2017

On March 14, 2017 my novel So Much Love came out and almost immediately I embarked on the most ambitious book tour I’d ever been on. The way book promotion generally and my career in particular is going, it may be the most ambitious book tour of my life, forever, period, but that remains to be seen. It wasn’t actually that wild compared to what a lot of authors do but it more than I had ever done, and as with any nice thing that ever happens to me in the literary realm, I treasure every invitation like an actual ray of light upon my face. Moreover, I do actually find book touring—sharing my work, meeting readers, meeting other writers, going new places—very fun. Setting up the tour was all good news.

Pretty often, if a literary festival or publisher or really anyone who is inviting an author to go anywhere is generous and can afford it, they will book an extra day for the author to enjoy the locale without having to do any events or interviews or anything, and if that isn’t possible, some authors—certainly this author—will try to book it ourselves if we can afford the time and money. We get to go so few places and if we’re already there, why not! So in 2017 I had a lot of “free days” alone in various cities around the country, meant as a treat, to enjoy myself. I was looking forward to them.

The problem was, a) I had not toured more than a day or two since my previous book in 2011, which was both a much smaller tour and a time when I was only a few months out from living alone, and a much more independent person, and b) my father died three weeks prior to the publication of So Much Love.

Of course b) was the real rub but a) made it all a bit worse. When Jerry died, I decided to just proceed with the launch and tour—and indeed return directly to my job—more or less business as usual. It would have been a dicier question had he still been alive—there would have been a person requiring company, and care. As he wasn’t there to need anything and as he had been quite excited about the book, near as I could figure he would have wanted me to proceed with the events. In truth, I didn’t know exactly what my father would want me to do after his death because Jerry never said anything in my hearing that allowed that he would or even could die. Which is a fact I still begrudge him, though I try my best not to. What I want the most from anyone is to know what they think about things, which I realize is not a debt owing to me.

Which is a very long way of saying: so began the Cross-Canada Crying Tour. I truly enjoyed all of the events and have no regrets about doing any of them—I loved the readings, the panels, the other writers, the readers, the signing tables, the questions from the audiences, even the quirky ones. It was those free days that were tough for me, those days spent alone in a strange city, where either I knew no one or I hadn’t been organized enough to reach out and try to make plans. I dithered over things that wouldn’t have normally bothered me: whether I could eat in restaurants alone, whether to spend money on expensive tourist attractions, whether it was in fact too late to contact a local acquaintance and ask them to coffee, and ended up doing nothing much almost every time, except going for walks. I walked and walked and worried about things that seemed extraneous to the problem at hand (dead father) but in retrospect, that was certainly the main theme. I was used to being able to talk things out with (sometimes to) Mark and get talked or hugged into some semblance of calm but he wasn’t there and sometimes, with the time differences or hectic life, not even by phone. I missed my family—none of us doing all that well, but it was always somewhat better together. I met a lot of great people in my travels, some old friends turned up, and many admired writers, but I didn’t know any of them very well and most didn’t know my situation. At the time, I thought I kept my grief to myself but looking back…I doubt that’s fully accurate. Retrospect can’t fully undo self-delusion, but I’m sure at least at times I was very weird. A few folks, near strangers and without asking, seemed to catch how sad I was and made some space for me, but mainly I just couldn’t figure out how to socialize. I just walked around and looked at things and tried to appreciate how nice it was to be there and tried to stop crying. I remember vividly how beautiful the places I saw during those seasons, and how violently I was willing myself to stop crying as I stood looking at them.

This came up because last week I took a work trip to Ottawa and for the first time in a while, I was at liberty to book myself one of those extra days. Really, I stayed to see a friend but since she had to work until evening, I was on my own for most of the day. Of course I said to myself I would go to the National Gallery and then immediately screwed it up (slept in, accidentally did three hours of work in my hotel) so that there wasn’t the right amount of day left to do anything but brunch and a long walk. It was a bright, blue-skied, perfect fall day and as I strolled beside the canal, feeling pretty fine about everything, there was something about being alone in lovely Canadian city with nothing in particular to do that suddenly made me feel that my father had just died. A strange oblique sense memory. A wave of despair crept over me as I rounded the corner towards the St. Laurence River.

These days, in 2025, I have well-accepted my life with a dead father. Only the day before that sunny walk, I was telling someone about learning Yiddish inspired by my father’s ability with the language and I added glibly, “Of course, my father was dead at the time.” I don’t not miss him but the wound is not as fresh. I do wish Jerry had said something about how he wanted to exist in my mind after his passing, but he just didn’t—I imagine a lot of dead people don’t. I know that I am slowly rewriting him in certain ways—I never referred to him by his first name while he was alive, but I also never really wrote about him at all—he was an intensely private person. But it seems better to include my father in my personal writing than to leave him out when he is so much in my thoughts. One must do something. We keep walking.