October 15, 2026
Anxious and Hairy, by Judy Wearing
What a wild ride is Judy Wearing’s new book, Anxious and Hairy, a study through evolution and culture of human hair and the reasons why it makes us so anxious when it grows where it shouldn’t or doesn’t where it should. The scope here is huge, the approach so comprehensive (80 pages of notes and references!), and Wearing compellingly combines her own research with reporting from the front lines, ie accounts of her stylish Parisian hair cutting session, her experience attending a beard convention, or the time she submitted to a Brazilian wax.
If you’ve ever wondered why we have eyebrows—or what pubic hair is for, why we evolved to be (mostly) hairless apes, what evolutionary benefits are provided by Black hair, why beards might be useful to have in a bar fight, what alopecia has to do with foxes, what your hair and your nipples have in common, and why my eyebrows never grew back after they were sacrificed to the early ’00s style gods—this book will prove an absolute delight.
Wearing posits that hair makes us so, well, hairy, because our hair brings the reality of our animal selves to the surface. But our animal selves are also, she reminds us, what makes us human and—in our age of the robot overlord onslaught—this has never been more important to remember.
October 14, 2026
Trust Fall
I’m at a crossroads in a bunch of different ways, thinking about how I might be sharing aspects of my life on the internet going forward as social media spaces keep on changing for the worse. Although one thing that’s been clear to me for a while is how impossible it is to write about being a parent once your children are people of their own, because their stories no longer belong to us and they can speak for themselves (and they do!). I think of how much I valued honest conversations about parenthood when my children were very small, conversations that let me know I wasn’t alone in the struggles and anxieties, and how I miss being able to have such conversations in online spaces now*, because the alternative is posting photos that may as well be captioned, “Look at us over here! We’re killing it!” When, of course, we’re only killing it some of the time, and the rest is the usual heartache, frustrations, fears, and tears, which is harder to bear when it seems like nobody else is ever going through any of it and everybody else’s kids are perpetually shiny.
*Obviously, I’m still having these conversations. That’s what group chats are for.
Parenthood is the most wondrous agony, which is something I’ve been thinking a lot about as we’re less than a year away from launching our eldest child into the world, and this is everything I want for her, but also, how! And why? And no!! The most wondrous agony for which I’d sign up again and again, but that doesn’t make it any easier. Maybe the most blatant demonstration of how ease and lack of friction aren’t what any of us are here for in this thing called life. I don’t train for marathons, but I do have kids, and the agony is similarly baked in, but also—oh my goodness—nothing compares to the highs. These wondrous creatures who are the very best people I’ve ever met in my life. (And I made them!)
I take credit for very little when it comes to my kids (except I swear by the results of having asked them, “Tell me what you think first,” whenever they asked me anything at all) and know how much it all really comes down to pure luck. As we all learned in playschool, you get what you get, and you don’t get upset, and neither do you decide that anything about your children was the result of your superior parenting skills.
Although IF anyone was asking me how to get kids to read, I’d say that modelling reading yourself sure goes a long way, and I’ve done my fair share of that, and then some, and so maybe that’s part of how we got to here.
To where I get to meet my kid at the bookstore on the day a new release by her favourite author drops so I can buy her the book she’s been waiting for. Truly, this is the dream! We’re killing it!
Or at least we were that day.
October 13, 2026
Dish, by Nancy Jo Cullen
While it’s true that Nancy Jo Cullen had me at hello with the Brazilian wax-inspired story “Brenda’s Bush” from her 2013 fiction debut, Canary, she has managed to KEEP me—through 2019’s The Western Alienation Merit Badge and now her new novel Dish—with her keen eye for the perfect detail, her characters’ offbeat insider/outsider perspectives, her fantastic sense of humour, and a prose style whose rhythms I just can’t get enough of.
In Dish (which is just as good as its cover promises!), chef Frida Davis-Lefebvre is already back in her BC hometown with her tail between her legs after the failure of her big-shot Toronto restaurant. To add insult to injury, her new job at a local hotel brings her back into connection with her once-upon-a-time fiance to whom she’s still most explicably attracted. And speaking of blasts from the past, Perry—a down-and-out whose single connection to Frida had been the sperm donation that resulted in her conception decades before—has washed up at Frida’s moms’ house where he’s staying as he tries to put his life back together.
Dish is the story of Frida, and also of Perry, navigating these relationship tangles amidst the twists and turns of life as they try to move forward, stay sober, and figure out both where they’re going and how to get over where they’ve been. A celebration of queer family and chosen family, Dish is a love story—and a most compelling one—on so many levels, and an absolute delight.
October 9, 2026
Books to Fall For
Who knew I wasn’t the only author who released a yellow book this spring in which the protagonist is masturbating within the first 50 pages! What a club! I feel lucky to join it. I loved this gem of a novel, for its empowered heroine, the dreamiest love interest ever, and such a smart and funny exploration of family, friendship, intergenerational trauma, and the inner workings of the publishing industry. The Book Tour, by Emily Ohanjanians, is the story of Ana, a Type A podcaster whose Armenian mother has never gotten over her dropping out of medical school, never mind that her podcast has brought her enormous success. And now she’s channelled her ethos (empowering second-generation immigrant young people to believe in themselves, delivering the validation their own parents have never been able to) into a book that’s sure to be a smash success. All good, except when her superstar publicist resigns, she’s replaced by the stiff and stuffy Ryan, whose lack of support for the book has always been apparent to Ana—she can tell that he thinks it’s a frivolous project and that Ana herself is an unserious person. But of course there is more to Ryan than meets the eye, and Ana’s book tour ends up being a sweet and sexy journey toward self-discovery and maybe even love. Like Ana herself, the novel packs a punch, and it’s also a pure delight.
And this autumnal bestseller by Julia McKay (aka Marissa Stapley) is my favourite yet of Marissa’s romances. Something About September is so cozy and comforting, and with apple pie spice and bookish vibes. Go read it!
October 6, 2026
The Paris Files, by Eva Jurczyk
There is darkness when one first enters the apartment building at 44 Rue Oberkampf in Paris’s eleventh arrondissement, which is to say that none of us—neither the characters in Eva Jurczyk’s latest, The Paris Files, nor those of us who are reading—really knows what we’re getting into here. The story, the characters, all of it just off-beat enough to keep surprising at every turn, every twist, and the image that springs to mind is the staircase in the building spiralling up-up-up, the stakes growing ever higher.
It’s the story of Genie, a Canadian woman who meets an American man while she’s travelling in Asia, and they make this plan to meet again in Paris, which sounds incredibly romantic, except that Genie’s best friend is doubtful. Because Genie has been burned before, can come on a bit too strong, wants too much, and she’s close to 40, not some young ingenue. But the American arrives, the best friend is proven wrong, apparently…but not entirely, because the entire novel is told through police interviews. With Genie herself, telephone interviews with the friend Toronto, with the building’s concierge, the neighbours, the grumpy man who sells fruit and vegetables across the street and keeps an eye on everything. Because it seems that not long after the American arrives, he and Genie spending a few love-soaked days together, he suddenly disappears.
Like the staircase, the novel is dizzying, disorienting. Genie is unreliable, characters are keeping secrets, just why the police are interviewing her in the first place isn’t clear. And while the novel’s structure could pose a limitation for lesser writers, Jurczyk’s cool and easy prose style, underlined by a darkly comic approach, brings the story and its characters to life, along with Paris itself (and the food!), and the overall effect is utterly propulsive. What I didn’t know when I was getting into this book was that I’d start reading it on Sunday, and be as close as is humanly possible to being LITERALLY unable to put it down, so that was my day gone, but I couldn’t have spent it better.
A fresh twist on the unhinged female narrator, a story about friendship, travel, duplicity, and real estate, I had high hopes for this novel, but the experience of reading it surpassed all my expectations. It’s out today and you should buy it!
October 2, 2026
Andrea Warner Was Awesome
Andrea Warner was oh so cool, and even more kind. We only met once in person, but over the past decade, I came to adore her, and was so grateful for (and quite chuffed by!) her support of my work, and also for the force of her own work, which was feminist and fabulous and truly made the world a better place. I think I learned of her first when the first iteration of her book *We Oughta Know: How Four Women Ruled the ’90s and Changed Canadian Music* was published in 2016, and I loved the idea of someone taking women’s art and women’s work (and also POPULAR women’s work) so seriously, and we became online friends after that. I still often think of her 2019 CBC music piece on Avril Lavigne, which gave credit to Napanee’s hometown girl for the “great emotional dexterity and depth” of ballads like 2003’s “I’m With You.” Do yourself a favour and go read her beautiful essay on grief and Bran Van 3000’s “Drinking in LA” from 2022.
Andrea Warner took cues from nobody about what was cool and what was important, her takes and criticism unabashed and straight from the heart. She wore her heart on her sleeve, was true blue, and earnest. She co-wrote Susan Aglukark’s autobiography. She also wrote Buffy Sainte-Marie’s authorized biography, bringing all the warmth, kindness, and generosity that was entirely Andrea to the project.
In 2024, she published a wonderful book in ECW’s Pop Classics series, Time of My Life: Dirty Dancing, celebrating the greatest nearly covert abortion story-line in 20th century film. We talked about it on my podcast, and you can listen here. My podcast is “short-form,” mostly because I don’t have a professional Zoom account, and get kicked off after 40 minutes. Andrea’s was the only interview I ever did where we ran out of time and I had to log on for another call, but this also seems so typically Andrea to me—exuberant, bursting with life, so full of laughter and joy to the point of overflowing. She did not have enough time, but what time she had she filled with everything she had to give—and those of us who got to receive were oh so lucky.
Andrea was a remarkable critic because she knew how to appreciate things, not just how to pick them apart. She was an example of the kind of writer who stayed curious always, asked tough questions of the art she loved, and respected such art enough to know that it was tough enough to take those questions. In our podcast conversation, she talked about how nothing in pop culture is above reproach, and how questions and critique can further our engagement with the work we love, even the “problematic” aspects. Her approach was counter to so much internet discourse which consists of maniacal stanning or trollish-pile-ons and all-out cancellation. Andrea was smarter than that. Andrea was so much better than that. Hers was the kind of critique that broadened instead of reduced, that was always inviting other people and ideas in, and making space for more.
In 2024, Andrea was diagnosed with cancer. As you’d expect, her health updates were funny, even when the news sucked. In the first one, she wrote about how “the very FIRST song we heard was Michael Bolton’s ‘How Am I Supposed to Live Without You’ which seems like it should be illegal to play in the f–king BC Cancer Agency waiting room, but was also VERY funny.” I wrote back and told her that I would have preferred Dan Hill, who is well known in waiting rooms across the globe. She told me that sh was obsessed with “Sometimes When We Touch,” And I replied that I was wishing her “Carmelia”:
Seems there’s always some tragedy
That’s tearing at our precious world
Wish sometimes we could just lighten up
Let’s take a look around us
Turn off the TV oh let’s open our eyes
Look at the stars in the sky
Carmelia, let’s dance away the night together
Let’s dance until this crazy world disappears
Girl in the morning we will still be here
Carmelia, let’s celebrate our lives together
Let’s dance until the stars tumble from the sky
I heard from Andrea’s husband Carlos this week that she died on Sunday. I am so sad for him, and so sad for her. I wish she was still here.
Update: When I heard the news about Andrea, I rushed to the internet like it was 2007 and threw all my feelings into my keyboard, just because sitting with the sadness felt awful and I wanted to talk about Andrea and celebrate her with others who knew and loved her too. I would never purport to have been a close friend of Andrea’s, which is why I never questioned, when the news arrived in my inbox, that it was public and could be shared, which was wrongheaded and clumsy of me. I’m sorry to people who were hurt by my posts, and to Andrea’s family, for not considering their privacy. I am grateful for her husband’s kindness and grace in the the face of my apology, and send love to everybody who’s missing her now.
Her family invites those of us who wish to honour her memory to make a donation in her name to the following causes:
Battered Women’s Support Services https://www.bwss.org/take-action/donate/
Urban Native Youth Association https://unya.bc.ca/ways-to-donate/
September 30, 2026
Naoyak, by Norma Dunning
With Naoyak, Norma Dunning follows up the Governor General’s Award-winning Tainna with a warm and rollicking novel about an Inuit woman whose plan for a better life for her son involves becoming inextricably bound to an inept researcher with an uncanny resemblance to Conan O’Brien, and following him all the back from the north to his home in Sherwood Park, Alberta, moving straight into the apartment in his basement. Naoyak is already behind on her plan to leave for the south by the time she’s 25, but luckily she makes up for lost time by being accompanied by the spirit of her grandmother and also Kiviuk, the giant guardian of Inuit lore who’s been watching over since birth.
It’s through their influence and also her own peculiar charm that Naoyak manages to win the researcher over (overcoming her own ambivalence to do so), and also secure a job at the university as a “community liaison” between university officials working on a study about Indigenous health and the people back home in her north community. But such a role is less straightforward than Naoyak imagines, and presumes that the academics would be approaching community members in relationship and not simply as another extension of the colonial scheme. When it turns out that this might not the case, its the southerners’ turn to get schooled.
Dunning’s fiction debut Annie Muktuk and Other Stories was such a revelation, and she keeps on giving with this latest release, with an audacious protagonist who’s just as unforgettable.
September 25, 2026
Big Little Truths, by Liane Moriarty
My first encounter with Liane Moriarty was a mass market paperback copy of Big Little Lies purchased from the drug store in 2017, a tie-in to the smash-hit HBO series that I never ended up watching, but I’ve been a big fan of Moriarty ever since then, and wish that she received more credit for her talent as a novelist from readers who might dismiss her as merely popular or as a women’s fiction writer. Craft-wise, Big Little Lies was a turning point for her, her sixth novel, and the first of the sprawling ensemble cast books that she’d be writing ever since, books that are twisty with plot but also with dizzying points of view, some of the most immediately unsympathetic characters rendered with a beautifull surprising humanity.
Big Little Truths follows Big Little Lies, and it’s Moriarty’s first sequel—a sequel to the book she wrote, not the TV show into which it was adapted, which differed from the book in several ways, most notably in being set in California. But with Big Little Truths, we’re back in Pirriwee, in the suburbs of Sydney, Australia, and the children who were kindergartners in the previous book are now in their teen years, which is to say that all the little problems of parenting have become positively gargantuan.
As ever with Moriarty’s work, everybody has a secret, but there are also secrets that nobody knows about yet, and what is going on with the kids and their world which none of their parents are able to properly permeate? There are also parents whose eldercare needs are more demanding than the kids are, a charismatic new history teacher who’s managed to infiltrate the mom’s group, and a severed finger that’s just been delivered to the school principal—what exactly is going on here?
Poignant, hilarious, frothy and yet not frivolous in the slightest—there are biting politics at the heart of this text—Moriarty has once again pulled off a rich and moving story about female friendship, motherhood, and middle age that is absolutely worth your time. And for those of you who haven’t read the first back (or for those who, like me, have forgotten its details), do not let that deter you, because Big Little Truths is a sequel that also stands alone.
September 21, 2026
Our Noble Selves, by Kate Atkinson
I periodically have to remind myself that once upon a time I didn’t read mysteries, that it wasn’t until Kate Atkinson’s Case Histories that I discovered my affinity for the genre, and Jackson Brodie became my gateway to Armand Gamache, Lane Winslow, Dame Polara, Hercule Poirot, Inaya Rahman, Cat Conway, and more. And I love the way that Atkinson has in the years since then permitted herself to dip in and out of genre fiction, including crime novels and historical fiction, blurring the lines between literary and genre, and those between the genres themselves. I adore the way that Atkinson continues to build whatever kind of literary container her stories require, her own brilliant sparkle and deft prose style the common thread through all of it.
And this time she’s sparkling in mid-century England, against the backdrop of the Festival of Britain, a government funded celebration intended to rouse a nation from its post-war doldrums, which turns out to be a big ask as rationing is ongoing and Britons are still wracked by war trauma. Among them is Harry Flynn, a reporter who spent his war was a captured civilian on the Burma Railway, and who’s hired by the festival for various tasks. What he’s there for is not exactly certain, but this is also the case for a number of his colleagues, which means that everyone has something to hide when a young Frenchwoman disappears—but it’s Harry upon whom suspicion falls immediately.
There’s a lot going on in this novel, a rollicking whirlwind, and lines like, “Flynn was impressed. He didn’t usually consort with women who knew both Milton and more than one sexual position.” A veritable circus, like the Festival itself, this book is very good time.
September 21, 2026
Takes and Gifts
“And it feels so good these days to keep yourself for yourself. What a great trend,” writes my friend Shawna Lemay in her latest Transactions with Beauty post, to which I reply (to myself!), And how! Like Shawna, I’ve been asking what the point is with these sorts of spaces, who is even listening relishing the straightforward humanness of real life encounters. I think I’m still a bit burnt out from my very busy season last spring, and am having trouble finding the motivation to write my monthly Substack essays or resurrect my podcast. For the former, I am pressing on anyway, because I’m grateful to have paid subscribers, but on Substack itself and on the internet in general, I am getting very tired of screaming out into a void. On Instagram, I’m altogether tired of scrolling to find post after post of clickbait by people I don’t even follow, weird and warped content that actually bears no relationship to the world that I live in.
My blog feels different though—it was always fairly certain here that not many people were reading anyway, that relative obscurity was a feature, not a bug. What has always differentiated blog audiences from those of social media is that the former is highly specific, while the latter is terrifyingly general. I know who I’m talking to here. I’m fairly sure that those readers will understand me. And anybody who doesn’t will have the context clues of 20+ years of archives with which to make sense of the matter.
In a piece today, Emily Wilson (recent and well known translator of The Odyssey and The Iliad) complains about the one-noteness of internet discourse (which maybe is part of the reason I’m not very inspired to post on online essay about anything right now). She writes about the “poisonous trend in media coverage, to be constantly reacting to lowest-common-denominator “takes” on the internet, rather than taking up the responsibility to reframe, investigate, listen, and educate.” Sometimes it’s hard to believe that there’s an alternative to this way of being online.
I am so done with “takes,” and am thinking now about about what takes actually take—from their writers, their readers, from the culture at large. And I’m thinking about how the opposite of a take is a give/gift. What Shawna writes:
Artists and writers and makers very often think about the gifts they receive, and understand the give and take of it all. The more you give, the more you get back. It’s a mysterious and wonderful economy all its own.
