Week Three: Update and Check-In #MARM2025

It’s been a quiet week for MARMers, with the rush of Week One behind us and the seemingly possibility-soaked remaining weeks in November awaiting, although Andrew has posted about Cat’s Eye (1988). He also included two early MARM links at the end, so you can also read about Bill’s reading and my rereading: all three of us had a different response to the book, wrote about different aspects of the story, and felt differently dis/connected to our interpretations of MA’s intentions.

It’s been a hectic week for MA, seemingly, on the other side of Book of Lives’ publication. She was even on “60 Minutes” this week. (Find your own way to the interview—depending how you access network shows. It’s partially available via YouTube too.)

Last week I’d read maybe twenty pages in Book of Lives. I’d imagined it would be more like her mid-career biographies (Rosemary Sullivan’s The Red Shoes, Nathalie Cooke’s Margaret Atwood, etc.) but it’s more like eavesdropping on a conversation, with the wry asides and humour that I should have anticipated. So, this week, I’ve enjoyed a few chapters each night, and now I find myself in The Edible Woman years.

The dedication is to family, friends, and readers, and as always to Graeme (I love that she maintains this dedication after his death—dedication need not die). And it really does seem as though she has thought about what readers would want in a book like this; I am thrilling over tiny details about what/how certain events transformed on their way to the page.

For some I suspect this sharing of certain facts will equate to the idea that her work is rooted wholly in autobiography; I think it was an interview with Helen Garner by Sam Baker, in which I recently heard that this charge is most often levied against women writers—the implication being that they lack the natural artistry required to create a literary work. (Anyone else hear this on The Shift? I wondered if it might have been Charlotte Mendelsohn’s idea…I listened to that interview on the same weekend.)

MARM 2025 PLANS

Launch (November 1)
Old Babes in the Wood, “Death by Clamshell” (November 4)
The Blind Assassin Parts I-IV (November 6)
Week Two: Update and Check-In (November 8)
Old Babes in the Wood, “Freeforall” (November 11)
The Blind Assassin Parts V-VI (November 13)
Week Three: Update and Check-In (November 15)
Margaret Atwood’s 86^th Birthday (November 18)
Old Babes in the Wood, “Metepsychosis” (November 18)
The Blind Assassin Parts VII-IX (November 20)
Week Four: Update and Check-In (November 22)
Old Babes in the Wood, “Airborne: A Symposium” (November 25)
The Blind Assassin Parts X-XV (November 27)
Wrap-Up (November 30)

Maybe some writers do draw wholly and completely from autobiography, but that seems unlikely, when we have access to so many other stories and ideas as well. More frequently, I believe that real-life experiences do make their way into an author’s fiction but alongside artistry, so that they are transformed when they intertwine with the stuff of story, and come to exist in a liminal space where facts might become truths.

But, even so, I craved knowing exactly which specific teacher inspired the character of Miss Lumley in Cat’s Eye (MA’s fourth-grade teacher, Miss Langley) with a couple of new details but, then, a direction to the novel’s description. In other instances, a broader event is referred to in real-life and in fiction, like the loss of a pregnancy (her mother’s experience) which figures prominently in two novels.

Readers can spot other connections too; her tenth-grade English teacher memorised Samuel Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan”, which is a verse known-by-heart in The Blind Assassin, but one known by many students of MA’s age—my mother was assigned its memorisation in school also. I’m gobbling up the memoir for this sense of a shared confidence (as I imagine it—“just” me and thousands of others), and likely devaluing other sorts of information while I inhale these treats.

Bill specifically sought mention of the ravines: “The walk—over a mile—was on a muddy gravel road that ended at a decaying wooden bridge. This crossed a ravine said to harbour unspecified ‘bad men’, then led along several quiet residential streets to the schoolyard.” (MA’s walk to school from the family’s second residence in Toronto.) And there is another veiled reference, when she writes about getting a library card at the Deer Park branch of the Toronto Public Library, which is described as being “a streetcar trip and a long walk” from the family home, and which is a walkable distance down the street where Laura Chase drives off the St. Clair bridge into the ravine below.

Elissa Altman asks in Permission: “What is it that separates a well-crafted memoir from one that lacks humanity?” And she answers her own question: “Among other things: a sense of ambiguity, or imperfection—physical, moral, ethical—among its characters, and the knowledge that even the wisest, most handsome, charismatic of people might have moments of profound assholery that need to appear on the page.”

There are moments in which MA casts herself in this role; for instance, the media coverage has focused on her statement about holding grudges. An imperfection, arguably immoral/unethical. She also admits insecurities and  openly discusses revealing different aspects of herself to different individuals. (Her friendship with Adrienne Poy, now Adrienne Clarkson, struck me: “We know what’s in the cellar. That’s where the bodies are buried.”)

If, like Bill, you have specific curiosities about Book of Lives, do share, and I’ll share what I’ve spotted so far.

Meanwhile, half of The Blind Assassin remains, a couple more stories, and two-thirds of this new memoir. What remains on your MARM list?