This is a work of fiction, based on fact. The author had a grandmother, Suzanne Meloche, who had abandoned the author's mother, Mousse, when Mousse was a small child. Upon her grandmother's death, the author hired a private detective to find out about her life. From this, as well as conversations with her mother, grandfather and uncle, the author wrote a fictionalized account of Suzanne's life.

Suzanne left her two young children in order to pursue a career in art and to fulfill her own dreams. She participated in, among other things, an avant-garde art movement in Quebec and in the civil rights march in the U.S. Her life was interesting, but not earth-shattering. And that is the tragedy of Suzanne's story. Had she been a man, or had she been born a generation or two later, she would not have had to abandon family life to achieve what she did. Her decision had multi-generational consequences.

The book is written in the second person, which makes it feel very personal -- like we are eavesdropping on very private events. What I liked most about the book is that it shows the power of art. The author didn't like her grandmother and did try to write a book justifying her choices. But she came to appreciate Suzanne in the process of writing about her. As she said, "I don't love you yet...but wait for me...I'm coming." ( )

Although the Suzanne of the title is not the muse for Leonard Cohen's song I sense a kinship between that Suzanne and this one. This Suzanne (Suzanne Meloche) was in Montreal a generation before Cohen's Suzanne (Suzanne Verdal) but they both hung around on the fringes of artistic groups and they both led rather unconventional lives.

Suzanne Meloche was the author's maternal grandmother. She abandoned her children when her daughter was three and her son was one year old. After that Suzanne moved from place to place and man to man. She occasionally held down jobs, like as a mail carrier in the Gaspe region, but she would abandon them on a whim. She sometimes wrote poetry and she sometimes painted and her works were good enough to be printed and exhibited but she never stuck to that either. In the 1960s she was living in Harlem and she ended up on a bus travelling into the South to promote desegregation in the movement called The Freedom Riders. She and her fellow protesters were jailed in the notorious Parchman Jail. After that experience Suzanne went back to Montreal with a young Vietnam vet who eventually committed suicide. Suzanne occasionally reached out to her daughter but never her son. Her daughter, who had been raised by Suzanne's sisters, seemed to weather the abandonment fairly well but the son was mentally unstable all his life. The author only met her grandmother on two occasions and one was when she had just been born. Despite the estrangement between Suzanne and her children she made her daughter and her granddaughter the heirs in her will. The author and her parents went to Ottawa to clean out Suzanne's apartment after her death and the author found enough intriguing details to make her want to know more about her grandmother. So she hired a private investigator and this book is the result. It's probably not completely factual because details had to be made up by the author.

I'm not completely convinced of the merit of this book. Yes, Suzanne Meloche was an interesting subject but I'm not sure I understand her any better after reading this book. If she abandoned her children because she wanted to concentrate on her art then why did she never sustain her poetry or her painting? If she abandoned them because she felt they were too much of a burden then why did she occasionally try to get her daughter back? I personally wonder if she wasn't experiencing postpartum depression which was exacerbated by her husband's long absences while she tried to raise two young children in a hovel but that is not a theory the author examines. Obviously Suzanne's issues with parenting were not passed down to her daughter or her granddaughter. The author thanks six children for allowing her "to be both a mother and a writer". ( )

The imagined life of the author grandmother. The facts are reals, the places are real. The inner life and the motivation of Suzanne for leaving, always leaving are deduced, imagined. Suzanne Meloche lived through tumultuous times. The end of the Duplessis era, the art scene of the 50s. The emotional scars she left on herself, her children, her family are the backdrops of this well written semi-fictional biography. The almost dream like feel of the writing keeps you reading, keeps you interested and emotionally involved. A very good read. ( )

What an original book. This is about the life of the author's grandmother, written from the author's perspective, imagining what her grandmother was living through, based on what the author was able to find out about her. The chapters are generally very short and much of it is written in the second person ("tu"), as though written to the grandmother.

The main character, Suzanne Meloche, was associated with an important group of Quebec artists. We learn that she grew up in Ottawa during the depression and came back to Ottawa later in life (in this sense, this book is as much about Franco-Ontarians as it is about Quebecois). The event that dominates the book, though, is Meloche's abandonment of her two children (including the author's mother) when they are young children.

One of the interesting aspects of this book is the border between novel and biography, as this is all based on a real person's life but with all sorts of blanks speculatively filled in. ( )