Breaking up and onward (without Eat Pray Love)
Recommended reading, watching, and listening for the heart in autumn
Autumn is such a strange time. I can’t separate fall from the start of a new school year. New courses and curiosities, fresh stationery and haircuts. But it’s also the time when we reap what we sow. Flowers give way to fruit and leaves shrivel up. All that is good and green in my garden shrugs and says ‘this is what I’ve made. Pick it and watch me wither.’
Nelly Furtado is crooning in my ear about how all good things come to an end, and here I am, harvesting what has grown from this little life of mine. My time in Toronto is coming to an end and I am looking at an empty plot of land, evaluating. What persists? What has taken root? What has died? Are these things nourishing? Do I even like squash?
What do I want to plant now?
This is my recommended reading/watching/listening for breaking upward. Breaking into a different sort of life. Breaking into possibility and heart and laughter.
Read on to feel something with me.
Reading about (re)building a life
“This life, the one that so many people want, I doubted was right for me. I was trying to find my way as a writer, but jumping from genre to genre, not working out what I most wanted to say, and not taking myself seriously enough to discover it, even. Who do you tell when you start to feel these things? Everything seemed immovable. Everything seemed impossible. And yet I knew I had to change my life.”
For someone who is deeply unhappy, those words sting. Doubly so for an unhappy wannabe writer who feels trapped in a place to which they don’t belong. Which is to say that when I read Joanna Biggs’ A Life of One’s Own, it gave me a lot of very big feelings.
In the wake of her divorce at thirty-four, Joanna Biggs set out to examine the lives, deaths, affairs, suicides, and literary work of nine women writers who were forced to begin again at various ages. From Virginia Woolf and Mary Wollstonecraft to Zora Neale Hurston and Sylvia Plath, the book spans ages of women’s work and the never-ending struggle against mediocrity and domesticity. It’s intimate and thoughtful, and sparked in me a desire to stop shelving my own aspirations and happiness in service of others, no matter how much I cared for them.
It’s not a light read, but it isn’t dark. It is full of hope and thoughtfulness. But it did necessitate a bit of a palate cleanser, which is why I’ve sought to balance it out with some unabashed laughter.
If you were standing on any given corner in the west end of Toronto in the summer of 2023, you’ve probably seen the cover of Really Good, Actually. I watched as at least twenty women missed their crossing lights because they could not peel their eyes off the page at the corner of Dufferin and Bloor. Monica Heisey has written for Schitt’s Creek, Baroness von Sketch Show and Workin’ Moms, and her debut novel brings all of the snark and laughter you’d expect.
This book made me laugh and sigh with relief because even at my very messiest, I have never been as messy as her protagonist Maggie. In my darkest hour, I have never felt as adrift as her. I’ve never made the kinds of decisions she’s made. I’ve never been as isolated as she accidentally becomes. I’ve also never wanted to hug a character more in the last twelve months than this sweet angel baby who is just going through it and doing her best.
Finally, somewhere in the middle of laughter, introspection, and wannabe-creatives lives Good Material by Dolly Alderton. This was a gift for my birthday and I can’t lie, as I read it, I felt a little attacked. It was like I had been clocked for my indecision and sadness in a life that should have fit, and a warning flag for the pain I would inevitably inflict on others. It was also hilarious.
Told from the perspective of a very sad thirty-something boy comedian in the wake of a breakup, the book walks through the fall out of his long-term relationship. Every awkward moment and fumbling step forward is chronicled as he comes to realize that his breakup may actually be pretty good material for his comedy career.
The final chapter, which I will not spoil, lives in my phone. I photographed every page and I reread it weekly and it makes me feel love and reassurance and a spark of something great and appreciative. And really—is there no higher honour than to live on in the photos app of your phone?
Watching The Worst Person in the World (2022)
This film does an impressive job of dancing over details and none of the characters are particularly fleshed out, but that’s part of its charm for me.
Julie has ideas about her life, but follow-through isn’t really her strong suit. She tries on lives and occupations like clothing, enduring itching and tightness to try and make them fit until it becomes painfully obvious that they never will. Not really tied down by convention, she never fully commits to any given path and watches as the doors slowly start to close.
It’s a breakup movie in that there are breakups in the movie, but that feels reductive. For me, the careless behaviour, waywardness, and Julie’s obvious unhappiness coupled with her fear of taking the wrong step, touched a nerve. I wouldn’t say it made me feel like the worst person in the world for being too much of a Julie, but it did make me sit and consider my life. It made me do the work of at least deciding what I don’t want and stop dancing on the border of acceptability and desire.
Canadians, watch it on Amazon Prime, Apple TV+, or Google Play.
Listening to Kiesza (and crying on the dance floor)
Do you remember that song that went ooo… aaa… ooo… and had all those babushkas dancing around their dachas? Well, after her 2014 hit Hideaway, the Calgarian singer was in a terrible accident in Toronto and suffered a traumatic brain injury. Mercifully, she’s recovered and blessed us with another dance floor banger.
(Fun fact: I’m also pretty sure that the warehouse at the start of the music video is the one just down the road from me at the heart of that big Bellwoods lawsuit, so there’s that.)
In the spirit of feeling sad much of the time but also really wanting to dance and have fun, please enjoy my Crying on the D-Floor playlist.
Recommended Reading is sent on the first Friday of every month. In the meantime, what’s on your nightstand? I’d love to hear what you’re reading.
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