Little Blue Encyclopedia (for Vivian) by Hazel Jane Plante

Paperback, read March 2021

Wow. Okay, just wow. This book is fucking art. I write these little reviews really freshly after I finish the book, so they’re always a little raw, a little gushy, a little vague, and this one especially is just going to be a slew of awe. There is so, so much to admire in this book. I’m so glad it exists, and I’m so glad I finally read it.

First, I have to admit: I have a habit of not reading what a book is about before I jump in, and I’m so used to autofiction as the trendiest literary thing right now, that it took me a solid 50 pages to realize that the TV show Little Blue is not real, and that the book was not autofiction. Up to that point, I was like “Holy shit this is the most beautiful and fantastic tribute to a loved person,” and then I was like, “Oh my god I feel so stupid, but this book also just jumped up a dozen tiers in terms of craft and execution???”

I went a read a few amazing interviews with Plante about Little Blue Encyclopedia, and her brain is amazing. I absolutely love seeing all the moving parts of something, and there are so many moving parts to this book but none of them are hiding: they are laid out for you, in detail so exquisite it doesn’t feel possible that it’s fictional. This novel crafts a whole world of pop culture, of love and grief and loss, of family, of self. And that whole world just sinks into you, and you wish it was real, and it is real. I am in awe, I am in love. Read this book.

Je Nathanaël by Nathanaël

Paperback, read May 2019

“All bodies are guilty of something. All of them. I have decided not to travel any more. Not to dip my feet into the river either. I water the plants. Nobody kisses me. I am a hundred years old.”

Some books, some of my favourite books even, I am very nervous to discuss: I’m worried that I won’t be able to properly articulate what I loved about it, that I will have read it differently than anyone else, that I will be wrong in why I enjoyed it (as though that is even possible). But these are also often the books I most want to talk about! Because they are challenging, they are meant to provoke discussion, they are trying to be hard to talk about. They want their readers to think, think hard, think differently, think newly. And I love to be asked to think, to engage.

Je Nathanaël is one of those books. It’s a short book of sort-of-poems, of short poetic sections that challenge the capability of language to really capture or describe experience, identity, desire. It is a story and a question and a statement, an exploration of how language fails us, how we are much more than we can say or write. Written in French and translated to English by the author, this edition – a 15th anniversary edition – also includes incredibly interesting additions from the author (a postface) and from the scholar Elena Basile (an afterword). In fact, I’m now very interested in a book mentioned in Basile’s bio: Queering Translation/Translating the Queer (eds Brian Baer and Klaus Kaindl).

This is a book that will not meet its reader, but will demand the reader climb as many steps as necessary to meet the text. It isn’t inaccessible, though: once you’re there, it is patient and slow and insistent, it will carry you through its interrogation. It is gentle, somehow, while being entirely abrasive at the same time. I can’t wait to read it again.

On a Sunbeam by Tillie Walden

Graphic novel, read October 2019

Tillie Walden’s graphic novel On a Sunbeam feels so, so good. It feels like a soft, slow breath of clear air to read for fun again after being overwhelmed by my Master’s program, but also Walden’s books are a slice of heckin’ magic. On a Sunbeam is sweet, swift, gorgeous, and so beautifully queer; my heart feels at home, at ease among her pages, and I only wish my little teenage self had found books like this.

Sometimes I get caught up. Just, generally: caught up in what impression I might be making, in how well I seem to be doing, in what-if and what-now. I come unmoored easily, because I’m insecure about my own personality, intelligence, value, and so on. I impose these arbitrary rules or punishments on myself: if you don’t have the capacity to read a challenging novel, you don’t deserve to read anything at all! In an attempt at balance, time management, and motivation, I cut myself off at the knees, then get obsessed over why an obstacle is suddenly insurmountable. But I have to remember: it is okay to stop for a moment, even when the world doesn’t, and dare to enjoy the softness where you can find it.

The Midnight Library by Matt Haig

Audiobook, read March 2021

I really enjoyed listening to this sweet, fun, existential book. I should qualify that, though: it is a book about wanting to die, about not being able to escape the crush of being alive, about grappling with disappointment and being disappointing. But I am a neurodivergent person with a fifteen-year history of depression, and a few solid years of debilitating anxiety, so these things aren’t heavy for me. Because this is also a book about learning what it means to live and thrive and love, and those lessons in my own life have been hard-won and life changing. So the existential dread of this book is vastly outweighed by its sweet hopeful journey and ending (beginning), and I smiled to myself for almost the entirety of its last hour. Plus, a magical library and a charming librarian! I absolutely recommend this.

Faithful and Virtuous Night by Louise Glück

Paperback, read September 2020

I know that a lot of people who read poetry want more than a story with line breaks, but I like stories and I like line breaks, and I love feeling the difference between a story and a poem in the breaths in, and out, in the lilt and sway of language and syntax. These poems are stories, they are so absolutely inarguably stories, fantastical stories with lively characters and plot twists, but they are also so fundamentally poems, exquisitely structured and broken and lilting. This book is a whole world, and I have loved stepping into it every now and then for another story or two every couple of months. This book felt like magic, like the easiest magic in the world, like being alive despite the circumstances is all it takes to be magical.

Normal People by Sally Rooney

Hardcover, read May 2019

This was an incredible book: I’m in love with Rooney’s writing, the dialogue, the pacing, everything about it comes together to make this swift and shudderingly accurate story about, yeah, normal people. But it’s devastating!! Two anxious people just missing each other over and over again because they can’t get out of their own heads.

“She closes her eyes. He probably won’t come back, she thinks. Or he will, differently. What they have now they can never have back again. But for her the pain of loneliness will be nothing to the pain that she used to feel, of being unworthy. He brought her goodness like a gift and now it belongs to her. Meanwhile his life opens up before him in all directions at once. They’ve done a lot of good for each other. Really, she thinks, really. People can really change one another.”

It only took me a few days to read and I was carrying it around trying to take a picture of it outside, because I love the colours of the cover (designed by Elena Givaldi) and it’s been raining nonstop and all the grass outside is absolutely vibrant, but I never did get the picture, so I had to settle for the yellow mug.
I adored the writing and pacing and rhythm and flow of this book, I loved that it’s not about a dramatic or defining moment and that it really is just about normal people, about life, but goodness gracious it made me very, very, very sad.

They Said This Would be Fun by Eternity Martis

Audiobook, read February 2021

They Said This Would be Fun, by Eternity Martis, is a memoir about the author’s time as one of the only Black students at Western University in London, Ontario. This book is angry and unapologetic, full of fact-based rage that asks you to hear and understand the harrowing experience of being Black in Canada. Detailing her own experiences of verbal abuse, sexual assault, threats of physical assault, and endless microaggressions from friends, students, and strangers, Martis does not offer up any easy solutions, but instead asks you to just step up and hear what Black Canadians have been trying to say for decades: racism is alive and well, and it is killing Black Canadians without a second thought.

I say this book doesn’t offer up solutions just because–sometimes–when I read about systemic issues that do not personally affect my life (cis white gay woman), I want an action-based book that directs me as to how to be, how to act, what to do next to help with dismantling this. But it is nobody’s obligation to give me that, and Martis’s book is no less powerful for not doing that. This book may not spell out its reader’s next step, but it does offer a few reminders:

1. Mainstream media reports only a fraction of anti-Black racism, and when it is reported, it is rarely reported fairly; so much more goes on than what you hear about

2. Just because someone’s experience sounds so violent or unfair that it seems like it must be a unique or rare experience, that does not mean it really *is* a rare experience. See point number one.

3. Stop trying to explain away marginalized communities’ and individuals’ hate-based experiences (see point number 2)

4. Rage is a perfectly reasonable response to oppression, and it is nothing but a privilege and a gift when a member of an oppressed community chooses to adjust their tone for you. We should learn to receive rage with the same compassion we receive grief, and we should figure out how to learn from it. (See point number 3)

Martis’s book is hard, it’s triggering as hell, it’s painful, it’s nauseating, and it is so, so important to read. Listening to this book, for me, was a crash course in holding space for terrible things I don’t understand, and trying to understand them. This book is not asking for sympathy, but solidarity. Everyone should read this book.

The Starless Sea by Erin Morgenstern

Paperback, read January 2020

Heck, I loved every second of this book. I fell in love right away with the lilt and sway of Morgenstern’s writing, with the whimsy and romance of the story, with the honey and gold, with the perfect twists and turns and surges of a fantastical story for book-lovers. It is beautiful and warm and cozy and familiar, and a younger, more pretentious version of myself might have called it heavy-handed and predictable but today I say it feels like a cup of tea and a soft blanket and a kiss on the forehead.

I love the ache of books that break you open, but I am also a sucker for book-themed knicknacks and cat-patterned sweaters and a cute nerd in a Gryffindor scarf (as a necessary aside, please note that a certain famous author’s stance on trans rights is appalling; trans women are women). The Starless Sea is 100% the latter, and what a relief it is to allow yourself a chuckle at a bar called the Adjective Noun, to give yourself a little pat on the pack for noting a literary reference, to imagine perusing the shelves of the Harbour and dream a little dream of building your own reading room someday.

Starlight by Richard Wagamese

Paperback, read October 2018

This book was beautiful. It was a completely standard, bordering on problematic story about an abused woman and a rural man of nature, but the writing is gorgeous, genuine, and somewhat subverts the story. As I read, I found myself thinking of Hemingway and Thoreau, of bro-lit writers today (you know who I mean, my hyper masculine nemesis), and how they should learn from this: this reverence for the subject, rather than competition or dominance or authority, this unity and modest and appreciation. I also loved and respected how the editors approached the unfinished manuscript and ending. It was my first time reading Wagamese, and what a way to meet.

Milkman by Anna Burns

Paperback, read January 2019

“The truth was dawning on me of how terrifying it was not to be numb, but to be aware, to have facts, retain facts, be present, be adult.”

I am so happy this was my first book of 2019. I spent some time with it, with middle sister, with her turmoil and her numbness and her anger. It is a beautiful book, an important book with astute and compassionate and chilling observations from a narrator in 1970s Ireland whose astute, compassionate, chilling observations are unnervingly relevant for North America today.

I absolutely adored this book. I think Burns’s writing is spectacular, the Irish lilt so distinct but not in any way impeding the narrative, the story so far fetched and circular and spread out, a whirlpool of a story that draws you in and keep you, keeps you, churns you through and around in deep into it. I’m excited to see how many people love this book, unusual (maybe difficult) prose and all.

Difficult People by Catriona Wright

Paperback, read May 2019

I picked up this book intending to read a story every now and then, perhaps even take a few weeks with it, but Catriona’s stories are so gripping, immersive, and - strangely - deeply relatable that I finished it in just a few days. The characters in Difficult People are delightfully and disorientingly unique, difficult, and alienating, while also being completely plausible and believable: I ached for them, hated them, feared I might be them. The writing is clear, crisp, rhythmic, almost transparent; it feels as though there is none of the author there (in a skillful and deliberate way), which is kind of refreshing in literary fiction at this exact moment in time. I honestly can’t recommend this book enough; I feel there is absolutely something for everyone here.

Heart Berries by Terese Marie Mailhot

Audiobook, read February 2021

I recently finished listening to Heart Berries by Terese Marie Mailhot, which I think was not the best way to receive this book. I have pretty strong feelings about posting un-positive book reviews, and I generally tend to avoid doing so, so I’ve been waffling about posting this, but here we go. I think this book is beautifully crafted and essential, so I’ll start with just sharing the description:

Heart Berries is a powerful, poetic memoir of a woman’s coming of age on the Seabird Island Indian Reservation in the Pacific Northwest. Having survived a profoundly dysfunctional upbringing only to find herself hospitalized and facing a dual diagnosis of post traumatic stress disorder and bipolar II disorder; Terese Marie Mailhot is given a notebook and begins to write her way out of trauma. The triumphant result is Heart Berries, a memorial for Mailhot’s mother, a social worker and activist who had a thing for prisoners; a story of reconciliation with her father―an abusive drunk and a brilliant artist―who was murdered under mysterious circumstances; and an elegy on how difficult it is to love someone while dragging the long shadows of shame.

I think part of the art of this book is in its unsteady syntax, in Mailhot’s visceral approach to truth in all its impossibility. There is a beautiful Q&A at the end of the audiobook, an interview with Mailhot, and what she says about her writing process is truly amazing. But this book, or the audiobook I listened to, didn’t capture the power of the book. I’m going to keep this on my list to read on paper someday, because in listening to the audiobook it felt like I was losing out on the experience of the book.

Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer

Audiobook, read February 2021

Braiding Sweetgrass, by Robin Wall Kimmerer, was a soft, beautiful, gracious audiobook, narrated by the author. I’m late to this 2013 book, but I feel like it arrived with me just when I needed it. In 2013, I wouldn’t have known what to do with the gentle teachings of reciprocity, gratitude, and generosity in its pages.

Wall Kimmerer is a mother, scientist, decorated professor, and enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation. Braiding Sweetgrass travels through her personal scientific and heritage journeys, finding a balance and strength between Indigenous knowledge and ways of being, and contemporary science. This book is a gift, and a teaching, and a story, and a warning. This book asks you to slow down, a reminder I am always in desperate need of, and be grateful. The gratitude of Braiding Sweetgrass is not the gratitude of #blessed, though – the gratitude of Braiding Sweetgrass is never taking more than you need, of giving what you have to give, of supporting and being supported by each other, by the earth herself. There is so much that nature has to teach us, and I loved the way that this book invites you to begin learning.

The Skin We’re In by Desmond Cole

Hardcover, read January 2021

This book is a tour de force, a month-by-month look at contemporary, historical, and systemic anti-Black racism in Canada. I learned so much in reading this, about massive untaught swaths of Canada’s anti-Black history, as well as details and nuance of high-profile cases of anti-Black racism in the past decade.

Cole’s voice is sharp, clear, and angry, and I was angry too. My white privilege means that I can get angry when anti-Black racism makes headlines, then go back to a passive simmer when the headlines change. This book lays out the people, obstacles, events, and developments that led to the headlines, and the work that communities have to keep doing long after the headlines change. I knew, in some abstract way, what is at stake when we talk about systemic racism, but I either refused to listen or never heard how deep, wealthy, and powerful that system really is. I think I could not fathom how people could carry out such evil. I still can’t.

I recommend this book for every Canadian. We have a terrible habit of thinking we are better than our neighbours to the south, but our oppression seems to mostly just be sneakier. Maybe we don’t see it because we will not look for it, so convinced are we that it isn’t there. But look. Learn. Start here.

You Are Eating an Orange. You Are Naked. by Sheung-King

Paperback, read February 2021

“Later that day, I will come to the realization that the things I do may have little bearing on events that follow. Most of the time, all there is is chance.”

I absolutely loved reading You are Eating an Orange. You are Naked. by Sheung-King, published by Book*Hug, and yet I still can’t quite put my finger on what it is I loved so much. It feels tender, gentle, but not passive at all. It is a little hurt, a little confused, a little angry, but never self-pitying – just here, always here, somehow holding space for you, the reader. This book feels like the kind of evening where you have invited your close friend over for dinner, and they stay for dessert, for drinks, for tea, and the conversation is rich and intimate and easy, and all of a sudden you are both wondering if your friend should drive home at this hour or if they should just stay over. This book stays over.

There is a trend in literary fiction of deeply unlikeable narrators. This is fine, existentially – it is nobody’s obligation to be likeable, and besides that, the very idea of unlikeability is absolute nonsense. I think that is why we have this trend: it is an objection to the idea that anyone ought to be any certain way. In recent CanLit particularly, flawed narrators are revered. Hell, I wrote one too. I love a good messy main character. But what I dislike is indulgence (literally just a personal opinion on narrators, not a judgment on people), and I find so many flawed narrators are also deeply self-indulgent. The self-indulgence yields fascinating character studies and insights, and I love watching these tortured, intellectual brains tick, but I lose interest in the lives of these stories. Sheung-King’s debut finds a balance that feels custom-made for me: a narrator who is himself interesting and thoughtful, but generally quiet, and who is in love with the messy, ambitious genius. Her personality, as seen through him, is mystifying but captivating, and I get to be privvy to her deep, meandering insights and philosophizing, while witnessing her through a lens of awe and admiration.

You are Eating an Orange. You are Naked. is exquisitely balanced, and in being such is deeply and desperately powerful. It is critical, soft, ambitious, meandering, and cautiously hopeful. It is beautiful, and I feel lucky to have read it. I hope you will too.

To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf

Paperback, read June 2019

Well, I have a new favourite book! After many long years in the number 1 spot, Catch-22 has been ousted by To the Lighthouse. I absolutely can’t wait to read more of Virginia Woolf’s books!! I don’t usually mark up books, but this is a used copy that already had some pencil highlights (which I loved, it made me feel so close to the stranger before me) so I just went for it – and could NOT stop flagging and highlighting passages. It is the perfect book, about sadness and love and humanity and grief and all of life, with no tricks, cheap or otherwise, it is an incomprehensibly perfect book that I spent a great deal of time with through some tumultuous weeks and which I immediately want to read again upon finishing. It is a perfect book that I gave up on, in university, and aren’t books funny that way, the way sometimes they land and sometimes they don’t? In any case, it’s landed now, and I am in awe.

Ledi by Kim Trainor

Paperback, read February 2019

I tried reading this book first very soon after my friend committed suicide. I tried to read this book in the midst of trauma – not grief – and when I tried to read it then, in the midst of trauma, it didn’t land. But now almost seven months later I have tried to read it again and I have read it in the midst of grief, coming out the other side of trauma (as much as we ever come out the other side of trauma). And I found a lot of solace in the book: I found a lot of beauty and solidarity, and I think I found them now because they are only just now occurring to me. It is only just now occurring to me that this person is gone, that all we have of this person is what they left behind, that all we will ever have of this person is what they were. And that is a horrible thing to be coming to terms with, and I’m coming to terms with it for the first time, and I’m grateful to this book and I’m grateful to this poet. I’m grateful that I am not the only person who has done this.

In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado

Paperback, read September 2019

“By the time I got around to dating people I was a little desperate, a little horny, and a lot confused. I had figured out exactly nothing. I came of age, then, in the Dream House, wisdom practically smothering me in my sleep. Everything tasted like an almost epiphany.”

I read this book in a few sittings, but I’m not exaggerating when I say I had to put my life on hold for it. As someone who has been in an emotionally abusive relationship, it was a surreal experience to find myself so clearly in some of Machado’s vignettes, and by the time I was halfway through the book it had thoroughly ripped me open: I had to take a morning off, make an indulgent breakfast, and finish the rest of it in one go so that the journey would be over.

“In the pit of it, you fantasize about dying. … You have forgotten that leaving is an option.”

It’s almost distressing to see what a profound impact this book is having on so many readers. But it is an exceptional book: it is dense and careful and thoughtful, clear and artful, it is raw and painful and so exceptionally beautiful.

“When you are ebbing, and try to inhale but can’t, she lets go, and you can feel the lingering tingle of unlanguage.”

From the construct (vignettes and a folk lore frame) to the writing (incomparable), In the Dream House is a perfect book, and I really believe that. I think everyone should read it: I hope not to find themselves, but also it is a relief to know you’re not alone. I think everyone should read it to know, and feel, and understand, because Machado is exceptionally good at knowing, at feeling, at making you understand.

It feels impossible to write a meaningful review of this book, even a small one. It is too close, and all I want to do is point you to all the chapters that I’ve flagged in my copy. Instead, I will leave you with two of Machado’s more direct and essential lessons: “A reminder, perhaps, that abusers do not need to be, and rarely are, cackling maniacs. They just need to want something, and not care how they get it.” And: "Our culture does not have an investment in helping queer folks understand what their experiences mean.“ Please read this book.

The Lesser Bohemians by Eimear McBride

Hardcover, read August 2019

“It’s not everyone you’re not lonely with.”

Eimear McBride is basically my hero: reading her books feels like peeling off someone’s skin and wearing it, and that being the only way to ever truly know another person, in exactly as painful and horrible a way as that sounds. Her writing is like nothing else: it is jagged and exposed and aggressive, it is momentous, it is slippery and malleable. Her books do not tell stories, they tell feelings. In fact, it is almost as though they have no interest in telling stories: they want the fallout of what has happened, brushing past what happened quickly, painfully, without lingering in the what of it all.

“I will remember this because, even though this morning’s not much of his life, it’s very much of mine. Whatever happens, nothing will be the same after and nothing will be like it again. Right, he says It’s getting late. We should go or you’ll miss your train.”

Both A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing and The Lesser Bohemians are intense, graphic stories of trauma and abuse. If you saw my thoughts on A Little Life, you’ll know I have little tolerance for books that use trauma as a plot device or for character development; and yet, we do need to be able to talk about abuse and trauma, especially in books. I think there is some kind of line between telling about it and using it, between healing and trauma porn, and if I’m being completely honest I’m not sure where McBride’s books sit. The abuse is horrific, the fallout in equal measure. I lean towards placing these books on the healing side of the line because within the books, it is not about the abuse. It is about how a life comes together after the worst things happen to a person, how the shards do and don’t fit together, how each of our shards do and don’t settle into each other, how sometimes they stab inwards, outwards, on purpose, by accident.

(Related: whoever is writing the jacket copy for McBride’s books is the **wrong person** for the job, both books have the worst [untrue, mismatched] descriptions I’ve ever seen.)

“Bodies knowing the other’s well from before but everything else running through now, making it rare. Keeping quiet, for discretion, more. For hearing the secret of our secret thoughts falling between. And the desire that follows, no matter what we do, cannot be spent up and does not let go.”

I do not unconditionally love The Lesser Bohemians. In fact, it’s possible I have a few grave concerns about it. But I still give it five stars, I would still die for McBride’s writing, and I still recommend it fiercely with extreme trigger warnings. (Do not trust the jacket copy, if you need to protect yourself with more details ask someone who’s read it.) I can’t wait for more McBride.

Heartbreaker by Claudia Dey

Paperback, read July 2019

Upon finishing Heartbreaker by Claudia Dey, and I had a lot of feelings about it. I’ve been trying to go around and check out what other people have thought, and it’s honestly hilarious how mixed the reviews are! Largely, it seems either loved or hated, and it comes down to Dey’s style: a frantic, circular, carefully chaotic style that propels a narrative of trauma, poverty, isolation, and perseverance. Major complaints are that it’s hard to follow, it jumps around, and the dialogue is too unreal. These are all true, but they are also all exactly what I love in a book, so – at the level of storytelling, I loved Heartbreaker. For instance, this slice of wisdom from a dog:

“We are what we have lost, I countered. Here was a way of thinking we could tear apart together. Thinking that reminded us we were alive, and what an inconsistent experience that was proving to be. We are what we have lost, I offered again.”

I loved the vagueness of the Territory, of teenage blood being the Territory’s main export, of the nicknames, of everything life is forced to become in extreme isolation and at the mercy of a world that has largely forgotten them. But I also feel extremely sensitive to the fact that there are, right now, in Canada in 2019, extremely remote communities that are facing extreme poverty and isolation and, in the case of First Nations reserves and communities, have been largely forgotten by a government that forced them there in the first place. Still, one reviewer writes: “Readers are perhaps used to encountering an intentional community as outlandish as the one Dey describes, but in the form of a cult.” Is it so outlandish to imagine a community where milk costs $10 per carton, though? Have you visited Nunavut?

Dey’s bio states that she’s worked as a cook in lumber camps across Northern Ontario, and it feels to me that the conditions of Heartbreaker’s Territory are possibly drawn from–and likely exaggerated–her experience in those camps. Heartbreaker portrays a community that is only a moderately exaggerated version of life for many people in Canada (mostly Indigenous communities), but I don’t feel that’s acknowledged, either within the story or in the media surrounding it, and instead it’s further portrayed as outlandish with the Territory’s backstory: a cult drives as far North as they can to start a civilization. A choice, a lifestyle. A consequence of their own actions.

I was especially sensitive to the narratives of suicide in the book. Isolation and poverty lead to suicide, there’s no question about that. But it’s worked into the story as something shameful, something the community doesn’t talk about, something that just happens sometimes. I couldn’t help but think of Wapekeka First Nation, which just a few years ago had to declare a state of emergency over a wave of youth suicides in their community. Including a sub-plot that revolves around a small group of suicides in an isolated Northern community is not outlandish, is not unrealistic, is not dystopic; portraying suicide as just something that happens here is, in my mind, horrific, and perpetuates the notion that life is sometimes just unlivable, and there’s nothing we can really do about it.

I felt like this book had the potential to be a striking and powerful force of literature. I think maybe it is a striking and powerful force of literature. It is so heavy, it is so dark in the pit of your stomach, it is cutting out a beating heart and asking you to hold it, feel it beat, feel that way life can crush you in its small and large unkindnesses. I fell in love with Dey’s writing. I am a sucker for writing that feels like the inside of my body. But I’m worried about the reception: I’m worried about how people are reading this book and thinking, Wow this is so implausible! Can you imagine this! Wow, those wacky cult leaders! Because it is not implausible, it is damn near happening right now, and they have largely not chosen that life. There is more truth in this novel than people seem to think. It is true that you can’t bury bodies when the ground is frozen. It is true that milk costs $10 a carton.

I want this book to ask us to tear apart together, but I worry that it just invites us to watch something else tear apart, something we believe to be a fiction, only fiction.