I had this funny feeling when I finished Casey Plett’s new book A Dream of A Woman a week or two ago: I felt inspired.
It was like being plugged into an electrical socket, a feeling of energy and a rush of inspiration, a feeling that I had to write, that moment, that instant… A feeling I get on occasion when something really hits home with me. I used that feeling to bang out a review of her book (I’ll let you be the judge of how successful that was) and to write a draft of a short story. It was a pretty productive 24 hours, especially since I worked my day job, too.
With that in mind, I thought I’d share some of the other books that had a similar impact on me. Sometimes they inspired me to write, other times they led me in new directions. But all of them, I think, helped shape me into the writer I am today.
Julio Cortazar - Blow Up and Other Stories (Pantheon, 1985)
Back in high school, I wasn’t much of an adventurous reader. I kind of stayed on the general path, reading only the assigned texts: The Giver, Lord of the Flies, Duddy Kravitz, that sort of thing. (Weirdly, neither Catcher in the Rye or To Kill A Mockingbird were taught at my school, as best I can remember). For entertainment, I’d read Stephen King, who I’ve always had a soft spot for, and thought The Stand was the coolest thing ever. Then in grade 12, we had to read this.
Not the whole book, but just a story from it reprinted in an anonymous textbook: “The Night Face Up.” It’s about a guy who’s in a motorcycle crash and maybe dying, or maybe it’s about a guy who’s on the run and intended as a human sacrifice. It plays back and forth between the two narratives, never giving away which one is the dream, and the entire time, it’s got a dreamy, tense and other-worldly kind of vibe to it. It’s scary, but in a deeply weird and unfamiliar (remember, I was like 17 at the time) way. Suffice to say, it blew my mind.
I’d been taught literature kind of did one thing. You had a story and sequences followed a logical path, one you could chart on a graph. There were rules and an order. And it was supposed to tell a story that seemed close to life, even if it didn’t happen. It was, I suppose, a kind of Aristotelian way of looking at things. When I wrote stories, they followed that sequence of events. For example, taking one I remember called ”The City”: here was a guy who was a reporter, here was the story he uncovered, and here came the consequences, which led to him skipping town and a fresh start in Japan. (I was definitely a romantic teen.)
And yet, when I read this one - could it have been summer school? The same summer I read Life of Pi, another book with a dreamy sort of unrealistic haze - it broke all the rules. The perspective shifted and changed, it played games with the reader, it made you wonder and think. I loved it so much I ended up photocopying the story and keeping a copy of it for years, a copy I read until it fell apart. I eventually happened across this book, and while it’s a generous selection, nothing else in it has had quite the same impact on me. But maybe you only get bitten once.
Hunter Thompson - The Great Shark Hunt (Simon and Schuster, 2003)
The good doctor, as he was called by his fans, was a huge influence on me as a teenager, too. I should probably back up and explain a little bit.
I went to a high school in a small town in Ontario. The entire town, and the surrounding locale, could have easily fit inside the SkyDome, if only someone thought to drive us down to Toronto. My classmates were generally in two or three social cliques: the prep kids who wore puka-shell necklaces and wore Abercrombie and Fitch, stoner kids who wore black and smoked prodigous amounts of pot, and hick kids, the ones who grew up out in the country and could be counted on to say something homophobic at least once a day. I didn’t easily fit into any of these categories, and spent most of my time on the sidelines, sitting in the cafeteria with a couple other friends who didn’t fit in easily anywhere, playing poker at lunch and skipping class by hanging in the library, reading books.
I can’t remember how I came across Hunter Thompson - it might have been my dad, might have been a stoner friend, or maybe I just saw Fear and Loathing on TV one night - but somehow I did, and somehow I got a copy of this from Chapters or somewhere. It’s all been lost in the mysts of time, to be honest. It was life-changing.
Almost overnight I went from vague ideas about going to law school to vague ideas about becoming a writer and journalist. I had originally figured I’d take pre-law and move to Toronto (or something), but after reading The Great Shark Hunt that all changed. I took to carrying this book around with me, reading from it whenever I got the chance. I really loved this book.
I think at first, it was the novelty of a guy writing about being drunk and on drugs that got me, but after a few reads, it was the way Thompson wrote that stuck with me. I loved the way he’d exaggerate his stories - I’m sure he didn’t drink or do as much acid as he claimed - for effect. Like, the one that stuck with me was about Al Davis, the guy who owned the Oakland Raiders, and how Thompson wrote that a football peeled the scalp of Davis’ head. It didn’t fly close over his head, it didn’t bang off his head, it peeled along the scalp. I found that kind of writing intoxicating: he was breaking the rules of journalism, making it something closer to a personal essay (or, if we’re being honest, outright fiction). It was an outrageous kind of writing, something I immediately put into my daily, mundane life: I took to also exaggerating stories, never asking to be believed but mostly trying to entertain.
It also led to me going to journalism school, where after a few years and a short internship, my journalism career flamed out before it began. The kind of writing I wanted to do - long, impressionist feature stories where I’d be able to wind a yarn and use all sorts of colourful language - wasn’t in demand, and the kind of writing I ended up doing (recaps of morning TV segments, little articles about cars, that sort of thing) was soul-sucking. It ended with an impasse, a letter I never read (but which my mom called “disrespectful”) and a conversation where my editor said I couldn't write and had no future in journalism. Cest la vie.
Mordecai Richler - Solomon Gursky Was Here (Penguin, 1989)
I got this one on a trip to Peterborough, an overnight trip at my friend Colin’s place. I knew I liked Richler: he’d written Duddy Kravitz which I found alright, and Barney’s Version, which I liked a lot, and even based a thesis project around. It was a sitcom about the 1970 FLQ Crisis, set in a bar in Montreal where people of all classes mixed and ended with Pierre Trudeau stealing someone’s glass of beer and going “Just watch me.” It’s uh, better left in my archives.
My friend’s car broke down outside Oshawa and while we waited for a tow, I read this book. It immediately drew me in: a failed writer named Berger with a drinking problem is called upon to write the history of a booze magnate and his family. There’s his dad, a document forger and sole survivor of a failed expedition in the arctic, a guy who’s sort of wheeled-and-dealed his way to the top of Canadian booze market (I suppose Richler was a little inspired by the Brofman family) and a mysterious brother who appears at the margins, popping in here and there like some kind of jewish prodigy: I remember a scene set out west where Solomon walks across a pen full of angry horses, sitting on a wild one and immediately calming it down and taking it for a ride.
This one I remember a little less well than the others here, mostly because I was going through a lot at the time, but I know I read this one twice, back-to-back, and I think about how Richler finally used his talents to explore all of Canada, not just Montreal (or, in a couple instances, London, England). He goes from the Laurentians to the North to Toronto and elsewhere with aplomb, painting a rich canvas of Canada as seen through the eyes of Berger as he tracks down a ghost. I seem to recall than even the writers who thought Richler second-rate (I’m thinking of Robertson Davies here in particular) thought this novel was wonderful. I’ve often thought it might be the great Canadian novel. Especially since so much of our literature is focused down on the States, or on other countries. Like how Mavis Gallant had Paris, Richler based the bulk of his writing on Montreal. But on the one time he turned his talents on the country, he produced a book I think about a lot - although, I’ll admit, I haven’t read in over a decade. I bet I would like it a lot less now, but at the time, it was the kind of book I needed.
Imogen Binnie - Nevada (Topside Press, 2013)
I’ve written about this before, so I’ll keep this relatively brief. I read this when I was questioning if I was really trans, questioning if I still wanted to be a writer and questioning my future. It was something that came at an opportune time.
I got it after someone recommended it on Tumblr to me, and I took it with me when I went on a work trip in late 2014. I was drawn in almost immediately by Binnie’s unassuming prose, the way she captured Maria in a sort of punk (but not sure where that’s headed) phase, the way Maria wasn’t sure about anything but knew James was trans, and in the questions James was asking themselves, which were basically the same sort of questions I was asking myself at the time. Like: would everyone know by instinct if I bought a dress online? Could I really be trans if I was thinking about it all the time? Or wouldn’t I just know and not be questioning?
These were all the sort of things rattling around my mind at the time, and in a rarity for me, it was a book that lived rent-free in my head for a long time. I mean, shit, it’s 2021 and I still think about the shaving advice dispensed in this book.
But the thing which has stuck with me about this is Maria’s transition. It’s not dealt with at all. We never learn her deadname, we never hear a lot about her parents (just that they don’t like each other), we never see her grow into what she became. She just is. That’s something I admire about Binnie’s novel. A lot of trans narratives - be they memoirs like Gender Outlaw, glossy fiction by cis authors like MIddlesex or even parts of Torrey Peters’ novel Detransition, Baby - show people’s transitions as part of the narrative. In some cases, they are the narrative arc.
But Binnie proved you can write about trans people without dwelling on their transition. It’s a lesson people took to heart: Wendy Reimer in Plett’s Little Fish is similarly introduced as a fully formed person; so is Gala in Jeanne Thornton’s Summer Fun. And I know in my fiction, I don’t write about people’s transitions; they come to you as the people they are. There won’t ever be a story about Meg or Kate transitioning. I’m much more interested in stories where they, you know, do things. As much as this book made me want to write (albeit it, not as much as Little Fish did), but more importantly, it showed me how to write about the kinds of people I wanted to write about.