Toward the end of Patrick deWitt’s new novel, French Exit, its sexagenarian protagonist admits while she’s touring Paris’s Musée d’Orsay with a friend that her life might appear a cliché. “[And,] yes, my life is riddled by clichés,” Frances Price says, “but do you know what a cliché is? It’s a story so old and thrilling that it’s grown old in its hopeful retelling.”
That iffy definition of cliché is strange sugar-coating coming from the usually acerbic…
Anne Kingston
Anne Kingston was a Canadian journalist and the author of The Edible Man: Dave Nichol, President’s Choice & the Making of Popular Taste and The Meaning of Wife.
Articles by
Anne Kingston
The Money Trap
Big Pharma’s bid to woo doctors, patient groups, journalists, and the rest of us October 2017
For more than 30 years, the physician Joel Lexchin has been a crusading Cassandra, warning Canadians of the commingling of interests between the medical profession and the pharmaceutical industry—and the dire risks it poses to drug safety and public health. His 1984 book, The Real Pushers: A Critical Analysis of the Canadian Drug Industry, foreshadowed by decades the rise of a booming literary genre devoted to the pharmaceuticalization of medicine—from Marcia Angell’s 2004…