The Question I Hate Most

“Wildflowers don’t care where they gr... Lazy Slob

The Question I Hate Most

“Are you the author?”

The woman holding Odd Mom Out with its bright, perky cover asks this like she’s identifying a suspect in a lineup. I've been standing by my sister’s quilt display at the Georgina Studio Tour for approximately forty-five minutes, jet-lagged and frazzled after thirty hours of travel from South Africa with my ex-husband, and already I regret setting up my little stack of books on the cash-out table.

“Yes,” I admit.

“What are your books about?”

And there it is. The question that grates my nerves worse than a snoring ex-husband.

I am not one of those authors who pumps out psychological thrillers with twists you can see a mile away—the nanny did it, the husband’s a sociopath, everyone is an unreliable narrator including the dog. I would love to be one of those authors with their hordes of readers who devour books faster than I can write them. I would settle for being a romance novelist, except then I’d have to defend the legitimacy of the genre, and I hate conflict more than I hate this question.

So normally I do what I’ve perfected over years: I demur. I fudge. I launch into something conspicuously vague like “Some fiction, some memoir, poetry...” while performing an interpretive dance with my hands that means absolutely nothing. Then I watch their eyes ring up ‘No Sale’ and the book return to the table like a stale loaf of bread.

But this weekend something is different. Maybe it’s on account of a month in another culture. Maybe it was watching my daughter get married under African skies and realizing that life is short and I should stop apologizing for my work. Maybe it’s the stupendous coffee.

I sell a whole bunch of books.

The trick, I discover, is to actually tell them what the damn books are about.

Odd Mom Out? It’s about a divorced woman desperate to get to her daughter’s wedding in Croatia before she completely ruins their relationship. It’s satirical. It’s about midlife. I wrote it during the pandemic when I was tired of being sad and serious and needed a laugh.

Fred’s Funeral? A ghost attends his own funeral and discovers everyone got his entire life wrong. He’s a WWI vet with shell-shock who spent decades in asylums because nobody knew what PTSD was back then. It’s as realistic as a novel narrated by a ghost can be but—my sister blurts out to a customer clutching the book, “I cried at the end!” I didn’t know that. It’s usually me who’s crying about stuff.

Head on Backwards, Chest Full of Sand? A messed-up teenage girl in 1970s Cape Breton tries to lure her delinquent boyfriend to her aunt’s farm. Spoiler: it doesn’t go well. And full disclosure: I forgot to bring copies to the studio tour because my brain is still on a jet plane somewhere over Dubai, but I have a whole box in my office gathering the kind of dust that whispers, “you're a terrible businesswoman.” I know. Shut up.

One quilt browser—a six-foot-tall woman who materializes like a cumulus cloud passing over the sun—spends twenty-five minutes telling us about her father-in-law. He is a very important man, she wants us to know. Very rich. He drives a Mercedes. Wait, no—a Rolls Royce. And she, naturally, is an art buyer for a museum. She knows good art when she sees it. My sister and I nod with the glazed enthusiasm of hostages. Thank God she doesn’t get onto literature—I've already admitted to being an author and can’t take it back. She does not buy a book. But she does give us a comprehensive understanding of her father-in-law’s criminal frenemy, which I promptly forget.

Between six-footers, I sell An Empty Nest, my collection about moving to Georgina when I was suffering from empty nest syndrome so severe I could barely see straight. “I never expected to miss them,” I tell a grandmotherly looking woman with kind eyes. “I was sad for years that my little kids didn’t need me anymore. I still am.” She buys two copies. One for herself, one for her daughter who just dropped her youngest at university and won't stop sobbing.

See? When you tell people what the book is actually about—the human thing underneath the plot—they buy it.

I didn’t bring Birds Don't Cry because I’m dithering about revising it into a second edition. I think about the bones of that novel the way you might think about an ex who seems like a fixer-upper. Which, like the ex, is probably a terrible idea. I’ll keep you posted.

And Chatterbox, my poetry collection from the year my marriage dissolved? Nobody asks about poetry. Who reads or writes poetry besides beautiful, devastated twenty-three-year-olds on Instagram? But that book is about a woman locked in her own story, who has much to say but doesn't know how to let it out.

Which is ironic, I realize now, because this weekend I finally open my mouth.

Turns out people do want to hear what I have to say.

Good morning my dear reader,

I’m writing today from my home in Georgina, Ontario. I’ve been travelling the past few weeks in South Africa and returned to sensational weather here in Southern Ontario. The sun is out, it’s warm enough for slides and t-shirts, and the deciduous trees are changing colour oh so slowly.

Thank you for reading this week’s newsletter. I hope you enjoyed it. Each week I send a little piece of writing for you. Sometimes it’s a personal essay and other times it’s a poem or piece of fiction. I hope you enjoy my scribblings. If my post prompts you to share something, by all means, hit reply to this email or leave a comment wherever you read this story. I love to hear from you.

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