Kim Moritsugu - Other Writings

What We Leave Behind, from the April 2004 issue of Canadian House and Home magazine, an essay about old houses and the memories and stories they contain.

Hairspray -- A Show to Cry For, published in the 2004 Toronto program of the Mirvish Productions staging of the Broadway musical

Read Kim Moritsugu’s humourous personal essay from the January 1, 2007 issue of Maclean’s magazine, “My Husband and My TV Boyfriend” about her non-relationship with actor Wentworth Miller.

Stories

Jennifer de Somewhere Else, a short story commissioned by CBC Radio One for its 2006 Canada Reads Challenge contest, and voted the contest winner by listeners.

Book Reviews from The Globe and Mail

Review of “I Feel Bad About My Neck: And Other Thoughts on Being a Woman” by Nora Ephron

What We Leave Behind
from the April, 2004 issue of Canadian House and Home magazine, by Kim Moritsugu:

When I was in Grade 3, a classmate named Donald Rooke lived in a big old house with an unusual facade--brick dotted with protruding, organically shaped, hardened globs of more brick. I know now that this strange ornamental style of brickwork is called clinker and is characteristic of the early-20th-century Arts and Crafts architectural style. But all I knew when I was young was Donald's inventive explanation for the house's look: that Superman had dropped by one afternoon and thrown some molten bricks at the house. I didn't believe this story, of course, but it and the clinkers sure made the house memorable.

Donald and I attended the same elementary, junior high and high schools, and the summer we turned 15, we briefly "went around." That is, for about three weeks we hung out at the local park in the evenings and watched baseball games, rode the playground swings or seesaw in a mocking, we're-too-old-and-cool-for-this manner, and strolled to the corner store to buy ice cream bars and P-Nutty Cones. In the late hours of those warm summer evenings, Don (no longer Donald) walked me home, and we made out, as only teenagers losing their innocence can, on the dark front porch of my parents' house. We didn't neck outside the house that Superman had built, though. In truth, I only remember going inside Don's place once that summer, when we sat six feet apart in his living room and, mindful of his parents' silent presence upstairs, listened to a Dan Hicks and His Hot Licks album, at low volume.

Twenty years later, I was married, a mother of two young children, and house-hunting, when my real estate agent suggested we check out a property in my old neighbourhood. The house was beyond the price range my husband and I had set, but it had languished unsold on the market for months, and the agent smelled a bargain. On the way there in her car, she said, "I should warn you--the exterior's a little weird-looking," and she pulled up in front of Don's house.

Some owners of clinker brick houses shave off the distinctive misshapen lumps of brick and stucco over the surface, but the Rookes hadn't. Nor had the family who bought the property from Don's parents, completed extensive renovations, then moved to Europe and put the house back on the market.

I hesitated on the porch, wondering what vestiges of the past I might find in the house, what reminders of its former occupants. I touched a mouth-shaped, liver-coloured glob of blasted brick on the outside wall, stepped inside the vestibule--and recognized nothing. The rooms were bare of furniture, the new windows undraped, the kitchen and bathrooms done over in the latest finishes. A vinyl LP of Dan Hicks and His Hot Licks was not playing on an old stereo. To my simultaneous relief and disappointment, there were no ghosts present, no sign anyone I knew had ever lived there. A tour of the house revealed that only one room--a dark, attic-type space on the third floor--had been left untouched by the renovators. But its decor of old-fashioned flowered wallpaper, faded broadloom and dark-painted trim did not speak to me of anything more than age and wear.

My husband and I left that attic room untouched 'after the lowball offer we made for the house was accepted, and we moved in. The house was large, and we were only four. We placed a spare bed, a saggy armchair and some old books in the attic room, and set about imprinting the rest of the house with our stuff: toys, stains, shutters, a pencilled-in growth chart on the inside edge of a door.

Since high school, Don had turned into a professional musician, a guitarist for a hip, esoteric band, while I'd embarked on a midlife career change and was becoming a novelist. In the way of people who have lived in the core of Toronto since early childhood, we ran into each other once or twice a year, on the street, or at a party. So, soon after we bought Don's old house, I told him we had, and invited him to come over to see how it had changed. He declined. He was busy, he said, and not often in the immediate vicinity. And a visit might be awkward. He didn't stop by to see that we'd painted the wood panelling on the main floor white, and the walls violet. He didn't climb up to the third floor and find the attic room intact.

Years passed. My children progressed in turn from elementary school to middle school, the pencil marks on the growth chart on the door inched ever higher. I had my first novel published, then a second; Don's band grew in reputation, accolades and following. And the spare room slept on, undisturbed, until my husband decided to make his own career change and begin working from home. What better place to set up a home office than in the unused attic room? Or rather, in an improved attic room. The renovation plan called for larger windows, skylights, the pushing back of three kneewalls, and refinished wood floors. When completed, the space would be bright, airy and completely unrecognizable.

One afternoon partway through the messy, dusty transformation job, a workman knocked on the door of my second-floor study. "You might want to take a look at this," he said, and motioned for me to follow him upstairs.

The flower-sprigged wallpaper had been stripped from one wall to reveal a dull coat of grey paint on plaster. And on that grey paint, written in a large version of the proper sort of handwriting taught to women raised in the 1930s and '40s, was this inscription: "This room was wallpapered by the Rooke family on September 12, 19--." There may have been an exclamation mark at the end of the sentence. There was certainly a flourish of pride in the formation of the letters.

Here was the silent presence I'd expected when we'd moved in, a bona fide artifact of the period when Don's family had occupied the house. I hunted up an e-mail address for Don and wrote to him about our archeological find. He happened to check his messages on a day when he was visiting his parents in Barrie, Ont., where they'd retired, and he later told me he'd entertained them that night at dinner with the story, and was entertained in turn by his mother's memories of the wallpapering job, her reminder that he'd pitched in and helped, all those years before.

The work crew carefully painted over the inscription in a deep sky blue that has helped transform the attic room into a treehouse-like aerie in which my husband can sit at his desk and see the street below through a screen of leaves. He doesn't think often about the writing on the wall, I'm sure, but I know it's still there, underneath the paint, a whisper of the past.

The clinker bricks are also still with us, and still elicit amused comment from visitors and delivery people. The house's facade looks no less ugly and no more fashionable than when we moved in, but we wouldn't think of changing it. Those clinker globs are a legacy, a piece of the house's history, passed down from owner to owner through the years, like the writing on the wall left behind by Mrs. Rooke. And like the copy of this story that I plan to place inside a small wooden box and hide deep within the house to be discovered one day by my successors--whoever they may be.

On Not Playing the Race Card
By Kim Moritsugu, Published May 29, 2003 in The Globe & Mail.

Ethnic is in. Roots are cool. Gone are the days when Antonios changed their name to Tony, when first languages were dropped by kids who tuned out during Saturday morning heritage classes, when the old country ways of one's parents were a source of embarrassment, when time-honoured culinary traditions were pushed aside in favour of chocolate chip cookies and Kraft dinner.

Now, identification with back-home culture is the fashion. Witness Asian Heritage Month, currently being celebrated across Canada (and controversially promoted by a Canadian Heritage poster containing stereotyped and cartoonish images of Asians.) Witness too the success of the multi-culti-happy film comedies My Big Fat Greek Wedding and Bend It Like Beckham, both of which poke fun at the gap between first and second generation immigrants, yet revere any ethnic customs which are colourful, entertaining, and feature good food.

The culture-uber-alles climate has encouraged the preponderance of the newly-met person who states his or her ethnicity within minutes of an introduction. As if to say, "Well, I'm Irish," (or German, or Chinese, or Jewish, or Jamaican, or Quebecois, or hardly ever, WASP) explains anything significant about the speaker other than that he or she likes to perpetrate stereotypes. As if asking a stranger, "What are you?" or "Where are you from?" is not an impolite, reductive question. As if ethnicity is all one is.

Yes, as my surname and face indicate, I'm Japanese-Canadian (half). But I'm also, invisibly, half French-Canadian. And more significant than either of those labels is that I'm the daughter of two individuals who blazed trails and broke moulds within their respective families (and who share likings for jazz and Chinese food.) I'm a child of the fifties, raised in a leafy old Anglo neighbourhood of Toronto that, for several years, housed only one visible minority family in its precincts--mine. I'm the kid whose favourite Beatle was George Harrison, who anchored the track team in grade six, who painted flowers on my knees in grade eight.

What am I? In high school, I was a band geek who occasionally skipped school to eat fries and smoke cigarettes at the pool hall. At university I studied Egyptology and took up tap dancing. Later, I earned an M.B.A. degree, only to develop a distaste for business over several years of toiling in the corporate trenches. So I became a writer, mainly of fiction. After I'd married a half-Sephardi, half-Ashkenazi Jewish man with a passion for basketball, and given birth to two athletic sons with dissimilar personalities.

I'm a unique combination of myriad scattershot influences, in other words, the sum of many disparate parts, someone who defies easy categorization. As are we all. We're all multi-faceted, complex creatures, products of nature and nurture, of pop culture and music from our particular era, of love requited and not. Some may be more strongly influenced by our backgrounds and upbringings than others, by which customs of our childhood we choose to rebel against (the jazz), and by which we choose to accept and carry forward (love the Chinese food). But no less a driving force in our formation may have been the inspiring teacher who set us on the career road to what we became, the life-changing summer I spent in England when I was twenty, the car accident you survived last year.

That's why being summed up or described in one dimension--the ethnic one--is so limiting.

If I ruled the world, the probability that I would be asked about timesteps would be the same as that I would be asked (as I was, recently) if my first name, Kim, is a Chinese name. (Some questions are so epic in their ignorance that they stupefy as well as offend.) If I were in charge, the salesman who sells frozen seafood in my neighbourhood from his truck would know that I'd be more inclined (not much, but more) to make a purchase if he didn't look by me when I open my front door, and ask to speak to the lady of the house. And I would never be confused with the other Japanese-Canadian mother at my son's school, or with other Japanese-named writers.

It's an enticing world view, the colour-blind one, but I often feel like one of its few adherents. In these days when novelists have forged successful careers writing exclusively about the cultures of their immigrant parents and grandparents, when SARS and wars have typecast people by country of origin more than ever, I'm majorly outnumbered by the I-am-ethnic, therefore-I-am crowd.

But for how long? When I was young, mixed race couples like my parents (and mixed race children like me), were as rare a sight in Toronto as a visible minority television personality. Not anymore. Tiger Woods had to coin a new word, Cablinasian, to describe his four-part ethnic background, but has become an icon whose fame transcends his parentage. Even My Big Fat Greek Wedding and Bend It Like Beckham feature subversive endings in which the open-minded, forward-thinking heroines embark on relationships with romantic partners from different cultures.

The current swell of ethnic pride notwithstanding, society may slowly be evolving--led by second and third generations of youth imbued with hybrid vigour--into a state where the combinations and permutations of ethnic and racial identity are too numerous and complex to translate into an easy, dismissive, one-word/one-culture assessment.

Hairspray -- A Show to Cry For
by Kim Moritsugu, from the 2004 Toronto program of the Mirvish Productions staging of the Broadway musical

If I were a gay man, I'd be called a show tune queen. But what do you call a middle-aged straight woman who's into Broadway musicals? Had I possessed singing and dancing talent, I might have tried to be a chorine. Instead, I became a writer (of novels) who, for thirty years now, has made an annual trip to New York to see musicals. Which makes me a Broadway musical aficionado, I suppose. Or an eccentric. Possibly a weirdo.

How weird? Some people recognize a transcendental theatrical experience by the raising of goose bumps on the skin, or hair on the back of the neck. When I'm caught in the spell of a good musical, I cry with joy. When I see and hear, in one show, all of thrilling staging, lovely melodies, clever lyrics, snazzy orchestrations, ace singing and dancing--out come the big, fat tears, streaming down the face. (Totally embarrassing, I know, but at least there's no sobbing involved. My crying is silent.)

The Pavlovian tear response doesn't happen every time I see a show--in my years of theatre-going, I've watched, dry-eyed, my share of dreck. I've endured tuneless music, banal lyrics, and sung-through rock musicals, and I've cursed the trend that replaces well-rounded song-and dance pros with one-trick singers. But by keeping up on show biz news and carefully choosing what I see, I've still often enough had the chance to shed my joyful tears in thrall to Broadway musical greatness.

I'll be frank, though: when I read a few years ago that a musical comedy was in development based on the 1988 John Waters' film Hairspray, I saw no sign that it would meet my cry-for-joy criteria. Though I could relate to the main character, a not-blonde, not-thin young woman who loves to sing and dance, the movie’s campy sensibility was not mine. That the score for the show was to be written by a songwriter associated with the animated TV show South Park--a show I knew and disliked--did not increase its potential appeal.

Then I read a New York Times magazine story about composer Marc Shaiman and the Seattle tryouts of Hairspray. Jesse Green, the author of the piece, raved--no, gushed—about the score, written by Shaiman and Scott Wittman. Green called it "the best Broadway pop score--part Motown, part Merman--since pop and Broadway parted company some 30 years ago." That statement piqued my interest, more than a little. He also said the songs "give old-fashioned instant pleasure," "have powerful beats to go with their catchy hooks," and "the lyrics are witty and rhyme properly." The capper? According to Green, each number built "to a socko finish."

The article appeared in July, 2002. My trip to New York that year was booked for three weeks later, during Hairspray's previews, for which, miraculously, tickets were still available. Two nights before the opening, my husband and I squeezed into a packed house of theatre buffs, celebrities, plus-sized women and gay men. By that time, the buzz for the show was deafening--it was widely predicted to become Broadway's next big hit. The curtain rose on plucky Tracy Turnblad, singing Good Morning Baltimore from her vertically suspended bed, and the audience--and I-- went wild.

The set was funny, funky, and sixties-coloured, the costumes tacky yet right-on, the hair wonderfully over-the-top. The multi-talented cast members could sing, dance, and do comedy, too. The book was sweet but irreverent, jokey but imbued with a humanizing touch of yearning--its writers describe it perfectly as "Cinderella for Cynics." The staging--watch for the breathtaking entrance of a girl group called The Dynamites during the song "Welcome to the Sixties"--was alive with tearworthy moments. (I know--who's gushing now?)

And the score! Imagine songs written in the style of early sixties pop music, only sunnier, funnier, and glossed with a Broadway sheen. Imagine orchestrations so sparkling--graced with jaunty backup singers, brilliant trumpets, and kicky drumming--that they delight me no matter how many times I hear them. In my car, for instance, every day, for the last three months, since I bought the show CD.

You'll have guessed that Hairspray made me cry, more than once. Especially during the socko finish to end all socko finishes, the show finale, "Can't Stop the Beat," a number that had everyone in the Broadway theatre where I saw the show, on their feet--dancing, cheering, hooting and hollering with joy.

Will Toronto audiences react as enthusiastically to Hairspray? I don't know if there are enough show tune queens around, closeted or out, gay or straight, plus or otherwise-sized, to give the show the welcoming reception it deserves. What I do know is that one night in April, this particular weirdo will be sitting in the Princess of Wales Theatre watching Hairspray with big, fat tears streaming down my happy face.

Three hours into my fifth morning shift in a row at a way-too-busy coffee shop downtown, when I’m exhausted and in automaton mode, the corporate hack I hand the latest cup of coffee to says, "Thanks, Lily. You're a doll."

I give him the dead eyed stare. As opposed to the dead eyed half smile I would have given if he hadn't mistaken me for my coworker Lily, someone I do not in any way resemble. I'm taller, she's thinner, I have a big head and long unruly hair, and she has a short sleek do tucked behind her small ears. She's also a sultry, free-spirited artist who incorporates burlesque routines into her performance art. And I'm a too-old-for-this-stage-of-life graduate student, name of Jen. (Yeah, hi.) Lily and I couldn't be more dissimilar, except that we both happen to be part-Asian, which, news flash! does not mean that we look alike.

"Oh, you aren't Lily?" the man says. "I can't tell you girls apart." And he smiles, as if he's not being offensive or displaying racial tunnel vision. "Are you two sisters?"

I'm tempted to say Oops and tip over the carafe that I've just filled with fresh Colombian Mountain Blend so that the hot coffee runs down to the floor, scalds his shoes, and if I'm lucky, his toes within the shoes. Before I can, though, Lily returns from her cigarette break, her patchouli fragrance battling with the tobacco smoke fumes that cling to her like a veil. She greets the hack, pulls a promotional postcard from a pocket within her sultry, free-spirited clothing, and hands it to him. "I hope I’ll see you at my new show—it’s opening tonight at the Coolhead Lounge."

The cocksure idiot almost spills his own coffee at the sight of the photograph on the card, which is of Lily in retro burlesque garb, featuring, it pains me to say, pasties in the shape of pineapples.

He walks out in a daze and Lily preens in front of the shiny surface of the espresso machine. “That guy is so hot for me right now,” she says. As if that were a good thing.

I don't need to take the order of the next customer in line, because he's a regular who comes in every morning at this time and orders a large skim milk latte to go. I may look as wasted as I feel, but this guy always appears well-rested, and freshly shaved and showered, in his good haircut, starched shirt, natty suit, and shiny shoes. He exudes success, self-confidence, and everything I might have been but am not.

I pass over his latte, he says thanks, and, "You're Jennifer, right?"

Is this name-the-coffee-person day and no one told me? "Yeah, hi."

"Hi, I'm Ramesh. And I've been meaning to mention: I think we went to the same high school. Sir John A. MacDonald?"

What? I serve the next customer in line and try to picture Ramesh as a teenager, but I can’t see anything recognizable in his face. "I'm sorry, I don't– Were we in any classes together?"

"No. I’m a few years younger than you, and I was your basic math geek anyway, but you were pretty high profile. Weren't you president of the student council one year? And into theatre? I remember you singing and dancing in Sweet Charity."

Unfortunately, he’s not mistaken. I was president of the student council and I did perform in the school production of Sweet Charity. I was one of a trio that sang "There's Gotta Be Something Better Than This," the anthem of dead-end job holders everywhere.

"Yeah,” I say, "that was me. And look how far I've come in ten years—now I get to serve coffee to young Turks like you."

A flash of discomfort passes across his face and I say, "I didn't mean that in the ethnic sense. I meant it in the corporate big wheel sense. Which is what I assume you are now. Or am I the only person who uses the phrase with that connotation?"

Apparently I am, because this muddled explanation fails to break the ice that has formed on our chat. Ramesh shoves off with a curt goodbye, and Lily says, right before she turns on the coffee grinder, "Hey, Jen. Did you see the write-up in the lifestyle section of the newspaper about that guy a few weeks ago?"

"No." I have to yell over the deafening sound of the coffee beans and my brain cells being ground into a deep, dark powder. "What did it say?"

She shuts off the machine. "It said he's a high-flying investment banker who lives in a lakefront condo and dines out at all the best restaurants. And get this: he spends a week out of every month in Paris on business. As soon as I read that, I invited him to my show opening." She winks. "Maybe I can become his Lily de Montparnasse."

This is my cue to go to the bathroom and wash my eyes and ears out with soap. I'm not sure who I despise more at this moment—Lily, or me. Though there's no real contest: most despicable has to be me, student council president turned perpetual student slash loser.

At eleven o’clock, our shift ends. Lily takes some time to layer on her outerwear, including a cute-as-a-kid crocheted hat and high-heeled boots from which large pompons dangle. All the while, she chatters about what she still has to do to prepare for her opening tonight. I'm also moving slowly—the zipper on my jacket has a tendency to get fabric from the lining stuck in it, and I'm in no rush to go to my noon appointment with my thesis advisor. No rush to report on my distinct lack of progress due to too many hours spent napping and watching all of the British, Canadian and American versions of Antiques Roadshow on television.

I tune out Lily's voice and observe, with fatigued amusement, that the headlines of two notices tacked up on a bulletin board have overlapped to form some found poetry. One advertises accommodation, the other a new show at the science museum, and together, they make up the random phrase "Rooms for Rent on The Outer Planets." Heh. I'm about to show this to Lily, and maybe suggest she go check out those rooms, when she pulls from her bag a small metal box, decorated with an Art Deco style design, and places it on a table next to us.

I point to the box. "What's that?"

"A cigarette case," she says, and flips it open, shows me the cigarettes inside. "I bought it at a junk store near the Coolhead. It's vintage. Cute, eh?”

"Yeah, cute." I pick it up, look closer at it, and try not to be knocked over by the adrenalin flow that's surging and crashing on my body's inner shores, because the case bears certain key similarities to an object I saw being appraised once on television. An object valued, if I recall correctly, in the thousands of dollars.

I'm probably wrong. I'm undoubtedly wrong, the way I was wrong about the usage of the term Young Turks, or in ever thinking that there was a career future in the study of art history. So I put the case back on the table and don't say anything. Whereupon Lily looks out the window, says, "There’s my ride!" scoops up her belongings and runs out. Leaving the cigarette case behind.

I stand and stare at it for about ten seconds and do not consider for any of those seconds calling or going after Lily. Instead, I palm the case, pocket it, pull my zipper free of my jacket lining, close it up and walk out into the street.

I blow off the meeting with my thesis advisor by phone message, but head to the university anyway, and put my research skills to work in its library. Two hours later, I set out for #3 Day Road, the address of an antique shop that the various online, book and periodical sources I consulted said is where I can find a local expert in Art Deco named Michael Simonoff. I've called ahead—he's in, and he's willing to give me a free over-the-counter appraisal.

Simonoff is tall and silver-haired and as elegant as the office located at the back of his elegant shop. It’s the kind where one must ring to be admitted, and where the antiques, including some lovely and impressive pieces of art deco furniture, are not hidden in dusty corners, but gleam and glow in well-lit display nooks.

I hand over the case, from which I've had the sense to remove Lily's cigarettes, and watch him carefully examine it. The longer the examination lasts, the more guilty I feel about what I'm doing, which is what, exactly? Seeking a professional appraisal of an object that doesn't belong to me. Why? So that I can advise my (cough) dear friend Lily of her good fortune if my instincts are proved correct. Yeah, that's what I'm doing.

"Where did you get this?" Simonoff says. "What's its provenance?"

"A friend of mine bought it at a junk store."

"So, it's not stolen? Or taken from an absent-minded grandmother, perhaps?"

I look him in the eye. "No."

"Excuse my suspicion," he says, "but it's rare for a young person, a student I believe you said you were on the phone, dressed as you are, to come into my shop with something like this. What are you a student of, by the way?"

"I'm doing a master's degree in art history."

He leans back from the spotlight of his desk lamp, puts himself in shadow. "And what made you think this was a significant object?"

I blurt out my research findings, recite the identifying characteristics I noted and looked up at the library. I make mention of the materials, which have the appearance of sterling silver, ivory and enamel; also of the artist's initials and the maker-mark engraved on the bottom of the case. And I point to the triangular design of the clasp, a hallmark of a known French decorative artist. "So what do you think?" I say. "Am I totally off track?"

"No, I think you're on track. A proper authentication would take a week or so to complete, but unofficially, I'd say this piece might be worth a few thousand dollars. As much as five thousand. Provided an interested buyer could be found for it, of course."

I could grab the case now, thank the man, and run with it to an internet auction site. I could sell it for big bucks, quit the coffee shop, and use the proceeds from the sale as seed money to start a new life in a new city. A city where I could magically come into my own, not as Jennifer de Montparnasse, maybe, but as Jennifer de somewhere else good.

I could do all that, but I won’t. The minute those thoughts so much as ambled into my mind's arena, my conscience and timidity jumped into the ring together and pinned the thieving impulses to the mat.

Simonoff says, "You have a good eye, it seems."

"Thank you." I take back the case and stand up. I’m tired, very tired. "Thank you very much. I'll tell my friend what you've said. I’m sure she'll be thrilled."

He says, "It's kind of you to do the legwork for her."

Kind? If any sort of kindness has motivated me today, it's a complicated kindness.

On the way to seeing me out, he says, "May I ask what you'll do with your master’s degree once you’ve completed it?"

Good question. I say, "With my luck, I'll continue to rot in coffee shop hell, only fulltime instead of parttime."

"You work in a coffee shop now?"

"I'm afraid so."

"What would you think about coming to work for me instead?"

That night, I show up at the Coolhead Lounge, intent on returning the case to Lily and advising her of its possible value. But half an hour before her show is due to start, the venue is packed, and the club manager tells me Lily's closeted backstage, limbering up in ways I can imagine and would rather not witness. Before I can change my mind about doing what’s right and honourable, I find a payphone at the back of the club, call Lily's home number, and leave her a message: I tell her not to worry, I picked up the case she left behind, and incidentally, I think it might be valuable, so she should call me about it.

My good deed done, I stroll outside, light of foot and spirit, and run into Ramesh on the sidewalk in front of the club. He's dressed down now, but still natty and fresh-faced, and his hello is friendly. "Are you coming or going?" he says.

"Going. It's crazy in there, crowded and sold out, and hey, I'm sorry about that Young Turks comment this morning. I don't know what I was thinking."

He says, "No harm done," and looks at the club entrance. "Sold out?"

"I understand there's a second show at midnight, if you want to line up for it."

"I’m not that interested in seeing it."

"Yeah, me neither."

Across the street, the door to a restaurant opens, some Spanish dance music escapes into the night air, and for a few seconds I'm the girl Ramesh remembers, full of promise and potential, standing on stage, singing my hopeful ambitious heart out.

"How about we go somewhere else good," I say, "and I buy you a drink?"

He says yes.

This story was commissioned by CBC Radio One’s Between the Covers program for its Canada Reads Challenge, and was voted by listeners as the winning story. It features a talismanic object, as do Kim Moritsugu’s novels The Glenwood Treasure and The Restoration of Emily.

Anyone who has had the pleasure of hearing internationally best-selling Irish author Maeve Binchy speak--on the radio, television or in person--knows that she exudes wisdom, wit, and warmth, and is a gifted storyteller. These qualities also enrich her fiction, stories about ordinary Irish people coping with their hopes and dreams, triumphs and defeats. In a rhythmic and conversational narrative voice, Binchy invites the reader to pull up a chair by the fire and witness the everyday travails of her large multigenerational casts. To sigh with satisfaction when the intricately plotted storylines converge, and when goodness and kindness win out over selfishness or meanness.

For her many fans, the periodic publication of a thick new Binchy novel has been cause for celebration and for a long slot of reading time to be set aside for delighted consumption. So the announcement last year that Binchy's novel Scarlet Feather would be her last big book--she would still write stories, she said, but no more long novels--was greeted with sadness. And the recent arrival in bookstores of what looks to be a new big Binchy book, called Quentins, comes as a surprise.

Closer examination of the new, not so thick tome--named after the fictional Dublin restaurant frequented by characters from Binchy's previous novels Evening Class, Tara Road and Scarlet Feather--reveals that is a hybrid of forms. Within it is a medium sized novel, presented in four parts, a romantic drama of the sort Binchy fans know and love, peopled with characters both new and familiar. Inserted between the novel’s parts are three sets of titled short stories, similar to those Binchy has published previously in slimmer, themed collections such as The Return Journey and This Year, It Will Be Different.

The novel portion of the book concerns a new character, Ella Brady, a young Dublin teacher who, in keeping with one of Binchy's recurrent themes, falls in love with a charming but no-good married man. This time around, the adulterer is Don Richardson, a prominent but shady financial consultant. He takes Ella to dinner at Quentins and on vacation to Spain, pledges devotion and love, gives her the best (off-stage) sex of her life, then disappears with money swindled from clients, among them Ella's friends and parents. Ella is devastated, but as a step towards retribution, takes on an assortment of part-time summer jobs. One is for a documentary film company that wants to make a film about the many human dramas that have been enacted within the walls of Quentins restaurant over the years, by staff and customers alike.

It is these Quentins-themed human dramas that are presented as short stories. Some of the stories--especially those about Brenda and Patrick Brennan, the returning characters who run Quentins--provide background information and depth on characters who play a part in the main storyline, but others do not. All are written in Binchy's convincing and often heart-tugging style, and feature the kind of poignant situations at which Binchy excels. We read about middle-aged siblings who deal (or don't ) with their aging parents, about a young man tempted to lift the money from a found wallet, about an efficient but lonely secretary unappreciated by her divorced boss.

Though the stories interrupt the flow of the surrounding novel, and some seem like extras, inessential to the main storyline, the book still works as a whole, thanks to Binchy's unerring ability to fill her scenes with telling details plucked out of lives that could easily be our own. Whether sketching a vignette about the mingled embarrassment and pride a successful young woman feels for her less sophisticated family, or bringing Ella Brady's novel-length plot to a suspenseful climax and a comforting life-goes-on ending, Binchy delivers. Like its predecessors, Quentins is sure to induce many a reader to pull up a chair and be warmed by Binchy’s fire.

Columnists have been known to dabble in fiction, and novelists to contribute bits of social commentary to newspapers and magazines, but rare is the writer as successful, prolific and multidisciplinary as Anna Quindlen. In the past ten years, she has won the Pulitzer Prize for her New York Times columns, moved on to pen a biweekly column at Newsweek, and published three best-selling, critically acclaimed novels. (One of these, Black and Blue, was an Oprah pick, and another, One True Thing, was made into a major Hollywood motion picture.) All that in addition to her four collections of non-fiction and two children's books.

Those of us with a less productive last decade could despair upon hearing this resume. Or we could open up Blessings, Quindlen's new novel, and prepare to be well entertained.

Blessings is the name of an old country estate somewhere in the northeastern U.S. It comes complete with rambling farmhouse, handsome barn, large pond, grassy acres, a picturesque orchard, and a permanent golden glow born of prosperity and tradition, if not of good times. The property, owned by an affluent New York family for the better part of a century, is a symbol of wealth and comfort to the working class locals, and the place where an unmarried teenage couple decide to abandon their newborn baby one summer night.

The wouldn't-be parents don't know that the only inhabitant of the house is eighty-year-old Lydia Blessing, a crotchety woman who fills her days by harassing her ill-tempered housekeeper and reminiscing about her life's many disappointments and too few moments of happiness. Nor do they expect that Blessings' new caretaker, a young, sad sack ex-con named Skip Cuddy, will find the cardboard box containing the baby, take the infant girl into his apartment above the garage, and try to care for her alone, in secret.

Quindlen alternates the novel's third-person narration between Lydia and Skip to develop two separate but convergent storylines. In one, Lydia picks apart the long-tangled skein of lies, deceptions and silences that is her family history, and discovers a sad secret therein. In the other, Skip labours to keep the baby safe and hidden, and to distance himself from his lowlife former friends. Throughout, Quindlen seamlessly blends scenes from the past and present in a smooth, skilful manner that recalls the work of Anne Tyler. She brings to vivid life settings as diverse as a contemporary small town bar and a pre-war debutante dance in Manhattan, and inhabits them with characters whose varied voices ring with veracity. She also creates enough suspense about the outcome of both storylines to carry the reader forward in a comfortable state of eagerness to the conclusion.

Blessings is an old house; Lydia is an old woman. Perhaps in homage to both, much of the novel gives off an antique perfume that lingers like the scent of mothballs on Lydia's stored-away belongings. In the style of an older time, character names such as Faith, Sunny, Skip and Blessing come fraught with meaning. There is much naming of plants, and an abundance of overtly symbolic animal behaviour (deer fawns edge toward their mothers, a barn cat catches a baby bird, herons swallow trout whole). In the heavy-with-portent opening scene, the reader can barely see the story for the similes. And two integral plot points--the abandonment of the newborn infant on a doorstep, and Lydia's lifelong blindness to the truth about her much-loved brother--verge on the implausible.

Nevertheless, Quindlen's artful combination of old and new provides an engrossing and enjoyable reading experience. Much as the lives of Lydia and Skip are transformed by contact with each other and with the baby, so does the juxtaposition of Lydia's richly detailed back story with Skip's more immediate plight energize both storylines. The end product is a welcome addition to an impressive oeuvre.

British author Jasper Fforde's The Well of Lost Plots is the third in a series of inventive, comic and madly successful cult novels that combine elements of fantasy, satire and detective fiction to both mock and celebrate literature, literary criticism, and the craft of fiction writing. (Register astonishment at subject matter here.)

Like the two previous volumes in the series, The Well of Lost Plots is set in a cockeyed, literature-centric version of mid 1980's England. There, characters from fiction can escape from books into the 'real world' (known as the Outland), and literary detectives--like the series heroine/narrator, the plucky, gun-toting Thursday Next--are able to enter fiction (the BookWorld) on police-type missions.

The Well of Lost Plots is the name assigned to the area in the BookWorld where living books are created, located on twenty-six floors of sub-basements in the vast Great Library. And it is to the Well that a pregnant Thursday Next retreats, for a much-needed rest, into an unpublished detective novel. Not one to sit home and knit even while in hiding, Thursday passes her time in BookWorld battling a mnemonomorph (memory-robber) who has invaded her mind; being trained as a Jurisfiction officer by a spirited Miss Havisham, on loan from Great Expectations, faded wedding dress and all; and learning about a new reading technology called UltraWord (designed to replace BOOK,version 8, the first version of which replaced SCROLL, which had followed centuries of the ORAL TRAD story operating system). That is, she engages in those pursuits when she’s not stopping by Sense and Sensibility, being tried for a crime against fiction by Alice in Wonderland’s Queen of Hearts, or meeting the Minotaur of Greek mythical fame.

Readers who enjoy intricately designed alternate worlds (and wordplay) will delight in such Ffordian inventions as parasitic grammasite creatures (gerunds gone wrong) that feed on grammar, a "mispeling vyrus" that can only be fought with stacks of dictionaries, and BookWorld shopfronts where holesmiths, pace-setters and moodmongers ply their trades. Those averse to science in their fiction, on the other hand, will be pleased to hear that the main purpose of the complex, jargon-laden setting of the book is to provide a showcase for an endless stream of literature jokes.

Funny tangential passages in The Well of Lost Plots explain the meaning of subtext, follow the path of a lost plot device, and riff on the frequent omission from novels of smells and breakfast. Thursday has several amusing encounters with Wuthering Heights' smouldering-eyed Heathcliff character--winner, for seventy-seven years running, of the Most Troubled

Romantic Lead (Male) Award at the BookWorld's annual Bookies. Scores of other familiar literary personages, including Scout Finch, Anna Karenina, Mrs. Danvers, some Triffids and Edward Rochester put in appearances too, all in service of a punchline.

So many characters, so many puns, and so many nudge/wink literary allusions make The Well of Lost Plots a marvel of cleverness that is devoid of emotional weight. Any stirrings of sympathy the reader might feel for the Thursday character (whose dearly loved husband has been "eradicated," for reasons too complicated to explain) are lost among witticisms about waiting for Godot and running gags on chick lit. Also, the presence of visible knots in some rather messily woven-in plot threads from the earlier books suggests that this volume would be best enjoyed if read in sequence after the first two, not as a stand-alone. But these are small quibbles when there's a quip in every paragraph, and a jokey, intelligence-affirming (I get it, therefore I must be smart) literary reference on every page.

Partway through the book, Thursday counsels a cliched detective character to break free of the conventions of his genre. "There's more than one way to make a story interesting," Thursday says, and she should know. The zany capering of her creator, a man whose imagination appears to be not so much fevered as on fire, has produced a series of novels that pays homage to the Great Library of books that have come before it, yet delivers a reading experience that is truly interesting, very entertaining, and like no other.

Kim Moritsugu's latest novel, The Glenwood Treasure, was inspired in part by some classic works of British fiction, especially Josephine Tey's Brat Farrar.

On my way out of a big box bookstore recently, I declared that if I never saw another pastel-shaded, pink-tinged book cover featuring an image of strappy high-heeled shoes, I'd be happy. If I never had to read another glib opening chapter about a witty, media/publishing/arty career tart and her zany romantic troubles, hallelujah. Not that I didn't admire Bridget Jones's Diary in its day--8 years ago--but enough already with the pale imitations. The time has come for chick-lit novels to go away.

Such is my mind set that I eyed with suspicion my review copy of Good Grief, by first-time American novelist (and experienced magazine writer) Lolly Winston. Its cover is awash in pastel greens and pinks, and the central image is of a pair of female feet, though not clad in high heels, strappy or otherwise. No, these feet are wearing fuzzy, pink, bunny rabbit slippers, the kind with ears.

Was it possible that The Publishing Powers That Be agreed with me (unlikely) and were changing things up? Or would Good Grief merely be a fuzzy slipper variation on a tired theme? I opened the book to find out, and encountered thirty-five-year-old Sophie Stanton, the wisecracking, mournful California widow who narrates this often funny, sometimes moving, and mostly conventional story about the year after Sophie's young husband, Ethan, dies from cancer.

The first third of the book follows Sophie's slide into deep depression as the reality of Ethan's death--and her utter aloneness--sinks in. She goes on a china-breaking rampage. She bakes nine pies and drives around with them in the trunk of her car. She screws up at her public relations job. Her shrink is no help, she binge-eats, she forms an unhealthy attachment to Ethan's ski sweater.

In her depiction of Sophie's decline, Lolly Winston makes the grieving process—by nature gloomy, tedious and repetitive--interesting, blackly amusing, and touching, thanks in part to Sophie's deadpan, self-mocking voice. About failing to move along through the expected denial-anger-acceptance etc. continuum, Sophie says, "For the past three months I've been lodged in the staring-out-the-window-and-burning-toast stage of grief." On getting through the day: "Most people have a to-do list. I have a don't-do list. Don't eat Oreos until your gums bleed. Don't sleep in your clothes. Don't grab the [supermarket] produce boy's teenage wrists and sob."

A hundred pages into the novel, after a befuddled visit to the office in bathrobe and bunny slippers signals the depth of her breakdown, Sophie starts over. In a new town and new state (Ashland, Oregon), she begins the long process of recovery, and the novel settles into the cosy expectations of its Easter-egg-palette wrapping. Each of Sophie's new friends comes with a trendy social problem: there's a thirteen year old girl who cuts herself,an older woman who suffers from Alzheimer's, a former popular beauty turned bitter middle-aged single mother. Not to worry, though--all ends happily (and preposterously) in a wish-fulfillment fantasy that makes Sophie the proud owner of a successful bakery, the den mother for the local lonely misfits, and the object of the affections of a handsome, charming suitor.

Sugary commercial fiction it may mostly be, but Good Grief is still more intelligent and well crafted than many of its pink shelfmates. Its story lines cleverly converge, plot points pay off, vivid images abound, minor characters in Sophie's grief group are succinctly and sympathetically drawn. Some parts of Good Grief reminded me of two other, better, contemporary comic novels about death and depression: Elinor Lipman’s The Inn at Lake Devine, and Shannon Olson's Welcome to My Planet. Other parts made me wish that Winston had used her considerable talents to transcend chick-lit conventions rather than embrace them.

Published August 12, 2006 in The Globe and Mail

The current issue of Vogue magazine is its annual wildly inconsistent look at "Dressing Your Age." Pronouncements that appear on one page about age-appropriate dressing -- for instance, that women over 35 should never show their knees, grow their hair longer than collarbone-length or wear jeans at night -- are contradicted a few pages on by nonsensical statements that refer to 60 as the new 40 and to women in their forties as being, in effect, in their twenties. Which may or may not mean they can show their knees.

How refreshing (and how adept on the part of the Knopf marketing department) it is to find, within the same Vogue issue, a wry essay about the realities of aging by Nora Ephron, now 65. In it, Ephron says: "There are all sorts of books written for older women. They are, as far as I can tell, uniformly upbeat and full of bromides and homilies about how pleasant life can be once one is free from all the nagging obligations of children, monthly periods, and in some cases, full-time jobs. I find these books utterly useless. Why do people write books that say that it's better to be older than to be younger? It's not better."

The essay goes on, to disarming and ultimately moving effect, to discuss death, friendship and expensive bath oil. And to be revealed as an excerpt from Ephron's equally disarming and pleasing collection of 15 recent essays, 11 of which have been previously published.

In the early 1960s, Ephron, fresh out of university, came to New York City hoping to become not just a writer or journalist, but her generation's Dorothy Parker. She soon made her name writing personal essays for then-big-deal magazines like Esquire, in a voice at once witty and vulnerable, intelligent and conversational, incisive and self-deprecating.

In 1980, her first and only novel, Heartburn, was published. Based on the breakup of her marriage to investigative journalist Carl Bernstein, of The Washington Post, the bitter comedy is considered a modern classic of women's fiction, still in print 26 years later. It also played a role in inspiring new generations of would-be smart-mouthed, funny women (this reviewer included) to try to become the Nora Ephron of their own times.

Such success -- and I haven't even mentioned her many screenwriting credits -- might suggest that Ephron, happy in her third marriage and secure in her position as one of the few feminist humour writers of consequence, would not be worried about how old her neck looks, or how messy her purse is. But Ephron continues to be an irreverent social observer of the small niceties of life in the upper-middle-class trenches. As in this bit from the essay On Maintenance: "We begin, I'm sorry to say, with hair. I'm sorry to say it because the amount of maintenance involving hair is genuinely overwhelming. Sometimes I think that not having to worry about your hair any more is the secret upside of death."

And this, from Parenting in Three Stages: ". . . thanks to modern nutritional advances, your adolescent is large, probably larger than you. Your adolescent's weekly allowance is the size of the gross national product of Burkina Faso, a small poverty-stricken African country neither you nor your adolescent had ever heard of until recently, when you both spent several days working on a social studies report about it."

Ephron's friendly, between-us-women tone -- harder to effect than it looks -- draws readers in, but her talent for shaping random, real-life events into well-constructed stories is what makes her writing satisfy. A case in point is The Story of My Life in 3,500 Words or Less, an intriguing exercise in deconstruction that creates a graceful narrative arc out of small nugget-like scenes.

Two pieces in the collection originally written for The New Yorker -- one about Ephron's serial devotion to various cookbooks and chefs, and the other about her emotional attachment to her rent-controlled Upper West Side apartment -- also impress, because each provides a fascinating history that is both personal and social.

Yes, some of the essays offer no more than fluffy entertainment (not that there's anything wrong with that), and two short sketches about Ephron's non-relationships with presidents JFK and Bill Clinton are so slight that they read like extended jokes. But just when you start to notice that each essay does not exactly contain an epiphany, along comes the self-mocking but lovely The Lost Strudel, or Le Strudel Perdu, about Ephron's version of Proust's madeleine.

Just when you suspect she might be overmining her own life in search of story material, Ephron uses details of her joyous past reading experiences in On Rapture, to bestow glowing praise on Michael Chabon's novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay.

Kim Moritsugu's most recent novel is The Restoration of Emily, a bitterly comic story about a 50-year-old mother with attitude.

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