From her publisher: “A startling and original new voice that owes as much to Black Flag and Bikini Kill as it does to J.D. Salinger and Heather O’Neill. Botha’s prose is compassionate, provocative, often funny, and always fearless.”
Danila‘s debut collection, Got No Secrets, hit the shelves this season. Check out her posts at The Afterword Here. She will be guest blogging on Salty Ink this week: her favourite Canadian books, and then her favourite Atlantic Canadian books.
My Favourite Canadian Writers
I’ve been studying education at Mount St Vincent University in Halifax, and one of the most brilliant kids I taught in grade eight this year told me why he enjoyed reading the Dave Pelzer memoir A Child Called It. “It makes me feel like my life really isn’t that bad, he said, no matter what I’m going through. It gives me perspective, and at the same time, it makes me feel less alone”.
I realized how important that is — for everyone to find literature that speaks directly to them, that gives them a different understanding of their own life experiences and even a little compassion for themselves. A lot of the things we go through aren’t as difficult as we think they are at the time.
Heather O’Neill and Zoe Whittall are writers who exemplify this most for me. They write with a grittiness and a dauntlessness that is so heartening to me.
Heather O’Neill is the author of my favourite short story of all time, called I know Angelo, from the Zoe Whittall edited collection Geeks, Misfits and other Outlaws. In it, a character called Chloe is pregnant, and trying to kick her heroin addiction. Her boyfriend Angelo, who is the father of her child, and whom she clearly adores, is still addicted and using. O’Neill is unbelievable at a turning a phrase, and finding incredible beauty and even humour in sadness. The story opens with the line: “My mother only ever sent me one postcard. It was of Nietzche and it has this joke: I think about you all the time, but the penicillin helps.” It’s the kind of line that makes you crack a smile, no matter what kind of day you’re having. She’s an absolute master at writing lines that are both stunningly graceful and heart wrenching. Her character walks around reading a Chekhov book, which she says “gives her the feeling those lucky pennies on the sidewalk are her eyelids”. She follows that up with the statement that reading the book “makes her feel that she and Angelo are just around the corner from being classy people.” The love struck Chloe describes Angelo’s hair in the morning as “feeling like a cat’s paw that’s stepped in the milk bowl”. She remembers that in the moment that she conceived, “His nipples were like pansies. His lips hung like toilet paper floating in the sink. His breath was like if you could buy morning in a can at a supermarket.” She says he makes her feel like “a perfect curl of hair, like all her words are pastries lined up in the window of the bakery.” This talent for making the harrowing enchanting stands in sharp contrast to her tragic subjects- a boyfriend who is raped by his dealer, who shoots up in front of his pregnant girlfriend, who according to the story became pregnant when they were paid to have sex in front of an older man who was: ‘shuddling on the chair to get a better look, a framed photo of Claudia Schiffer over his head.”
I remember being astounded at how fearless it was the first time I read it. I remember how it made me question my own work, and want to push myself much further. I remember being so impressed by her sensitivity to detail, at her emotional accuracy and her precise imagery.
Her novel Lullabies for Little Criminals, the story of a twelve year old prostitute named Baby, is equally arresting, harrowing and beautiful.
In the same book that her story I Know Angelo appears, there is a story by Whittall called Seven Stops Nine that ends with the fantastic line: “I am having the world’s slowest nervous breakdown.”
Whittall is similarly skilled at writing characters whose lives are dark and complex, at evoking compassion and even empathy as they navigate through emotional crises. Both of her novels, Bottle Rocket Hearts and Holding Still for As Long As Possible, she cuts immediately to the bone, and to the heart. Bottle Rocket Hearts ends with the dissolution of a relationship, “the bottle rocket diffused”.
Eve, a young woman who has spent the duration of the novel in love with a woman named Della, realizes that Della has never been honest with her. She notes that “her heart now beats strongly and purposefully, no longer a panic driven metronome.”
Her poetry is equally stunning. In the Emily Valentine Poems, in the poem On Discovering she writes:
“Having .23 cents in my chequing /and .47 cents in my savings/ and a two day coke hangover
Is no reason to feel as bad about myself/ as I do right now.”
It hangs on the wall near my desk where I do my writing. It never fails to make me feel better when I’m having a bad day.