Barbara Gowdy
Barbara Gowdy is the author of seven books, including Helpless, The Romantic, The White Bone, Mister Sandman, We So Seldom Look on Love and Falling Angels, all of which have met with widespread international acclaim. A three-time finalist for The Governor General’s Award, two-time finalist for The Scotia Bank Giller Prize, The Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize and The Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, winner of the Marian Engel Award and The Trillium Book Prize, Gowdy has been longlisted for The Man Booker Prize. She has been called “a miraculous writer” by the Chicago Tribune, and in 2005 Harper’s magazine described her as a “terrific literary realist” who has “refused to subscribe to worn-out techniques and storytelling methods.” Born in Windsor, Ontario, she lives in Toronto.
“I think of the emptiness of outer space, and the men in their little pods going up there alone, wives and girlfriends left behind. I think of Abel and me lying on the grass, looking up at the stars, and how great that was, but, still, I was always waiting for him to turn his head. To look at me”
“And then came months of memories connected to nothing and telling me nothing, and in this ambiguous atmosphere I stopped thinking of him as doomed. The memories themselves were generally pleasant. For at least a week I kept reliving the time he removed a splinter from my foot using surgical tweezers. Strangely, during this same week, a black Labrador retriever was accompanying me around town, appearing out of nowhere and trotting alongside me to the subway or or the grocery store. As with the splinter memory, I had a sense of information being conveyed but through a medium too opaque to be grasped.”
“Is that how he sees it? He knows how much his death will hurt us, so he must be under the impression that by staying alive he'll eventually hurt us even more. Maybe we should pretend we've stopped caring what he does. Say, "We've given up on you, Abel. You don't matter." Well, that would gratify him, our failling in line with what he has been telling us for months. How do we get around that? How do we persuade him that he's entitled to cause pain and, what's more, that he has a responsibility to bear the pain that he causes? If only I could say, "You're worthy of your own life," and make him believe me. Too late. Too late. He seems completely enraptured now by the idea of no longer existing. I think he imagines the space he'll vacate, the actually physical space, and there we'll be, his parents and I, waving our hands around trying to find him, but at least we won't come up against any resistance. There won't be anything to collide with, only air.”
“On the one hand, Sylvie loves the feeling of being like everybody else... on the other hand when she feels most like a freak is when shes getting away with not being one.”
“Life is oblivion erupting, for a brief moment, into nonoblivion in order so that oblivion may proclaim... "I am." The assumption being, that living things are aware enough to make such a proclamation. Let us suppose that they are. Let us suppose that they are, to a degree, self-aware. This makes for the possibility of life recognizing itself, yes, but not as oblivion, only as life. In order for life to recognize itself as a fleeting pulse of oblivion, self-awareness, must be refined into pure awareness, which is observation unimpaired by either ego or preconceptions.”