Mornings Without Mii by Mayumi Inaba

  If you’ve ever had a pet, you’ve probably felt gratitude for how they’ve been there for you during any number of significant moments in your life. The memories we form alongside our pets have a special place in us, so it makes sense that Mayumi Inaba grounds her memoir Mornings Without Mii in memories of her cat. It is her life, but through the lens of a beloved pet.

The book is a quiet, meditative reflection on Inaba’s life that reads like an episodic novel. Each section is also punctuated with a poem that parallels her experiences with her cat Mii. The account of finding Mii is heartrending; she finds the cat hanging on a school fence and rescues her from her vulnerable state. She brings the cat to trust her and they have a clear special bond and they ultimately go on walks together.

There’s a sequence that I thought had a really interesting framing. Inaba talks about the dissolution of her marriage. The relationship is clearly coming to an end but it’s anchored in their relationship with the cat. Inaba is trying to find a home but the leases all have specifications against cats. In the end, she finds a place where she can move with her cat to write, but her husband cannot make the move with her. She then reflects on her choice and sees that choosing her cat was a way of making the harder choice to let her marriage end.

As the book progresses, Inaba recounts a few significant neighbours in her life around their interactions with Mii. There’s one memorable sequence in which she remembers Mii running away and the panic of trying to find her—and then finding her with a neighbour and having to reclaim the cat. There’s also a great part where she hires a cat sitter who takes a lot of effort to personalize Mii’s care.

I think that the last third of the book is probably the most powerful; we witness Mii’s declining health and eventual death. For years, Mii declines such that her digestive system no longer functions. We then see a tenderness in Inaba as she tends to Mii, making it a routine to squeeze her bladder to help her urinate and to manually push feces through her system. They have evening walk routines and Inaba it’s clear how deeply she cares for her cat. It’s tragic watching her realize that there is nothing to be done for Mii; I think most pet owners will recognize that feeling—you know it might be time, but can’t bring yourself to do it. Inaba also recollects the memories for which Mii was her ongoing companion and, despite the book being fewer than 200 pages, it feels like an earned tragic walk down memory lane.

As I mentioned, the tone of the book is a quiet, meditative one. There’s a directness and simplicity in the language that serves a dual purpose. On the one hand, it gives the text an accessible quality and presents these nostalgic moments as matters-of-fact. On the other hand, the text’s elliptical quality gives it a weightiness, a mysteriousness. The poems at the end of the chapters are a nice touch; because the relationship with her cat develops alongside her writing career, the pairings have a formal purpose.

Of the poems, one about the loss of Mii and the mornings without her stands out as a highlight. The poem starts with the line “The night split split and never closed” (171). In the latter part of the poem, there’s a series of lines that I think encapsulate grief and loss beautifully:

“Your time in your body receded like the tide
leaving it empty
The dawn sunrise

A single unmoving point in a world on the move
The newspaper came   but there was nothing in it I

    wanted to read.” (171)

I think the line about there not being anything of the note in the newspaper is so true to life. Losing a pet creates a numbness where nothing else feels like it matters. And the fact that this comes at the end of a book about the loss feels like a nice parallel: words get to matter again as Inaba processes the loss of her beloved cat.

The book navigates difficult feelings: there’s a tension between the deep love you have for a pet, but the frustrations of caring for an ailing pet. There’s the grief and regret and doubt of doing what is best for your beloved animal companions. The book is pretty sweet, but at the same time offers its fair share of heartbreak.

If you’re looking for a bit of tenderness or if you’re processing your own pet grief, this book may well be for you. It seems inappropriate to end this review with my usual “happy reading” so instead, I’ll just request that you comment pictures of your little animal pals.

The Adventures of a Black Girl in Search of God by Djanet Sears

  If you’ve ever found yourself thinking that church sermons don’t have enough whacky septuagenarian heists, Djanet Sears’ The Adventures of a Black Girl in Search of God may just scratch that itch. In the initial pages, a character reads from the Bible while a woman (whom we later learn is his ex) largely mimes a flashback. The opening sets a somber tone—this is a play that deals with child loss, the resultant grief, and the subsequent dissolution of relationships. We then switch to some comedic relief: a group of elderly conspirators whose mission is to “liberate” (i.e. steal) offensive depictions of Black people in their  community, Negro Creek. Meanwhile, the (White) powers that be are vying to rename Negro Creek to avoid present-day controversy; Michael, the pastor, is organizing a march to ensure that doesn’t happen—erasing the name is erasing their history.

As you can probably tell, there are a number of threads to follow-up on. The play balances humour and darkness, sorrow and joy. The darker elements of the book center around relationships. Rainy and Michael had previously been married and had a daughter together that passed away at age 5—Rainy was becoming a doctor and blames herself for not recognizing the symptoms of meningitis; her faith is shaken and she literally eats handfuls of dirt from Negro Creek. Three years after her daughter’s death, Rainy can’t bring herself to go to the grave, can’t bring herself to divide her child’s things with Michael, from whom she is awaiting divorce papers. Their moments together are painful; Sears is clear about the hopes and dreams they’ve lost, their infidelities to one another, their refusal to confront head-on the crisis of faith they’ve endured.

Meanwhile, Abendigo, Rainy’s father, is at the end of his life and has perpetually led on Ivy. Growing up, he had made promises to her and when he was traveling he had Rainy by a jazz singer, who died following their marriage. When he returned to town, it was to ask Ivy to help raise his daughter—while he married Ivy’s sister. It’s hard not to feel bad for poor Ivy, spending her life waiting for her fling to settle. Their dynamic is also pretty compelling, given that they are conspirators in the heists.

And the heists are a lot of fun. It’s a bunch of older people in dark shades who can’t keep their nicknames consistent making plans to “liberate,” primarily, lawn ornaments of Black figures—though other racist trinkets are also hoarded in the pantry. The farcical efforts to disguise their plot from Rainy is a fun addition and watching them break into the museum is a real highlight of the play for me. Sears navigates the comedy with a light touch and it gives the necessary reprieve from the sadder elements of the text—including Abendigo’s death.

Yes, Rainy’s father is on the verge of death and Rainy is desperately trying to get him the help he needs. She’s making plans and checking charts—but he is at peace. He instead requests Rainy to read a book about home deaths and funerals, and she is confronted with her denial and refusal to let go, bumping up against fulfilling her father’s wishes. The conflict resonates well—it forces the audience to confront our own discomfort with death when Abendigo is telling Rainy how he wants to be dressed when he’s buried in the coffin that he has ordered directly into his home.

I’d be really interested to see the production live, if for no other reason than the Chorus. The Chorus has some moments of (you guessed it) choral singing throughout the play, but what’s more interesting to me is that they also form the setting. At scene changes, the Chorus transforms to create hospital rooms, museums, the creek—I’d be really curious to see how they pull it off, especially in the final scene where some critical objects fall into the creek and are swept away. I just want to know how they’d block that scene for the actors and how they’d imitate the landscape.

In fact, that choice feels as significant as anything else in the play. Several characters reference the fact that Negro Creek has a two hundred year history and that their deceased relatives have become part of the landscape. Rainy says she wants to be a tree. Michael rails against removing “Negro” from the name of the creek because the Black community has been so critical to the place. Abendigo sees the creek itself as Heaven. It gets even more interesting when you consider how Black Canadians came to settle the land via the Underground Railroad and live alongside the Saugeen Ojibway Nation. The fact that actors in the play literally become the landscape of the play is a thoughtful formal choice to reinforce some of those key perspectives.

I embarked on this reading in the hopes of infusing a Black Canadian woman into my grade 12 curriculum. I’m not sure how students would respond to this one; it’s got a lot to like—especially with the more comedic scenes—and there’s a lot to talk about historically and culturally. I’m not sure if the themes of child loss and waiting around your whole life for someone who won’t commit to you are really the best fit for them, but it might be worth a shot.

I often end reviews with the statement “Happy reading” or some such imperative. Djanet Sears, I think, fits the category. As sad as the play can be, I think there’s enough joy there to serve as an uplifting, bittersweet experience. One of Abendigo’s requests for his funeral is that songs of mourning are replaced with joyful ones; there’s a time for sadness, but there’s also time for acceptance and joy in the face of it all. So, happy reading.

Small Planes and the Dead Fathers of Lovers by Candace de Taeye

It’s always a bit awkward reviewing local poets that I can conceivably encounter in public. The stakes somehow feel higher and that I need to offer a more thoughtful review. I hope I can do justice to Candace de Taeye’s Small Planes and the Dead Fathers of Lovers. It’s a collection of poems divided into a few sections. The first is the titular section, followed by “Blue Collar, Red Hood,” “I, House,” and “For Sale – An Addendum.” The first section recounts relationships marred by tragedy, the second is a retelling of Little Red Riding Hood, the third an extended metaphor of house and heart, and the final is a reflection on selling a home and moving away.

One of the early standouts in the collection is the poem “Alice” which sets the scene with an opening couplet: “the isolation of finches made famous the tiny islands / evolving independently on the dead ends of rural roads” (5). The poem then describes a budding relationship, where “she was kind, his second choice,” sort of a bleak thought, but followed up with tenderness: “but 60 years later he learned to cook / for her.” The poem describes the relationship between the speaker and the central figure of the poem: “she once scolded me, my dirt bike scaring off migratory birds and a / lost racing pigeon” (5). de Taeye follows up the line with a gorgeous and evocative turn of phrase: “I crafted a wreath of limp songbirds out of spite” (5). The images that follow offer a cohesive package: “gravestones spring up, granite volcanoes, ashes buried” (5). She refers back to “the first choice and the pilot son-in-law” and then comments on “maps discretely embroidered into bomber jacket linings” (5), which again is a great image to offer insight into characters at a glance. In discussing his ashes, “that summer we smoked his humidor clean” (5). I like that poem in particular because it establishes such a rich backstory for the characters in just a short set of lines.

The poem “Green Screen” shares in the strength of “Alice,” offering rich turns of phrase alongside a clear and distinct narrative. The opening lines alone are excellent: “the passage of time layered semi transparent. every boy I’ve ever / kissed here at some point along the trail. Land marking epochs” (7). I’m a sucker for conversations about time and the storied memories that are implied just below the surface. The poem continues, “unspooled familiar static pulling my foot beats along a magnetic cas- / sette ribbon retraced near daily for two dogs or 20 years” (7). I like how de Taeye proposes different methods for measuring time: the standard, years, and the uncommon—dogs. The idea of walking on memories like an unspooled magnetic cassette ribbon is a great image, particularly because of the magnetism implied in traveling the path. Plus, the very image is a callback to an obsolete technology—from roughly 20 years ago, appropriately. The notion of a “green screen” referenced in the title is not the filmic backdrop, but the natural world: “occasionally I’m still present here but most days it’s faded / some would argue the forest is always a background” (7). From there, the narrator comments on taking photos, the most used feature on the camera being macro and she frames the light while taking pictures of small things, like spiders and mushrooms. You’ll notice some similar language to “Alice” in the final lines—ash, maps, tiny islands: “I file away a cache of maps, sand, ashes and tiny rocks of significance / from this forest and all the tiny islands to come” (7).

One of the highlights and challenges of the collection is that there are such echoes and connections between poems. The benefit is that, when reading the collection as a whole, the poems elevate one another. The downside is that some of the poems don’t really ‘work’ when taken out of context. Such an example is in the poem “proprioception”, which recounts a definition in a terse four lines:

        from Latin proprius
meaning “one’s own” “individual” and perception
is the sense of the relative position of neighboring parts of the body
relating to stimuli produced and perceived within an organism (48)

This poem provides a good idea for an unclear word, and taken on its own would be unlikely to stir up much emotion. It’s only when taking a look at the following poem, “exoskeleton,” that proprioception serves its purpose. “exoskeleton” talks about “steadily / becoming your body // not just a heart / this space an extension / of your experience // nourish and entertain yourself / inside me / beloved parasite //// I can insulate a nude /unkempt/sickly you //// as I breath [sic?] with seasons / floors and window panes adjusting” (49). We’re going to get a little bit complex here. First, we ought to recognize that these poems appear in the “I, House” section of the collection. The start of “I, House” replaces the phrase “Home is where the heart is” by saying that the heart is the home. So, here, the metaphor is about a house growing around the resident, the “parasite.” So, we see proprioception in action, where the house reacts to its internal stimuli and grows around it, “floors and window panes adjusting” to the resident’s breathing. Without the context of the proprioception poem, the “exoskeleton” would not really stand on its own—conceptually, it’s a brilliant move.

I think what prevented me from being fully immersed in the collection is some of the ambiguity that arises when connections are missing. This sometimes happens at the level of the sentence, where the connective tissue of punctuation and conjunctions has been removed, progressing in a more impressionistic mode. For me, I found some of this presentation more perplexing than necessary. I’ll try to offer an example here with the poem “salmon tangent,” where there are some areas of connective tissue that appear to me to be missing or ambiguous:

no one is watching you
tossing ghost dimes
to the koi/carp/no salmon
against the current
dragons
change into golden rolls
        demons drunk
        neighbor - H- - - - - - -!
        increases the height of the
    
         falls often slur dam(n) the potential
         buyers wishing phrased right of way

100 years takes over 3 months

most fish are retracing a
couple straying up/changing shape/getting desperate
falling a part a little maki at the local sushi place one last time (61)

To be clear, there are actually a number of things I like about the poem and I think the central idea is clear. There are several parts of the poem, though, where there is an ambiguous connection between clauses that I don’t think serves the poem very well, although perhaps it plays into the idea that buyers’ expectations are inconsistent. For example, the “koi/carp/no salmon” is ambiguous. Is the ‘no’ an interruption that corrects to salmon, or is it saying there is no salmon? With the word “current,” it is unclear whether that is a noun or an adjective. The noun would make sense, contextually. As an adjective, it could also be that there are current dragons that are changing into something new. Similarly, when talking about “the “demons drunk,” similarly it’s unclear if it’s being used as a verb or a noun. Towards the end, “increases the height of the // falls often slur dam(n) the potential / buyers wishing phrased right of way” is very obscure to me. The falls might be little waterfalls in the pond. I don’t know what to make of “buyers wishing phrased right of way.” I do like the twist at the end that moves by association from a koi pond to visiting the local sushi place before moving away. It’s darkly comic and I like it.

Speaking of darkly comic, there’s a poem in the collection called “a wedding” that is similar to Margaret Atwood’s fish hook poem in both tenor and delivery. de Taeye writes, “Maimed birds carried over the threshold / concussed brides in the maw of the cat through the dog’s door” (42).

All this to say that sometimes the poems felt more obscure than I would have liked. Even when referring to the love interests in the poems there are “The Arborist” and “The Actor”. Other characters are named, so I don’t see why they couldn’t have been given names—it felt weirdly mythic, and it just didn’t land for me in that respect.

Overall, there are some really brilliant moves in the collection that demonstrate an ambitious poetic vision. Maybe it’s my own jealousy, but sometimes the poems just seem too high brow for my own understanding, so the collection didn’t consistently resonate with me. Still, I’m happy to know that I live amongst such ambitious and thoughtful poets.

Happy reading, everybody!

I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home by Lorrie Moore

  Describing the premise of I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home will not do justice to the stunning craft Lorrie Moore has committed to page. The opening plot line that shows up intermittently throughout the book is set in the past, with a woman writing letters to a deceased sister about the boarders in her home. In the modern day, Finn visits his dying brother in hospice before receiving news that his ex has taken her life. The majority of the novel then focuses on Finn abandoning his brother’s bedside to go to his ex’s grave, only to reunite with her there and take her on a roadtrip to where she actually wants to be buried while she decays and dies for real (for the third time?). It’s kind of like Weekend At Bernie’s, that is, if Weekend At Bernie’s were the most beautiful, depressing, tender, and heart wrenching book in recent memory.

The book is finely wrought and the premise isn’t quite like anything I’ve read before, so I absolutely loved it. Full disclosure, though, when I looked it up online afterward I found it had received a middling review from the public at large, with many people rating it at 1 or 2 stars. I was stunned and perplexed that people could view the book so poorly, because to me it was irresistibly moving.

Moore is a gifted writer from a stylistic standpoint. She offers passing descriptions that are wonderfully evocative: “His look is like last year’s bird’s nest” (7), “Finn cleared his throat as if it were full of notepads and paper scraps” (28). The turns of phrase in the text are poetic and there’s a natural rhythm to the writing that helps to punctuate key ideas and create an emotional impact. Finn’s relationship with Lily (who has left him for another man) is described as waxing and waning. Moore writes that he “had been the waning beau for so long he had never really absorbed being the ex. He was always just waning. But he could wax! He really could. He had. Every once in a while the phone would ring and there was Lily’s voice and he and she would wax again. He would take whatever she would offer” (70). There’s a nearly farcical tone here, but the end of the paragraph emphasizes Moore’s poetic bent: “He was not a cold mad moon. He was a circle of light made from leftover sun” (70). 

I love the characters in the book, both for how their personalities show in conversation and how they are characterized by the narrator. Early on, Lily is introduced as a somewhat chaotic figure stricken with mental illness, “The noonday demon, the black downward dog, the devil that had long ago grabbed [her] and rammed her head into the wall” (30). Yet, at the same time, Finn saw her as “beautiful and funny. Sort of” (30). Finn recognizes that she wore him out and then left him for someone new that she could wear out, but he “still thought of her every pathetic day. The prick and tingle of her was a phantom limb: his mind was independent and self-starting and did not give up in its attempt to enliven the phantom” (30). The passages about their relationship drip with sincerity and authenticity. There’s even a bit of humour here in describing her as a phantom limb where “even if the limb remained phantom, he knew it was on permanent standby, waiting for a signal” (30). 

Finn and Lily have a number of unresolved conversations, and between them there are a number of things that go unsaid, often spoken of only allusively or through symbols. If there is a flaw in the book, it is that, admittedly, sometimes the symbolism threatens to break through as too on-the-nose, but Moore generally demonstrates the necessary restraint to maintain the impact of the moment.

In fact, Moore demonstrates a great deal of control and I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home is a book that knows what it is doing. Early on, Finn reflects on the role of humour in depressing situations. He wants to bring levity to the conversation with his dying brother, but his humour has to suit the situation—a kind of humour that elicits no laughter. That then serves as the template for the rest of the novel, which offers plenty of funny moments: not funny ha ha; more like funny womp womp (sad trombone). I find that the tragic nature of the book hits harder precisely because it is replete with humour; the jokes punctuation the true sadness of the situations. For example, one of the characters writes in a letter to her dead sister, “P.S. I used your ashes this past January outside on the icy stairs for the safe walking of the boarders. I felt strongly you wouldn’t mind being put to good use” (179). There’s an irreverence towards life and death that helps the text sting and shine.

The dialogue of the book really helps to emphasize that balance of light and dark. It’s witty, snappy, sad, and deeply authentic. Moore’s sense of rhythm in conversations would make I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home a perfect candidate for a stage play or an indie film. There are moments charged with meaning that linger and all the peaks-and-valleys one could hope for from a scene-construction point of view. As Finn and his corpse non-bride drive to her future gravesite, they banter back and forth, bicker with the tenderness of the deeply close, and share some pretty special moments of sarcasm, but Lily in particular drops a number of bombs that turn the knife and turn it hard. Finn’s love for her, despite his frustrations, is clear. Moore provides the following dialogue and description of Finn:

“Lily, you are ruthless,” he found himself murmuring with affection and gratitude---he was without power, so he wasn’t sure, but for a moment it felt like unquellable happiness. (97)

Immediately after that, Lily offers such a sorrowful apology for taking her own life and the depression that plagued her while they were together:

“I am so sorry,” she said, “that in our years together I was unable to wake every day with a song in my heart.” She smelled like warm food cooling. Sorrow had entered her face and her mouth split into the downturned clownish crescent it used to take her professional makeup to produce. “At least not the right song.” (97)

Oh, did I forget to mention that Lily was a professional clown that tried to cheer kids up and that she was buried in her oversized clown shoes? And that as they travel she can’t be warmed up too much lest she decompose? Anyway, the idea of not waking up with the right song in your heart is such a small, poignant reference to her feelings. For some additional backstory, Lily takes her life while she’s in a facility that cares for her. Finn is told that she drowned herself in the shower. After dying, Lily professes not to remember what happened in the lead-up to her death. On the road trip, she suggests that she broke her ankle by slipping in the shower:

          “Broke your ankle? That’s what you think you did?”
         “It was a little slippery.”
         “Mmmmmm. Perhaps we should get it looked at.”
         “Are you joking?” she asked. “Sometimes I can tell but not always.” (109)

The idea of her killing herself is sad enough, but if you factor in that it was perhaps an accident, that she slipped and fell and drowned, I feel like that makes it even sadder, especially since the assumption is that she did it intentionally. I also appreciate the way this exchange ends, uncertain whether Finn is joking or not, because “sometimes [she] can tell but not always.” I think that that line characterizes Moore’s project so aptly. It’s unclear how much of their conversations are jokes and how much of them are serious—same with the book, it’s unclear how much of it is meant to be serious, funny, seriously funny, or funnily serious. That ambiguity is a critical part of my enjoyment of this text—but more on that shortly.

First, I need to address the power of the final interaction between Finn and Lily. For most of the book, Finn is on the road trip with Lily so that she can be buried at the people farm. There’s a trope in literature that I have grown to love deeply, with the most notable example in Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro, and it is the trope of “being told and not told.” There’s a sense of inevitability that we just try to look past. In Ishiguro’s work, you know that the fate reserved for the children is not a positive one and that their hopes to transcend it are futile. In I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home, there are several inevitabilities that we try to push aside. First, that Finn’s brother will die while he is away on this road trip—he has a premonition and senses it when it happens. Second, that his road trip with Lily ends with her being dead and gone forever. We try to avoid these realities and revel in naivety, but they are inevitable. So, the final interaction between Finn and Lily hits hard:

“Listen to me,” she said with some tenderness. “Everything is going to be OK.” In her personal revolutions she was like an unrotating planet with a permanent dark side and a permanent light side where the sun never set. She had always been like that. Was there a line in between, a sweet Goldilocks zone? No, in this tale Goldilocks was devoured by the bears and the zone was just a permanently positional stripe of rising hope, which was also a stripe of permanently positional sinking hope. (171)

I’ll pause briefly here to let that hope simultaneously rise and sink. The passage continues:

“You’re just going to leave me here?” he asked.
“You want gas money?” She raised her eyebrows and let go, stepped back, an
opalescent figure and face. Above the clown nose her eyes blackened and emptied, losing their interested gaze in exchange for bleak determination.
“I’m jealous of the damn dirt,” he said. “I realize it’s over---but I can’t let go,” he added.
“Isn’t that, like, a song?”
“Oh, I’m sure it is very much like a song.”
“One does not die all at once. There are stages.”
“I’ve gathered. And one does not grieve all at once. But there really aren’t stages, as advertised. There’s just a kind of sad soup of the day
“I’m grateful for your driving. And for so many other things.”
“Words.” He tried to make his face contemptuously still, but he suspected affection showed regardless.
“Well. I’ve assembled them and give them to you.”
“I’m afraid of your desertion. Your self-desertion. Your desertion of everything.”
Punishing scorn was hard for him to summon or depict. He understood now that she had had to return to him, to make her reappearance to him, because he was the only person who would have actually believed it was her. (171)

The fact that Finn admits to her that he can’t let go is such a tragic moment (again, interspersed with her accusation that he wants gas money). The unspoken gratitude between them is undercut with scorn, the scorn undercut with tenderness. The scene that follows is just as beautiful, describing them turning away from each other for the last time—but I’ll leave that for you to experience. I appreciate, though, how Moore navigates the complexity of Finn’s feelings (as well as Lily’s). If you go back to the passage that introduced their relationship, Finn is embittered at her leaving him for another man, “yet the deprivation of her intimacy had made a small dent in his heart, and in his breathing, and in the hard candy of his eyes. The thought of her was everywhere but nowhere---an omniscient narrator” (30).

        What I’d like to return to, though, is the final line of the passage above. Finn comes to the understanding that she had to reappear to him because he is the only one that would believe her. There’s a special bond there, but it’s also evocative of the core ambiguity of the text: how much of this happens? If we take it literally, Finn discovers a zombie that he drives to its grave, but stops along the way at restaurants and hotels with Lily’s corpse propped on his shoulder—and everyone just goes along with it. At a more figurative level, this is a journey he is on himself, with an imagined Lily who he knows intimately and knows the rhythm of her dialogue well enough to converse with a ghost he has imagined. Or, maybe Lily really is back from the dead and is cognizant enough to fake being alive for just a few more days. The fact that this is unresolved adds to the charm of the story, and enhances the early invocation of Finn’s mistrust of his own sanity (he tests himself by submitting editorial comments to the New York Times website and seeing if they get published).

A final thought before moving on from Lily. There’s a tenderness that comes through, even in the imagery Moore applies, to her relationship with Finn. At one moment, “The snow was collecting in her hair and eyelashes, sticking like confetti. Ah, here was their wedding! Then, as if his thought had been heard, a sudden wind came sweeping in, with its oceanic sound and its quick picking up of things and taking them elsewhere in a purposeful hurry that was also a bit random” (90). I find the description here poetic and imagistic, with the snow on her eyelashes leaping to the confetti at a wedding, and then all of it being swept away. It’s also depressing, because Lily then reaches for his hand and he feels the cold of hers, “which had always been cold and bony and he had always liked that, though he had never warmed a ring and slid it on her. Why not? She had never asked. And so he had never had to scrounge around for a reply” (90). It’s such a human moment and the torture these characters endure in their regrets is, again, profoundly moving. Then, Moore switches track and has Finn thinking about Lily donating her body to medical science, how “her hands with their now oyster-gray nails would already have been chopped off” (90). He thinks about how “Perhaps he would have been given a pair of her gloves, as a memento, and he would have worn them around, his hands inside of them, soft as if inside of her. And he would have gone through life like that for many very sad years” (90). That idea of holding onto her gloves—wearing her—for years after she is gone shows the depth of the tenderness between them.

What remains somewhat complex is Finn’s response to his brother’s death. Max is in the hospital and Finn leaves him in order to pursue Lily, showing her devotion to her. Like with Lily, Finn’s dialogues with Max are masterful navigations of character. The depth of their bond and their unresolved tensions are fantastically wrought. It’s devastating in its own way to know that when Finn leaves Max’s side, he is abandoning him to die alone—and when he does, people keep telling Finn it was like he was looking for someone. Finn even knows the moment of Max’s death; it is the same moment that Lily leaves, that the World Series ends and that Max’s reason for hanging on has come to a close. The conjunction of all of these ideas simultaneously presents a situation replete with hidden significance and deep emotion.

I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home is a tight reading experience, clocking in at under two hundred pages. I am amazed when books can create such a huge impact in such a small space. Truth be told, I think it could even have been shorter and maintained most of its power. The epistolary sections aren’t, in my mind, essential to the story. The only area of overlap is that Finn finds these letters in a hotel he stays at and they are a historical footnote of a woman murdering a boarder. There are some similarities in the stories that resonate with each other, but ultimately that short story could have been excluded and the heart of the story would still be just as lively.

That said, Moore’s project is extremely unique, and I really appreciate that about it. As Finn is on the road trip, the narrator notes that “They seemed generally to be passing the same sites over and over though nothing was exactly the same just mostly” (111). I love that phrase: “nothing was exactly the same just mostly.” The fact that the phrase is unpunctuated also gives it a special kind of power. I think Moore is capturing something vital and irreproducible, here, which is paralleled in the imagery of the road: “Darkened fields with unreadable signs streaked by them on either side. The days, separate and named, seemed to be no longer arriving. He and Lily were between and among the hours and days rather than in them. The road ran on with its rough sections and moods and daft coordinates” (111). The central characters are adrift, and the reader knows the general direction but not necessarily the specifics of the road signs.

The novel is a truly stunning project that is as depressing as it is beautiful. The reflections on life, death, loss, and grief are nuanced and accurate. When reflecting about the way life is, Moore writes: “Regrettable things kept accruing in life until it was done and you got to say, Well that’s over. Or didn’t get to say, That’s over. But someone was there to say it for you if need be” (46). There’s a bluntness to the writing that simultaneously elevates and diminishes the reverence people often hold toward death. Finn then reflects on the idea of memory: “On the other hand, he knew, memories were often tampered with before they were put back on their shelves. Stories, told enough times, replaced the memories which, once uttered, dissipated and remodeled themselves. It happened at a cellular level: everyone was narratively rewritten” (46). I find the reflection on how we manage our life stories a nice touch, especially since Finn is likely constructing Lily’s story for her throughout the novel as his own way to process his grief.

As depressing as the book is, though, I found it really enriching. It’s so deeply human, so moving, so unique, that it’s hard not to see it as a masterpiece. Moore’s attention to the particulars of relationships and interior worlds, the way she addresses mental illness, and the ear for dialogue all contribute to the best man-and-zombie-ex-go-on-roadtrip book I’ve ever read. In one part of the book, the narrator discusses the idea of sadness and joy and notes that Finn “felt a kind of small joy he had never felt before---an amalgam of old joy and new. Although that was the thing with joy: it was constantly presenting itself as an unprecedented feeling. Every time, you had never felt like this before” (93-94). In context, it refers to the notion that joy is so rare it always feels fresh, but I think it’s also true for the nuances of joy. There is a kind of joy that comes along with depressing stories, a comfort in the light touch of humour in a dark situation. Reading I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home is a particular kind of pleasure that is hard to replicate.

In reading it, I hope you find joy, too.