Tag Archives: Books about women

Patterson House Book Tour Update

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It has been a joy to tour around Canada with Patterson House. Thank you to everyone who came out to events and a special thank you to everyone who joined me as a presenter including Aritha Van Herk, Rayanne Haines, Sandra S.G. Wong, Fran Kimmel, Katherine Taylor (twice!), Elizabeth Adilman, Judy Rebick, Sally McLean and Theresa Kishkan. What a wonderful experience to be with you all! And thank you to the venues and hosts — Shelf Life Books in Calgary, Glass Bookshop in Edmonton, Studio 106 in Victoria, Another Story Book Shop in Toronto, The Beaches Branch of the Toronto Public Library, Flying Squirrel Motorcycle Club in Toronto and Massy Arts/Massy Books in Vancouver. You were all so welcoming and helpful!

Talking with readers about Patterson House has been a real treat for me. The characters have been in my own head for such a long time that talking about them now feels gossipy and fun. I love it when people tell me they couldn’t put the book down and stayed up way too late to finish it. What a compliment!

Although the book tour is over, I’ll continue to talk about Patterson House at book clubs and with whoever else wants to talk to me about it! I have a couple of interviews coming soon with Women Writers, Women’s Books and one that will be out soon in the Beaches Metro Community News. These are my people! When people from the Beach tell me I got it right, I feel very complimented.

Here are a few photos from the tour.

Photos from events along the way.

IMPACT shortlisted for Book Publishers Association of Alberta Trade Non-Fiction Book of the Year

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Cover of Impact

What a great headline: Impact: Women Writing After Concussion is shortlisted for the Book Publishers Association of Alberta Trade Non-Fiction Book of the Year! Thank you to BPAA for this honour.

E. D. Morin and I are grateful to all of our contributors, to the University of Alberta Press, and to everyone who is part of getting this book out into the world.

We are also thrilled to see that Alan Brownoff is nominated in the category of Book Cover Design for his excellent work on Impact.

Celebrate!

Celebrate, by Kool and the Gang GIF

Do men read books about women?

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According to an article in The Guardian, men generally don’t read books about women. They tend not to read books by women either. M.A. Sieghart reports that ”men were disproportionately unlikely even to open a book by a woman.”

That’s a darn shame. I don’t want to go to any sexist Venus and Mars place, but I think about this and wish I could speak to the dearest men in my life about some of the dearest fictional women in my life. I think they might get insight into the lives of women. That is, I think they might get insight into me. Sometimes these fictional women say the things I cannot. Read the first page of Claire Messud’s The Woman Upstairs, for example.

Recently, my husband read Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout. I was on a real Strout binge and was prepping Olive, Again for my book club. Olive was in my mind and even in my dreams. I would wake up and be in the passenger seat of Olive’s car, her big black purse crowding me. When I had concerns, I would wonder what Olive would think. Oh, let me tell you, I was in deep. There are so many ways I relate to this difficult and imperfect woman. There is Olive in me. This I know.

Frances McDormand as Olive

What a treat it was to be able to discuss her. Olive makes me feel normal. Or sort of normal.

Similarly, I was just watching the new show on Julia Child, Julia (HBO) and in the first episode of season one, there is Julia, all hot flashy and having a conversation about menopause with her doctor. When she finally tells her husband she is changing, it is a moment of great tenderness.

Ad for HBO’s Julia

It’s lovely thinking about men watching this show (if they do) and witnessing a conversation like this and adding it to their general experience. That way, when such a time crops up in real life, they are not in a conversation that seems to come from Venus, but from this very earth. Maybe it will help all earthlings along the spectrum of sex and gender communicate just a wee bit better. Isn’t that what fiction is for? To help us understand each other?

Sieghart writes, ”If men don’t read books by and about women, they will fail to understand our psyches and our lived experience. They will continue to see the world through an almost entirely male lens, with the male experience as the default. And this narrow focus will affect our relationships with them, as colleagues, as friends and as partners. But it also impoverishes female writers, whose work is seen as niche rather than mainstream if it is consumed mainly by other women.”

As a woman about to release a book about women, this matters to me.

Book Recommendations for Mother’s Day

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This morning, I happened upon a tweet by Jael Richardson who expressed that she’s not too keen on what she’s seeing on book recommendations for Mother’s Day. I responded, interested in what she would recommend.

Richardson’s point is that she wouldn’t make a different recommendation to mothers than she would for anyone else. She writes, “My favourite books for ‘mothers’ are my favourite books for people.” Yep, true. She objects to the spring time covers and so on, and is asking people to think about what the marketers think a “Mother’s Day book” is. It’s a good and important point to make.

Cover of (M)Othering, a new anthology edited by Anne Sorbie and Heidi Grogan

Some of the other tweeters on the thread point out that Mother’s Day recommendations can be triggering, and this is so true for people who struggle with infertility or who have lost a child or children or have experienced any of the myriad things that can happen. Anne Sorbie, editor of the upcoming (M)othering Anthology with Inanna in Spring 2022 (with Heidi Grogan) has as inclusive an approach to mothering as I do and says in her tweet, “All people are and do (m)other” to capture that inclusivity. I had recommended her upcoming book in my reply because, well, I’m in it, and I think it’s a logical Mother’s Day book recommendation. I am certain it will be inclusive and wonderful.

The flip side of Richardson’s point is that books about mothers are good for people.

I can’t help thinking that sometimes readers are looking for books that reflect their reality. Sometimes, it is helpful, (and not to be too dramatic) even life-saving, to find someone else who captures something of your experience with their words. A colleague of mine, Diana Gustafson, edited a book called “Unbecoming Mothers: The Social Production of Maternal Absence,” which was groundbreaking and, if it weren’t so darned hard to find now, would be a great Mother’s Day recommendation. It’s about the stigmatization of mothers who come to live apart from their children, for whatever reason. Mothers who give up, surrender, or abandon their children are among the most stigmatized.

What we do to mothers. (Shakes head.)

So, while the recommended books for Mother’s Day may be problematic, it is part of a bigger problem: Mother’s Day itself is problematic. It’s not literally a Hallmark Holiday, but it might as well be. It’s easy to create a situation in which people feel excluded and judged. It becomes the opposite of celebratory. Most problematic of all is the way our culture thinks about mothers, limits them, expects too much of them and offers very little by way of support. Even the notion that mothers are women is, thankfully, being deconstructed as we challenge gender constructs and stereotypes. All of this is welcome.

I also can’t help thinking that marketers are gonna market. Any opportunity to recommend books will be seized. Let’s try and be thoughtful about it.