A Little Sincerity

Among my more vivid memories of my nerdish preteen years in the city then called Madras is of reading Oscar Wilde plays aloud with my mother. We read under fluorescent tube light in a house surrounded on three sides by sand and the Bay of Bengal, from a hardbound volume that now sits on her bookcase in Toronto. I knew nothing of Wilde’s tribulations then, or even that he was gay. I had only words on a page, mordantly funny and sharp. We chortled our way through The Importance of Being Earnest, then Lady Windermere’s Fan, then A Woman of No Importance, each playing a fleet of droll, witty characters.

Life bobs along on unseen currents, and many years later, when I made a documentary for CBC Radio’s The Sunday Edition about my mother’s mother—in brief: married at ten, a mother at fifteen (and then again, five more times), she issued a “declaration of...