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Loading... Pathologies: A Life in Essaysby Susan Olding
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In these fifteen searingly honest personal essays, debut author Susan Olding takes us on an unforgettable journey into the complex heart of being human. Each essay dissects an aspect of Olding's life experience--from her vexed relationship with her father to her tricky dealings with her female peers; from her work as a counsellor and teacher to her persistent desire, despite struggles with infertility, to have children of her own. In a suite of essays forming the emotional climax of the book, Olding bravely recounts the adoption of her daughter, Maia, from an orphanage in China, and tells us the story of Maia's difficult adaptation to the unfamiliar state of being loved. Written with as much lyricism, detail, and artfulness as the best short stories, the essays in Pathologies provide all the pleasures of fiction combined with the enrichment derived from the careful presentation of fact. Susan Olding is indisputably one of Canada's finest new writers, one who has taken the challenging, much-underused form of the literary essay and made it her own. No library descriptions found. |
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![]() GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)813.6Literature English (North America) American fiction 21st CenturyLC ClassificationRatingAverage:![]()
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“Pathology,” the first essay in this book, chronicles Olding’s difficult relationship with her pathologist father, an alcoholic given to mercurial moods. This essay is so raw and clear-eyed, and yet completely unself-pitying that it literally took my breath away.
Another of my favourites is “On Separation,” a tribute to Olding’s sister-in-law, Jennifer. Olding alternates between meditating on separation using the metaphor of separating eggs to make almond cake and recording Jennifer’s losing battle with breast cancer. Although this may sound like an odd juxtaposition, this essay is one of the most moving pieces in the book.
Olding also writes a series of essays about her infertility, her decision to adopt her Chinese daughter Maia and her struggles as the parent of an adopted child. Of these, my favourite is “Mama’s Voices,” a wrenching piece about parental absence, writing about one’s child and Lana Turner. It’s hard to explain the structure of this essay, which alternates between sections called “Play,” “Fast Forward,” “Stop,” “Rewind” and “Record”—and I’m finding it equally hard to put into words the admiration I feel for Olding for writing (and publishing) this piece. In it, she contemplates reading a piece about her daughter at a writer’s conference:
“That piece is too long, too personal, too difficult to excerpt, too domestic, too dependent on all its parts for a true effect, I tell myself. What I mean is, that piece is too revealing, too raw. Or maybe it’s just too real” (p. 201).
When she does workshop the piece, her classmates and instructors urge her to shelve her project and not write further about her daughter. All I can say is, thank you, Susan, for not listening to them.
One of my (minor) criticisms of this book is that I felt Olding overused the device of interweaving two or more elements in her essays. (Sometimes these elements are different narrative threads; at other times, she uses definitions or fictional passages.) It works brilliantly in many essays including the three I’ve already mentioned, but feels choppy and distancing in “How to Be a Volunteer,” for example (although maybe I liked this essay least of all because parts of it are written in the second person). I also don’t like the inclusion of fictional passages in a non-fiction book. Although Olding says in her notes at the end of the book that she trusts these passages will be identifiable from their context, I wasn’t sure they were fictional until I read her note.
I am in awe of writers like Mairs and Olding who transform the dross of everyday life into the gold of art—an alchemy I still aspire to. I highly recommend this book and hope Olding is working on her next one!
*I’m sure there are others out there—I just haven’t come across them yet.
A slightly different version of this review can be found on my blog, she reads and reads. (