I Wanted a Boyfriend. I Got Notes.

We were in a Japanese restaurant. I thought we were on a date, but he had something else in mind. He held in his hands the manuscript of my book, Fred’s Funeral. I had started writing it back in the 1980s on the night of my great uncle Fred’s funeral. This day in the Japanese restaurant was decades later, and I’d been working on the current manuscript for a year or so when Simon had offered to read it. He’d enjoyed my book Chatterbox, and he wanted to read more. I wanted to lure him back to being my boyfriend, hence the Japanese restaurant, but that’s a story for a different day.

Simon was a lawyer, and I’ve always been attracted to the lawyer brain. I’ve known many in my life, including both my grandfathers. Well, I didn’t actually know my dad’s dad, but he was a lawyer and, I might add, a morphine addict. Some things run in families. Also, I may have given birth to a lawyer if my daughter had wanted to go to law school. Woowee, can that kid argue her side of an issue, and she’s got a memory like a steel trap, but I digress.

There I sat across from Simon as he opened up my binder and started leafing through the opening pages of Fred’s Funeral. He said, “I think you could make your writing . . .,” no, what he said was, “I’m accustomed to reading clearer writing, legal writing.” I remember thinking, “What the hell is he talking about?” Of course my writing is more lyrical than legal prose, which I imagined was stuffy old contracts and legalese. Fred’s Funeral is magic realism for heaven’s sake, and the protagonist is dead at his own funeral, a ghost hovering over the proceedings. Anyway, it amused me that Simon thought legal writing made more sense than my prose.

Now, after years of listening to podcasts by very smart lawyers dissecting the American justice system, I think I finally understand what Simon meant. I’ll never be a lawyer, but I’m learning to be sharper with my ideas and less afraid to say them out loud.

Ironically, clarity was the last thing I wanted as a kid. I wrote poetry to tell the universe how I was feeling while making sure no one else suspected how sad and frightened I was. My poetry was so obscure that hardly anybody understood it, but I did, and I think the universe did too because it has answered now. Those poems came from somewhere deep, a place I never felt safe enough to reveal. Now, I’m safe. Now, I’m ready to be clear.

Let me know a little bit about you as I share little bits about me. Please feel free to read the Archive.

If today’s story connected with your heart, you will probably enjoy my novels. They aren’t all the same flavour, but they all come from the same brain: curious, wry, emotionally nosy, and very interested in what people do when life gets life-y.

Start with Odd Mom Out if you like bad best friends, terrible mothers, bratty daughters, aging, reinvention, and the humiliating business of being human in public.

For a darker and more emotionally intense story in which a man must go back to his hometown and face the music while his girlfriend is left behind to figure out what’s happening on her own: Where the Night Winds Wail.

For more about me and my books, please visit my website, sandyday.ca