kind of performing monkey saying cute things for likes. When I announced I was leaving, some people did ask me not to and told me they enjoyed my “content” (which made my presence there feel even more performative). I offered my email, offered letter writing, offered FaceTimes, and these offers were tellingly met with indifference for the most part. I even had a few folks tell me that it was inconvenient for them to engage with me anywhere but Facebook. I stuck to my guns and departed and resolved myself to losing a lot of friends, especially those scattered around the globe.

I didn’t lose those friends from around the world. The real ones stayed. Some may have disappeared at times, as did I, but some found their way back, or I found my way back to them, and I also connected more meaningfully with some people than I had simply through scanning their social media feeds. We TALKED. We wrote emails. We waved at each other awkwardly on Zoom. We met up for coffee after years and years. I mostly lost local friends - who I guess, like me, mistook our ability to scroll each others’ feeds for effort in terms of maintaining the relationship.

Now I find the same thing is happening with Instagram. While I like taking pretty pictures, mostly of my house, or gardens, or interesting things I see on the street, I mostly use Instagram as a curated shopping feed. I hardly ever look at friends’ updates, I have to confess, unless I make a concerted effort to do so - nor do I regularly share something more personal than decor or food photos. Don’t get me wrong - I love my friends and being updated on their lives. I just prefer to do so in person. So again, the social has dropped out of the social media, and become a singular activity for me.

Which got me thinking: if my online presence continues to be ultimately a singular one, where I am most interested in expressing myself (rather than receiving validation or interacting with others), why not go back to where it all started? Go back to the world I created just for myself, where I make the rules, and where I get the most satisfaction because it gives me an outlet to work through thoughts and feelings without a character limit or need for hashtags (#althoughidoloveagoodhashtag). So, no promises, but I am going to make an effort to say more here. To explore more here. It might be more book reviews, because I love reading. It might be journal entries, because I’m thinking a lot about a lot these days. It might be years of nothingness, like the past two and a bit years, because I am out living my life. I don’t know. I just wanted to say - I’m still here. If you are still here, thank you. This site continues to be a record of who I was, who I am, and maybe who I will become. And to me, that is still something to hold onto.

Lemonreads: The Wife Upstairs

As a fan of all things Brontë (and I mean by ALL the Brontës), I was very excited, when looking for my next read, to come across the recently published The Wife Upstairs, which was described as a modern day retelling of Jane Eyre, set in Birmingham, Alabama.  I have never hit “Buy” so fast in the Kindle Store.   I thought that the gothic elements of Jane Eyre would lend themselves so well to a modern day thriller.

And, they might, but this isn’t that book.  Sure, this is a thriller. There is murder and mystery and intrigue a-plenty.  And yes, many names and some plot lines from Jane Eyre are used in The Wife Upstairs, but it should not be described as a re-telling.  

The Jane of The Wife Upstairs is a foster child who aged out of the system, and has suffered from the loneliness and trauma of an insecure childhood, like the original Jane, but the resemblance stops there.  This new Jane steals.  She deliberately lies.  She manipulates.  She is eager to climb the social ladder and take advantage of all of the material spoils of the well-to-do suburban society where she works as a dog-walker (the modern day equivalent of a governess, natch), at whatever cost.   The integrity, the bluntness and steadfastness of character that is really the hallmark of Jane Eyre herself is missing here completely. 

I found some of the homages to Jane Eyre clever (the subdivision in which the book takes place is called “Thornfield Estates,” for example), but shuddered every time the new Mr. Rochester was referred to as “Eddie,” and didn’t find the concept of his ward, Adele, being portrayed in this book as a DOG that needs walking to be anything but cringeworthy.

In her acknowledgements, Rachel Hawkins thanks readers who, like her, believed the original Jane “deserved better” than Mr. Rochester, implying that in her novel, she’s given that to her.  I completely disagree.  Read this book if you like easily digestible thrillers, but don’t read it because you are hoping for a clever interpretation of Charlotte Brontë’s masterpiece. 

Lemonreads: Conversations With Friends

I enjoyed but didn’t love Normal People, Sally Rooney’s most celebrated novel, which was recently a BBC miniseries.  I found the main characters of Normal People, Connell and Marianne, both fairly unlikeable and frustrating.  I really enjoyed this book, however, which was Rooney’s debut novel, published in 2017.

Frances, the narrator, is a brilliant, depressed millennial cut from the same cloth as Connell and Marianne, but she possesses a level of self awareness that they don’t seem to have - or maybe they do, but Frances wants to move past what she currently is and grow, while Connell and Marianne seemed, to me, to be resigned to some fate.

I liked Rooney’s exploration of the love “square” between Frances, her best friend and ex Bobbi, and the older married couple, Nick and Melissa.  I found the messy but passionate understanding they all eventually reach to be hopeful and a more realistic, less idealized depiction of polyamory, and love in general: it’s hard, and there are no rules.   I would definitely recommend this book.  

Lemonreads: Hidden Valley Road

First, imagine having 12 children.

Then, imagine 10 of them are boys.

Then, imagine 6 of those 10 boys suffer from severe schizophrenia. 

This happened to Don and Mimi Galvin, raising their family in Colorado in the 60s, 70s and 80s.  One of their sons commits a horrific violent crime, one sexually abuses his younger siblings for years, and all of the boys demonstrate a terrifying level of physical aggression towards their family.  All of the boys spend their entire lives in and out of mental institutions.

Reading this book, it’s hard to believe it’s true.  The story is only made bearable by understanding how the Galvin family’s suffering’s contribute to science’s understanding of schizophrenia, how it is transmitted genetically, and how it can be treated and, someday, prevented.  Sadly, I think it will be too late to make any of the Galvin family members’ lives easier.  

TW for this book: domestic violence, sexual abuse, mental illness.

Lemonreads: A Delhi Obsession

I have never been anywhere so DIFFERENT from my own life as Delhi.  I find it hard to articulate how out of place and foreign I felt when I visited in November 2019.  With some distance, I now feel very nostalgic for that visit and want to someday dive back into the delightful, terrible, awesome bedlam of Delhi.  In this 2019 book, M.G. Vassanji perfectly describes how the “crowded, jostling, cluttered and infinitely noisy” Delhi overwhelms with its millennia of history, labyrinthine neighbourhoods and masses of people.  Vassanji shows us the city through the eyes of a Muslim Indo-Canadian writer, who desires to belong but can never shake off his foreignness.

I was very interested in Vassanji’s exploration of the Hindu/Muslim schism that I had no idea was still so prevalent in India until I visited.  In my experience, it varies by intensity, from a benign observation of difference to a justification for violence and oppression, depending on where you are and what is happening.  Just in the month I was there, our trip was re-routed at one point to avoid Muslim riots, and the Hindu government shut down the internet for several days during our trip to try to dispel unrest after an Indian court awarded ownership of a site sacred to both Hindus and Muslims to the Hindu community, after years of legal challenges - both of these events was shrugged off my our guides as normal.  

I am not sure India can ever be (or ever wants to be) a completely secular society where these cultural and religious identifiers don’t matter, and this is the central conflict of the book, both in terms of the plot, the internal struggles the protagonist Munir has to understand who he is and where he belongs, and between Munir and his lover, Mohini.  Beautifully written, heartbreaking and though-provoking.  I loved this book.

Lemonreads: Story House

I adored Timothy Taylor’s first novel, Stanley Park, published in 2003.  My copy is now coffee stained and dog eared after years of re-reading.  I’m not sure why I never got around to reading Taylor’s 2006 follow up, Story House, until now.  Like Stanley Park, Story House is set in Vancouver and I always get a kick out of reading books set in places I am familiar with - it helps to bring the story to life for me.  Much of this book takes place around a dilapidated house in the Downtown Eastside (my old neighbourhood), a structure that may be a relic of a world-famous architect, Packer Gordon.

Taylor does a deep, DEEP dive here into the world of architecture.  The majority of the characters are architects or architecture enthusiasts, and there are many very, very detailed descriptions of settings in this novel as seen through the eyes of these architecture-fluent characters.  It’s tough as a person without that architectural knowledge to envision what Taylor is describing as he waxes poetic about beams, light, angles and lines.  I almost wish architectural drawings of the places described had been included in the book to help ground layman readers such as myself.

What kept me interested in this book was not the plot, around the revival of the building known as Story House, but the web of love, hurt and lies that tie together Graham Gordon, an architect, his half-brother Elliot, their wives, and their dead architect father.  In both Stanley Park and in Story House, Taylor is a master at creating characters so layered, with such deep and intricate histories, that you are sure they are real and that he is writing biography.  He is also skilful at depicting the complicated nature of families and relationships - this is what makes his writing stand apart for me.

That being said, I was somewhat disappointed in this novel, perhaps because I couldn’t fully immerse myself in the world of architecture in which the story is set.  I also found the prose to be so dense, so determinedly poetic, that I often had to re-read sections.  I found the end dissatisfying and wasn’t sure that it was the logical conclusion to the story.  I look forward to reading more from Timothy Taylor, but this book doesn’t achieve “instant classic” status for me as his first novel did.

Lemonreads: We Wish You Luck

First book of 2021! Written in a plural first-person narrative (“we”), this book recounts a series of traumatic events between students and faculty at a low-residency writing MFA workshop in Vermont. The author, also a literary editor, is a graduate of a real-life program, the Bennington Writing Seminars, that no doubt provided the inspiration for this fictional college. The novel takes a very long time to identify who this “we” narrator is, and I spent much of the book wondering about this point, which was an interesting experience - you don’t generally spend an ENTIRE novel wondering whose lens is framing the story, and who is necessarily missing from the narrative because they are the one(s) telling it. The book repeatedly foreshadows some major event (lines like “we didn’t know then that...” or “of course now looking back we understand that...” I am paraphrasing but you get the gist), and the payoff of that major event that looms so large for the narrator(s) didn’t live up to that foreshadowing, in my opinion. That being said, the book is still a very good read, introducing fascinating three dimensional characters, exploring the dynamics of students and teachers in a small creative program, experimenting with collective storytelling and memory, and questioning the nature of art, writing and for whom we write. I have found myself thinking about it days after I finished reading, which is the sign of a food book. Published by @penguinrandomhouse, and I believe the paperback is being released in the next few weeks.

Lemonreads: The Refining (Book 1), JC Brown - Advance Review

I have to say, I’m always a little nervous when I realize a novel is going to be written from multiple perspectives.  It can be a challenge for some authors to create sufficiently distinctive voices for their characters so that you know who’s speaking without referring to the beginning of the chapter to check “Who is this again?” I have to say, in The Refining, the first in what will likely be a series, JC Brown has nailed it.  She’s created compelling (if sometimes infuriating) characters, members of a band and their manager working towards their debut at a huge music awards show, who must wrestle with their individual pasts and present as they fight for their future.  The Refining skilfully follows each of these intersecting stories and lays the foundation for what I think will be a compelling, thoughtful series.

The pace of the narrative is quick and we’re thrown into the plot right away, but thanks to Brown’s skill in deftly providing enough backstory and voice to her characters, it’s not hard to follow.  Being a performer myself I love that this story centres around a band, and a performance, as I related to the anxiety, frustration and excitement of the lead up to music awards show appearance, as well as the aftermath.  I also loved reading something with a Canadian setting as this book takes place in Toronto, and as a musical theatre performer I got a huge kick out of the fact that this was originally a musical!  I wish I could have listened to the soundtrack while I was reading!

The Refining will be released SOON - on November 4th, and will be available on Amazon.  Thank you very much to the author for providing me with an ARC of this book to review.

Lemonreads: Chocolate Chip Cookie Murder (Hannah Swensen #1)

Would you believe that I had never heard the term "cozy mystery" until very very recently?!

According to Wikipedia, a cozy mystery also referred to as a "cozy," belongs to a subgenre of crime fiction in which sex and violence occur off stage, the detective is an amateur sleuth, and the crime and detection take place in a small, socially intimate community.

I worked as a bookseller AND have an English Lit degree, and I had never heard this term?! I just don’t know how this is possible given I love ANYTHING that takes place in a small town (see: my rabid consumption of the entire Virgin River series earlier this year). Plus I love anything where the protagonist runs a bakery/chocolate shop/candy shop/bookstore (see: Jenny Colgan). So Joanne Fluke’s “Murder, She Baked” series featuring professional baker and amateur detective Hannah Swensen was bound to be right up my alley and a great introduction to the cozy mystery genre. I wasn’t disappointed with the first in the series, Chocolate Chip Cookie Murder. I enjoyed meeting the quirky cast of characters living in Lake Eden, Minnesota, and while the murder plot was slightly predictable, its resolution was still satisfying. I love that the author includes recipes for items from Hannah’s bakery, The Cookie Jar, in the book, and I had a go at making Chocolate Chip Crunches - a yummy chocolate chip cookie with cornflakes in it to make it crispy! I think I’ll try to bake something from every book as I go! Lucky friends are going to get all this baking; I don’t want it all in my house or I’ll just keep snacking! OK, OK, maybe I’ll keep a little...just for a taste...

Virus Diaries: Six Month Slowdown

It’s hard to believe it’s been over six months since I got sick and my whole life changed, but here we are.

I haven’t posted any updates for some time, because there hasn’t been any update to give - COVID stopped all treatment in its tracks. I spent March, April and the beginning of May in utter solitude. No one came in my house, and I only ventured out for walks and fresh air in the evening when no one was around, like a vampire. I found I had no attention span to read books; I had to keep my hands busy at all times, so I listened to audiobooks while I made meals, did embroidery projects, and sewed.  Likewise, I couldn’t organize my thoughts coherently enough to write anything here, although I did keep a journal of each day that we lived in this new COVID era.

Slowly, the initial terror I had felt that I was doing to die in the pandemic (chances are huge that COVID would be fatal to someone with my decreased heart function) subsided, and I became more comfortable going outside in the daylight.  At the beginning of May I opened my bubble, to my dad, who came to visit and help me with some chores around the house.  He also accompanied me to St. Paul’s, my first trip out in months, to have an MRI to check up on the status of my heart.

The news was good:  I have no permanent damage or scarring on my heart.  My heart function has risen from 24% to 54%; an amazing increase in a relatively short time period, and the hope is that it will increase further – a normal person’s heart would be somewhere in the seventy percent range. My medications have now been increased to help facilitate that increase, because I’m finally able to venture out to get the regular bloodwork I need to make sure I am tolerating the new dosages, as long as I’m masked and gloved and come home and shower and wash my hair right away (doctor’s orders).   I’m still waiting to get into the heart rehab program that stalled when the pandemic hit; the latest I heard was that a virtual program was going to start and I’ve been referred to it, so I’m just waiting for the call to let me know I’m in.  Interestingly, doctors are studying one of the medications I am on, candesartan, as a possible treatment for COVID-19; patients taking the drug seem to be having better-than-expected outcomes, so the virus may not be the potential death sentence I thought it was when this all began.   So, the news is fairly positive around here.

My heart is still quite enlarged, however, and my doctors have told me this is an indication that if I was to go off the medication, the heart failure is likely to recur.  They’ve advised me I will be on the medications for the rest of my life.  There are a few minor and major consequences to this: no drinking, ever, no marijuana anything, ever, no grapefruit, ever.  The drugs I’m on are dangerous if taken while pregnant, to both mother and child, so any hopes I may have had of making hay while the sun shines and having a kid before it’s too late are probably foiled, at least by traditional means.  I do think these are all acceptable prices to pay, considering the alternative.  I still tire very easily and get chest pain if I overdo it with physical activity; I’ve been told that pericardial pain is something I may experience for several more months.  The drugs make my blood pressure extremely low so I’m often dizzy and have tingling hands and feet., and fall asleep at times when it’s really low.  Again, tolerable consequences given the alternative. 

So, I’m still home, still social distancing, trying to recondition my heart so that I can resume life as normal sometime in the next…year?  That’s what my doctors think.  I’m focusing on slowly and steadily losing some weight to make things easier on my heart.  I’ve redone my patio so that Currie and I have a nice outdoor space to spend our time.  We have two house swallows who have moved in as roommates, and hummingbirds visit us daily.  My attention span still hasn’t returned to the extent that I can sit and read for hours like I used to, but I spend a lot of time listening to the wind in the trees, watching the sky, or listening to the birds.  I’m often lonesome for company, often bored, but I connect with friends and family on Zoom and FaceTime when that happens, and I’m grateful for my cranky fuzzy grey familiar who is always by my side.

I remind myself that it’s important to remember what I had learned before COVID, that taking it one day at a time and not worrying or planning too far ahead is the key to remaining contented during this forced downtime.  But I’m plotting for the future like you wouldn’t believe.  Staring your mortality in the face does that to you.  Suddenly there are no more excuses, and a lot of fears and insecurities are released too, once you face the worst and survive.

Onward.

Virus Diaries: Anger.

I’ve been angry all day today. 

Of course, there’s lots for all of us to be angry about.  The suffering, the death, the fear, the economic uncertainty, the wave of pain and loss that feels poised to crest over all of us at any time.

But this anger – well, it’s personal.

The darkest, deepest inner part of me that feels unworthy of love and happiness and joy is screaming “OF COURSE!”  Of COURSE during this sacred, unprecedented time of rest and renewal, as I am slowly tottering towards a place of health, focused on healing who I am, letting myself just “be,” just experiencing happiness in the present, this kind of catastrophe has to descend to replace that peace and calm with fear and anxiety.  Of course the connection and care from my friends and family has to be brutally cut off, leaving me isolated and having to rely on myself.  OF. COURSE.

Really, I do know that Covid-19 is not some plot by the universe against my happiness. I’m self-centred but I’m not that self-centred. I know I have to change that inner narrative that thinks that fear and anxiety and uncertainty are all that I deserve, that they are the inevitable replacements for the peace and security I was still in wonder at feeling.  But frankly it’s difficult not to be resentful.  It’s hard not to feel exhausted at the continuous trials.  What is the lesson I am supposed to be learning from this new hardship, Universe?

And most of all, it’s hard not to feel impatient at being stuck waiting for this crisis to end in order to move forward.  My rehab program is cancelled indefinitely; progressing my drug therapy is on hold as I’m prohibited from visiting any lab to do the testing necessary to increase the doses, as I must do to heal the damage to my heart.  I’m stuck.  And it’s so, so difficult to wait this out.  If there’s anything that this year has taught me so far, it’s that no time is promised to us. I want to get on with the sweetness of life.  And I’m afraid I’ll lose my tenuous grip on that sweetness while I wait. 

Virus Diaries: Shutting the Door.

Recovering from myocarditis, I’ve basically been in self-isolation since January.  So you’d think the advice that our public health officials have given, that those of us with pre-existing conditions and the elderly, should now self-isolate for an unknown number of weeks in order to avoid contracting the coronavirus, COVID-19, would not cause a great change to my life.  

You could think this, but you’d be wrong. 

Somehow, the idea that it’s dangerous for me to leave my home, even to run errands, and that it is dangerous for friends and family to come visit me, feels terrifyingly lonely and scary.  I didn’t realize how important my small trips to pick up bread and milk meant to me, or how much this introvert needed the companionship of other people – the physical presence of another person, not just a smiling loved one on FaceTime.   While I’ve been regimented in my stay-at-home routine since January – getting up, getting dressed and putting on makeup, eating regular meals, keeping the house clean and keeping myself busy (sometime too busy) – over the past few days, that’s gone out the window.  I haven’t changed out of my pyjamas or brushed my hair or teeth, let alone put on makeup.  I’ve laid in bed until 4 in the morning scouring Twitter for the latest news and worrying myself sick for myself and my family.  Meals have been replaced by Mini Wheats (deliciously sodium free!) and milk.

 I’m not sure what’s brought on this sense of helplessness, when I’d made such miraculous peace with the uncertain future that myocarditis had presented me with.  Isn’t this just more of the same uncertainty?  Why can’t I face it with the same optimism?!

 I think partly it’s because that optimism has counted on the fact that the world would be waiting for my return when I recovered, and it seems that the world I am eventually able to return to may look very different.  It was easy enough to think positively for myself and at the same time to accept the uncertainty.  I could carry the weight of what happened if things didn’t turn out happily, because it was only my burden to carry.  Suddenly I’ve added concern for my diabetic father, my immunocompromised mother, my wee nephews, my schoolteacher brother, and my sister-in-law who has been chronically ill with strep throat and bronchitis for the better part of a year, to that load of worry, not to mention the fear over what this virus and its aftermath will do to the economy, our community, and my friends and family, and I’m buckling under the weight of it.   

 The threat of this virus, and of the wave of sickness that experts believe is about to crest, feels terribly ominous.  It feels like there is so little we can do to stop it.  Yes, I wash my hands, I don’t touch my face, I wear a mask when I go out, and I’ve been doing these things for weeks.  But somehow, this past Thursday afternoon, when I returned home from my last scheduled appointment for months, and shut the front door, I felt like I was sealing myself in, going into hiding indefinitely, and that feels stifling, terrifying and maddening, rather than feeling like shelter, or solace, or safety. 

 I speak almost every day to a group of friends from around the world.  My friend in Denmark told us yesterday that the borders were going to be sealed there, and she is busy helping people in need get groceries and medicine before the worst hits.  An Austrian friend who, along with her husband, teaches at a school in Bosnia and Herzegovina, is preparing to leave for Vienna with their young daughter while her husband stays behind to evacuate students.  They are both aware that when more borders eventually close, he may not be able to get to Vienna.  She is pregnant, which makes this even more stressful and sad.  A friend in Qatar told us that everything is slowly shutting down and called it a “surreal nightmare.”  We haven’t heard at all from our friend in South Africa.  Here at home, I have friends being tested for the virus, and friends in self-isolation because they’ve potentially been exposed.

 It’s hard to believe right now that everything is going to be OK. 

I would love to be able to help people during this time.  To offer to shop for neighbours, or vulnerable people in my community.  I think if I could think about someone other than myself, I might be able to function better.   Instead I am one of those vulnerable.  Instead I am focusing my time on cleaning my house as much as I am able (which is not a lot) because my cleaner can’t visit.  I’m attempting “big” tasks I normally can’t do without assistance, like changing the sheets on my bed and vacuuming, tasks which require me to sit down and rest, and sometimes nap, afterwards.  I’m trying to be self-sufficient when I’m really not.  I’m not at a place yet where I can start looking for ways to help others through this crisis, even ways that I can assist people online, but I’m hoping to be able to rest up enough to do this soon.

 So, I’m counting on those of you who can, to be that help to others that I can’t be right now.  Meals on Wheels needs drivers, because most of their current drivers are elderly folks themselves who are scared to go out.  Visit local businesses that desperately need our patronage in order to survive.  Knock on your neighbours’ doors and ask if there is anything they need.   Please help make this a moment where we come together rather than descending into chaotic selfishness.   Please give this lonely shut-in some good news to look at rather than the endless disasters being chronicled on Twitter.

When my mother was living with me and taking care of me in January, she wrote a list for me called my “morning routine.”  It read:

1.      Take medications.

2.     Start microwave for hot cereal.

3.     Get dressed.  Do makeup and hair.

4.     Eat cereal, toast and yogurt. 

 The final item read, “Go live, love…”

 Wishing that you all continue to live and love in the best of health, and that we can rise above this stronger and more united than ever.