Maybe it’s summer, the heat, the mosquito bites. Maybe it’s where I am in the novel—ie. nearing the end [of the latest draft]. Or maybe I’m just not in the mood to read fiction and maybe I shouldn’t keep forcing myself to try.

The truth is I’m presently in love with memoir. Also personal essays, letters, biographies, diaries. It’s not a sudden thing. When I think about it I’ve been heading in this direction for months and months. There have been signs. I don’t know why I pretend to be so gobsmacked.

Still, the question needs to be asked: how did this happen?

Nothing would be easier than to say, oh yes, I know exactly when and where it began—it was with this book, or that book, that’s what led me down the memoir/diary/bio path. But who am I kidding? I can’t pin this whole mood thing on a single book—after all, I was attracted to the book, right? There must have been a reason for that. I was in the mood for what it had to offer.

That’s how these things work. It’s not like you’re so happy with fiction then you trip over a diary and out of the blue go crazy for the genre. You have to have been open for that genre to come into your life in the first place—otherwise you wouldn’t even notice it. And it’s the being open to it that comes as a surprise. Not even knowing what it is you need until it’s right there in front of you.

Anyway. No more guilt. No more pretending or ‘trying’. I’m off fiction temporarily. Period. I’m reading memoir. My stack includes Viola Whitney Pratt, Pablo Neruda, Pat Lowther, I Nuligak: The Autobiography of a Canadian Eskimo, Marina Nemat’s Prisoner of Tehran, Margaret Laurence’s Dance on the Earth, something called The Woman Who Walked to Russia, which I bought on a whim—no idea who or what this is about; The Letters of Alice B. Toklas, a biography of Dorothy L. Sayers, Confessions of an Advertsing Man by David Ogilvy, Wayson Choy’s Not Yet, and two old favourites: Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s Gift from the Sea (in progress), and Alix Kates Shulman, Drinking the Rain.

Sigh.

I swear I feel better already.

“Menus, recipes, small scandals, small journeys; exchange of neighbourly courtesies and little kindnesses, little tasks; an earache, an inoculation; the text of a sermon, a ‘scene’ of some kind in church; sixpence won at cards, or a maidservant’s dismissal; a snowstorm, a ripening of cucumbers, a rumour from the wars in France; the garden, the weather, the walk before dinner—always these three—the garden, the weather…”

(from: English Diaries and Journals, by Kate O’Brien; Collins, London, 1943)