Marian Botsford Fraser

The act of turning dark memories into words is difficult, especially when not working in one’s mother tongue. The writing in itself — finding the right phrase in a foreign language, then building a narrative — requires enormous strength of purpose. And to put a deeply personal story of persecution, flight, and loss of identity on the…

In Landscapes of Silence, two narrative streams flow over the Arctic topography that Hugh Brody returns to again and again. The first is a story he has avoided telling all his life, about his upbringing in a Jewish household in Sheffield, England. The second is the story of Qallunaat’s impact on Inuit. Putting these narratives into conversation — making connections between them — was something Brody long…

About thirty pages into her memoir, All Things Consoled, Elizabeth Hay is recalling a fight with her mother; it’s a recognizably wide-ranging fight (on and off over several hours) at a classic battleground (the family cottage), somehow embracing (but not directly or exclusively) rotting peaches, wasted chicken juices, teasing versus taunting, greasy…

On a wintry weekend in 1991, I attended a meeting of Janeites at the Château Laurier Hotel in Ottawa. Janeites are Jane Austen enthusiasts; this was the annual meeting of the Jane Austen Society of North America, when several hundred devotees of Austen assemble in a different city every year. They listen to readings, admire displays of quilts and…

It is a rare book that can alter forever the reader’s understanding of a single word, an ordinary word that until now has had one meaning only. The word is “caress.” A soft, musical word, with loving connotations; how can it possibly be used without irony to describe acts of torture? But henceforth for this reader it is yoked to images of flayed skin and clamshell…