The Lost Daughter

Thanks to those who asked me to send them the essay and wrote back, including dear Greg, who wrote Your essay about your father and Alice Neel is magnificent. I was captivated by the first sentence and you didn’t let me go until the very end. I loved the second last sentence…a brilliant summary. Thank you for sharing that noble piece of writing. Take a deep bow. You deserve it.  

How to live up to that? If only publishers were so effusive! 

It was mild today, thank God, so I rode my bike to Loblaws to pick up a few luxury items not available at No Frills - Quaker steel-cut oats, Adams crunchy pb, Icelandic wild cod on sale etc. Had a great convo with the man behind me in line, who was buying two cartons of cherry-flavoured water. He thought it would help him lose weight. Yuck. "I'm from New York," he said, after our long chat. "People in Toronto aren't usually so friendly." When I told him I was born in New York, he shouted, "Aha! I knew it!"

Finally watched The Lost Daughter - both compelling and repellant. (Yes, spoiler alert, I think she's dying at the end.) How Olivia Coleman can make us care for a selfish, borderline sicko woman, I don't know, but she does. The film made me replay the many times in my own motherhood years when I wanted to leave and never come back - the time I ran screaming from the house into the snow to avoid strangling someone. But unlike Leda in the film, never in a million years would I actually have left. Inconceivable. 

It's clear in what I think is the most important line in the film, when Leda's desperate husband threatens to send their daughters back to live with her mother and she shouts he can't send them to the "dark shithole" where she grew up, that her relationship with her own mother was not good. Which helps explain, perhaps, her truncated soul. 

After, I thought, I think the thing I can be most proud of in my life - yes, books and teaching and friendships too - but the main thing is that my adult children like and trust and take care of each other, and I like and trust them and they me. I really like them. I do not understand some of their choices and disapprove of others - tattoos! taste in partners and media entertainment! alcohol and food! - but they are fine fine human beings and the love between us all is the best thing in the world. Leda ended up teaching at Harvard, so her gamble for her career worked for her. But, my guess is, not so much for her children. 

I have decided to take a lot of credit for my kids. They nearly drove me, their single mother, mad for 15 years. And yet we all came through. 

Speaking of which, I was over at Anna's yesterday for Sushi Saturday - we ordered sushi for us all which was expensive as Eli can eat most of it all by himself. Sam is the king of uncles, tossing the boys in the air to screams of joy, hauling them around upside down. The day may come when it will be harder for him to do that.

So many people have Covid. In the meantime, one friend is going through chemo and another is waiting for the results of a biopsy, but major surgeries are being cancelled because hospitals are overflowing with the unvaxxed. It's infuriating. Maybe we should be less tolerant. As we saw Joe Biden finally ramp up the rhetoric about Jan. 6 and the attempted coup - maybe the time has come to take the gloves off, both with American fascists and with the anti-vaxxers clogging our health care system. I know, we must take care of them, as we care for chain smokers and people who live on cherry-flavoured water. But sometimes, in fury, I want to run screaming into the snow. 

On the other hand, here's the view over the lake from Anna's front window last evening:

Essayer: to try

Friends, I guess uploading the TNQ essay didn't work after all. I can see it on my computer, but I gather others cannot. Back to the drawing board. 

For now, let's do this the simple way: if you'd like to read the article, please email me at beth@bethkaplan.ca, and I'll simply send you the PDF. Old school! 

The sun is out. I'm at my desk delving into old work, starting with a few essays I wrote in my twenties. Did almost no writing in my thirties - raising kids, moving across the country to Ottawa then Toronto, trying to be a good wife - except the MFA thesis that turned into my first book. 

From 1994 to 2004, I had nearly 60 essays published in the Globe and other newspapers and magazines and read by me on CBC. I thought essay-writing would be my life. But then the Globe stopped paying even the measly $100, $250 for Lives Lived, and I decided I would not write for nothing. Then a new producer at the CBC told me to be on my way, my writing was "not edgy enough." I quit essays to concentrate on books. With incredible success, as you know.

LOL. 

There's some good work in the pile, IMHO, and I'm thinking of a compilation. Another guaranteed bestseller. Especially if I can't find a way to post them anywhere! 

Sharing joy: a New Year's walk with Anna and Eli close to the lake. The boy is nine and will be taller than his mother soon.

Portrait of the Artist: my article in the New Quarterly

My personal genius Nishat has helped me post this. It's long, but I hope you enjoy it. Press the icon on the top right to open the whole PDF.

non, je ne regrette rien, sort of - well, maybe not, but I'm trying

Another gloomy day, not cold, just dark. But we're alive. Sam got over his flu or whatever it was and has just been offered the job he wants, to start Monday. I got out a library book that will be fun to read. It's almost wine time. Life is okay.

Something recently gave me some bad moments. You perhaps know about the painting of my father by the American artist Alice Neel, described in my article in the New Quarterly last month that I hope to post here when I can figure out how to change a PDF into some uploadable format. After my mother's death, my brother and I owned the painting jointly; since relations between us can be prickly, I thought it best to sell the work asap. It was complicated; I had it refurbished and two good copies made, then got permission for it to leave the country, took it to a New York dealer and then to Sotheby's. He and I were hoping to get a lot for it, I to help my kids with housing. But after two auctions at Sotheby's, it still had not sold. A private buyer offered $27,000 for it. 

Since I didn't want to sell it in the first place, I briefly thought of offering to pay half of that to my brother and taking it back home. It's my father's face! But  it just seemed too complicated. He and I took the deal and after expenses, cleared something like $12,000 each.

Last year, Alice Neel was given a huge retrospective at the Met in New York. She was compared to Van Gogh and named one of the greatest American painters of the 20th century. A friend recently sent me an article, which says, Neel’s reputation has undergone a — well, a “turnaround” doesn’t even begin to describe it. During her life, she was a marginal artist; and now — as evidenced by that massive retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum — she’s considered a master. Accordingly, the value of her works has skyrocketed. A single Alice Neel painting from 1966 — and not a particularly noteworthy painting — recently sold at auction for $2.5 million. 

Gulp.

Ah well. What the @#$# would I do with a million? U.S.? Besides help my kids, both housed in small crumbling apartments, buy a place to live? Say, a bright duplex, Anna and family on one side, Sam on the other, a huge yard ... Oh stop. All that money would be too complicated. I have everything I need, and although my kids do not, they're healthy and well and fine. 

So - after a few minutes of feeling sick, I put away my burning gut and crippling regret. Nothing to be done now.

But still...

No. Don't go there. 

On the other hand, Jean-Marc gave my memoir to a friend for Xmas. She wrote, "I just finished reading Beth Kaplan’s truly wonderful, magnificently written book. Thank you so much for your thoughtful gift. Please tell her that I relished every word!"

So that's better.

I also read two important, depressing articles: one from the Guardian, "Your attention didn't collapse, it was stolen," on how our brains, particularly young people's, are being hijacked by our devices, how we now can't concentrate for more than a few minutes - that this is a new kind of disaster and we have to fight back. Absolutely. I concur. 

And more pressing, this article, one of the most frightening things I've ever read, by Thomas Homer-Dixon, about the rise of fascism in the States: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-the-american-polity-is-cracked-and-might-collapse-canada-must-prepare/ 

If you're briefly feeling good about your day, read it and weep. What a world for our grandchildren - climate change and fascism. What happened? The day Obama was elected, we thought many of the world's problems had just been fixed. 

Horrifying. 

Time to have a glass of wine and read Alison Bechdel and turn off the brain for today. Thank you for listening. 

support for Jo Rowling, Don't Look Up, Joan Didion

It's movie week. Outside, snow; I guess it's winter here, after all. Netflix and the fireplace are my companions.

Annie, Ruth, and I had a fabulous New Year's Eve. They are two of the most interesting people on earth, with ideas, insight, travels, fascinating friends. The talk was gripping. Can't wait to do it again. 

We watched Don't Look Up. I enjoyed it a lot and don't understand why it has generated such negativity. Yes, it's broad and even silly sometimes and takes on obvious targets. But the topics are huge: politicians only interested in profit and polls are throwing citizens under the bus, the American media is appallingly shallow, and the world is heading into disaster by ignoring scientists. Adam McKay, director of another satirical film I loved, The Big Short, presents this dire scenario clearly and yet makes us laugh with a parade of great actors, particularly my favourite Mark Rylance as a sociopathic billionaire and an unrecognizable Cate Blanchett as a venal TV anchor. The film haunts me. Terrific.

Last night, I watched The Center Will Not Hold, a doc about Joan Didion. Fascinating. She's terrifyingly thin throughout but particularly skeletal at the end; David Hare who worked on her play speaks about how he wanted most of all to fatten her up. She's almost disturbingly detached about her life. A reporter always, groundbreaking, skilled, courageous.

And then the Hogwarts reunion, a twenty-year anniversary gathering of those involved with the Harry Potter films, came on. I intended to watch just a bit but ended up staying to the end - moving interviews with the young stars, who spent ten years of their young lives making the films, with the directors, with great British actors like Ralph Fiennes, Gary Oldman, the hilarious Helena Bonham Carter. Finding out the actors who played the diabolical Malfoys are nice people, that Hermione in actuality had a huge crush on Draco ... who knew?  

The doc could hardly have given shorter shrift to the magnificent, now controversial creator of all this magic: writer J. K. Rowling, who appears in a few brief clips. The Star recently printed a half page opinion article by a Torontonian telling us how very much all the books meant to her, but how now she despises the "cruel" "transphobic" JK. If she watches the reunion, she writes in the sweetest bit of virtue signalling, she'll mitigate the "damage" she has done by making a donation to a pro-trans organization. The headline affirmed: "transphobic" Rowling. It's simply accepted as fact.

As if a philanthropic writer who has donated huge amounts to charities particularly for women and children, who's known as extremely open-minded and generous with her time and money, who created a series about the struggles and eventual triumph of a group of outsiders that has meant the world to countless young people - and older people too - is full of vicious hateful blind prejudice. That cast members of the film have parroted this rhetoric must be especially devastating for her, not to mention her near exclusion from a celebration of her extraordinary achievement. 

Has the Twitter mob bothered to read what she actually said? Her thoughtful essay is below. It matters. 

The issue of gender and sexual orientation is incredibly complex; we're still learning and figuring out how to deal with different orientations and biologies. Rather than leaping to condemn, at least a writer who obviously - obviously! - is not a despicable bigot, we on both sides of this and any other issue need to be able to talk to each other without hatred, recrimination, and blame. 

https://www.jkrowling.com/opinions/j-k-rowling-writes-about-her-reasons-for-speaking-out-on-sex-and-gender-issues/