Dreaming of British Columbia
“The dream was in fact a lot like Vancouver weather—a dismal sort of longing, a rainy dreamy sadness, a weight that shifted round the heart.” From “To Reach Japan” by Alice Munro.
Time for a confession, even though it might mean that the powers-that-be revoke both my writer card and my Canadian citizenship. Up until last week, I had never really read Alice Munro.
I say “really” because, sure, I’d read a small handful of stories over the years, stumbling upon them in The New Yorker or various anthologies. I was familiar with her genius, but only in a glancing and happenstance way. Don’t ask me how I got through these 32 years without ever intentionally picking up an entire book by Alice Munro, but I did, and I have no idea why. But last week I was sitting in the living room, feeling a bit fatigued by my current brick of a novel (I’m reading Stalingrad by Vasily Grossman after seeing Claire Messud recommend it here, and it is brilliant but also LONG, and I know from experience that I can only sustain these Russian marathons if I sprinkle in the occasional palate cleanser), so I stood up and started browsing our bookshelves, and when I saw my untouched copy of Dear Life sitting on the shelf, I thought: why not?
The first story in the collection is “To Reach Japan.” Greta, the delightfully spiky woman at the heart of that story, lives in North Vancouver. She rides the bus across the Lions Gate Bridge, into Stanley Park. As I read those words, I felt my heart skip a little. There’s plenty of New York-centric fiction in the world, and I read (and write, lol) a lot of it. I live in, love, and am endlessly fascinated by New York. But I spent ages 8 to 18 in British Columbia, first in Whistler and then in Vancouver, and for me it’s a rarer treat to reencounter that world—that other slice of my life—when I’m reading fiction. Rarer, and possibly more meaningful because of that rarity.
I texted my family to tell them how happy it made me, coming across these familiar words—Lions Gate, Stanley Park. My dad reminded me that Alice Munro used to live in Dundarave, a small neighborhood just a few minutes down the road from our old house, where I used to jog along the seawall during summers in West Vancouver. Reading the stories written by this former resident of Dundarave, by this woman intimate with the topographies of the North Shore, it gave me a peculiar kind of wistfulness. Not nostalgia exactly, because these are stories about grown women navigating the complex hopes and sadnesses of their lives, and I have only ever been that kind of grown woman here in New York. Instead it’s like getting a glimpse of parallel universe: a window through which I see myself as the 32-year-old woman I currently am, but instead of riding the downtown 6 train, I’m taking the bus across the Lions Gate Bridge, like Greta. Instead of Central Park, I have Stanley Park. In this universe I stand by English Bay and watch the container ships come in from Asia. The cold grey Pacific, the dark fir trees, the low winter skies. Maybe in this universe I’m still a writer. Maybe I’m not.
This is what fiction always does. It helps me to imagine my way into a different kind of life. But I feel a certain poignancy when that different kind of life—that life which I am only temporarily visiting—contains so many deeply familiar features.
As fate would have it, this was also the week where I finally reached the top of the library queue for The Glass Hotel by Emily St. John Mandel, another British Columbian. I started it a few days ago, and it’s so good, I’ve been tempted several times to blow off work and just sit on the couch and read all day. I love this novel. Why did none of you tell me about it? (Kidding!!! I am very bad at listening to people when they tell me to read things.) The hotel at the northernmost tip of Vancouver Island is fictional, but it’s as vivid as any place I’ve actually been: “A glass-and-cedar palace at twilight, lights reflected on water, the shadows of the forest closing in.” This glowing glass box of luxury in the middle of the dark wilderness is a source of escape, or opposite-ness, for the various East Coast characters in the novel. And maybe for me, too, if only mentally.
When we were with my parents over the holidays, we started daydreaming about the post-vaccine world (one of my favorite pasttimes). If you could hop on a plane right now, where would you go? A brand-new place on the bucket list? A familiar beloved destination? I hope there will be time for both, but during that conversation, and in the days since, I keep thinking about the latter—about the places I’ve already been. I think my memory needs a little bit of purchase in order to make the daydream feel real.
This is why it’s been so delightful, reading Dear Life and The Glass Hotel. Not just because Alice Munro and Emily St. John Mandel are genius writers, but because reading these books is like taking an invisible trip across the continent. When I open these books and visit these worlds, I’m able to superimpose my own memories upon them—the years I spent on the North Shore, the years I spent on Vancouver Island—and the result is a heightened vividness. It’s not quite the same as being there, but it’s the next best thing.
The Glass Hotel makes me particularly wistful because Vincent, the young woman who grew up on Vancouver Island, eventually lands in New York City, too. It puts me in mind of that famous E.B. White quote from Here Is New York about the three layers of the city: “Third, there is the New York of the person who was born somewhere else and came to New York in quest of something.” I’m coming up on my eleventh anniversary of moving to New York, and I have no desire to leave, but I also miss those former selves, the younger versions of me who live in other places. In the non-Covid world, I usually manage to travel back to B.C. about once a year. As time goes by, those trips have become more meaningful and emotional; as necessary as a pilgrimage. But I can’t go back, not yet, so until I can, I will rely on these writers to remind me.