Welcome to Litsy!

All of the short stories in this collection are about old women. It's full of memorable characters and gorgeous prose and so, of course, I loved it. Winner of the City of Calgary WO Mitchell Book Prize.

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Ava was given, on occasion, to talking like a 19th c novel, rising verbally sometimes even to the height of a Henry James sentence, spieling it out as she gazed high up into space, although more often she got lost in her own sentences‘ complexities & had to let her voice trail away. Sometimes, though, she made it to the end, maintaining the relationship of the clauses & the phrases, not forgetting the original idea, 👇

In the weeks before the raven incident, the Americans, in a rage against ‘the elites,‘ (meaning anyone who knows anything—shades of the Red Guards!) elected a president whose ramblings, as well as being untruthful more often than not, frequently defied reason. I saw him as the purveyor of the original, many-formed mythological Lord of Chaos himself.
(Internet image)

Why should the life of an old person be a poor copy of the life of a young one? As if to be an old person was merely to be a failed young one. And then I began to wonder what the life of an old person could be on its own, as if there had never been a young person, with her ceaseless activity, her endless drama from excessive weeping to equally excessive excitement, inside this wrinkled and shapeless exterior.

I have personally discovered over the years that if you constantly stifle your feelings out of concern for what you‘ve been taught is appropriate behaviour, you soon can‘t feel anything at all. Or at least, you have to dig very deep to figure out what your real feelings are, and that mostly this will not seem worth the trouble of doing.