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2011: About to turn 43. I’m living in a condo above a Tim Hortons, just south of what I used to facetiously-but-not-really call “crack alley” (Sherbourne and Dundas), with my husband and my son. No official job--the Toronto Film School doesn’t exist anymore--but writing and looking after Cal are pretty full-time activities. Amazed by the success of my first novel, awaiting the release of my second novel, working--not fast enough or often enough, but working--on my third novel. Tired as fuck a lot of the time, somewhat anhedonic from still fighting the same cold I’ve had for the last two months, and I need to work out more often. I need to finish Chapter One and send it off, hopefully by Tuesday or so.
2001: I’m 33, still at the Performing Arts Lodge, and dealing with the fallout of The Hunger, which showed me I really don’t want to be a film reviewer anymore. Pressures at eye Weekly make it impossible for me to work there anymore, even on a contract basis. I attend my last Toronto International Film Festival, hoping to make enough money to bridge the gap between quitting at the Trebas Institute and starting to teach at the International Academy of Design and Technology (later the Toronto Film School), but most of the work I do is for a French website run by insane people who don’t pay me for over a month. The TIFF itself is thrown off by September 11; I stand in the press office listening to otherwise reasonable American journalists saying things like: “You know what we should do? We should bomb Mecca, right the fuck now.” Start teaching at IADT, but they also pay on a monthly basis, which means I’m utterly broke really quickly and living off my boyfriend. Jokingly, he suggests we get married so he can take care of me.
1991: I’m 23, just graduated from Ryerson University, and working at Lovecraft, a “high-class” sex shop in Yorkville that’s basically a tourist trap catering to bachelorette parties. My floor manager keeps telling me to smile even when I’m on my break, and I feel like punching her in the face. One day, my Mom observes that one of the guys in my Magazine Journalism class is writing about rock for this new rag, eye Weekly. “You could do that.” “I don’t know anything about rock,” I say, but I send in three film reviews, and within a month or so I’m doing stringer work for them--not in film, since the woman who runs that section (since deceased) thinks I’m too soft on people to be objective. A few years later, I’m happily working for the new film editor, finally out of my mother’s house and living “on my own” (aside from boyfriend sleepovers) at the Performing Arts Lodge. I don’t know that just a mere ten years later, I’ll be reckoned “too old” for hip, young readers to relate to anymore.
1981: I’m 13, living in the Annex--Palmerston Avenue, I think--and just about to graduate my first alternative school (Spectrum), totally shit-scared I won’t pass the interview to get into City, the alternative high school I want to go to. When they ask me what my interests are, I completely shut down: “I write...yeah, I write. I like to write...” I get so upset I bite my thumb until it bleeds, right in front of everybody. Nevertheless, they pass me--maybe they get that if they didn’t, I’d probably end up at a “normal” school, and things would end in either suicide or murder. My best friends are a girl I met in middle school who’ll eventually be diagnosed as bipolar, a guy I met in therapy who’ll develop a drug habit and move to Vancouver, and a guy I originally thought was a girl whose mother is bipolar, and lives in fear of that genetic payload exploding. By the time I’m 30, I’ll have abandoned all three of them...just walked away. The guilt is still so strong I can barely stand to think about it.
1971: I’m three years old, probably living on Farnham Avenue near St Clair East. My strongest memories involve a bee flying into my ear, looking into a barrel of rainwater and seeing a spider in a spiderweb, or suddenly realizing that it’s winter again, just like it is every year at the same time. My parents are still together. I don’t know about mortality. I still wear diapers at night. I can read at a five-year-old level. By the time I’m five it’ll be up to ten; by the time I’m eight, it’ll be up to high school. I watch a cartoon adaptation of Cyrano, and cry inconsolably when he dies.
1961: Seven years ‘til I’m born. Mad Men time. My Mom and Dad may still be in school--the National Theatre School, in Montreal. Does she already know it would be a bad idea to marry him? But she’ll do it anyways. Misery, and me, result.
2001: I’m 33, still at the Performing Arts Lodge, and dealing with the fallout of The Hunger, which showed me I really don’t want to be a film reviewer anymore. Pressures at eye Weekly make it impossible for me to work there anymore, even on a contract basis. I attend my last Toronto International Film Festival, hoping to make enough money to bridge the gap between quitting at the Trebas Institute and starting to teach at the International Academy of Design and Technology (later the Toronto Film School), but most of the work I do is for a French website run by insane people who don’t pay me for over a month. The TIFF itself is thrown off by September 11; I stand in the press office listening to otherwise reasonable American journalists saying things like: “You know what we should do? We should bomb Mecca, right the fuck now.” Start teaching at IADT, but they also pay on a monthly basis, which means I’m utterly broke really quickly and living off my boyfriend. Jokingly, he suggests we get married so he can take care of me.
1991: I’m 23, just graduated from Ryerson University, and working at Lovecraft, a “high-class” sex shop in Yorkville that’s basically a tourist trap catering to bachelorette parties. My floor manager keeps telling me to smile even when I’m on my break, and I feel like punching her in the face. One day, my Mom observes that one of the guys in my Magazine Journalism class is writing about rock for this new rag, eye Weekly. “You could do that.” “I don’t know anything about rock,” I say, but I send in three film reviews, and within a month or so I’m doing stringer work for them--not in film, since the woman who runs that section (since deceased) thinks I’m too soft on people to be objective. A few years later, I’m happily working for the new film editor, finally out of my mother’s house and living “on my own” (aside from boyfriend sleepovers) at the Performing Arts Lodge. I don’t know that just a mere ten years later, I’ll be reckoned “too old” for hip, young readers to relate to anymore.
1981: I’m 13, living in the Annex--Palmerston Avenue, I think--and just about to graduate my first alternative school (Spectrum), totally shit-scared I won’t pass the interview to get into City, the alternative high school I want to go to. When they ask me what my interests are, I completely shut down: “I write...yeah, I write. I like to write...” I get so upset I bite my thumb until it bleeds, right in front of everybody. Nevertheless, they pass me--maybe they get that if they didn’t, I’d probably end up at a “normal” school, and things would end in either suicide or murder. My best friends are a girl I met in middle school who’ll eventually be diagnosed as bipolar, a guy I met in therapy who’ll develop a drug habit and move to Vancouver, and a guy I originally thought was a girl whose mother is bipolar, and lives in fear of that genetic payload exploding. By the time I’m 30, I’ll have abandoned all three of them...just walked away. The guilt is still so strong I can barely stand to think about it.
1971: I’m three years old, probably living on Farnham Avenue near St Clair East. My strongest memories involve a bee flying into my ear, looking into a barrel of rainwater and seeing a spider in a spiderweb, or suddenly realizing that it’s winter again, just like it is every year at the same time. My parents are still together. I don’t know about mortality. I still wear diapers at night. I can read at a five-year-old level. By the time I’m five it’ll be up to ten; by the time I’m eight, it’ll be up to high school. I watch a cartoon adaptation of Cyrano, and cry inconsolably when he dies.
1961: Seven years ‘til I’m born. Mad Men time. My Mom and Dad may still be in school--the National Theatre School, in Montreal. Does she already know it would be a bad idea to marry him? But she’ll do it anyways. Misery, and me, result.
