A Sexistential Saga

Early in The Memory Artists by Jeffrey Moore, a waitress asks the multi-talented, darkly bitter Norval Blaquière for any advice he might give an aspiring writer. Norval, whose first and only novel was an instant international hit, tells her, “Don’t recount your dreams, don’t puke up your diary, don’t write anything before age thirty.” When the waitress reminds him that he wrote his famous book in his twenties, Norval replies, “Learn from my mistake.”

In 1999, Jeffrey Moore was safely into his thirties and working as a lecturer and translator in Montreal when his first novel, Prisoner in a Red-Rose Chain, was published in Saskatoon by Thistledown and won the Commonwealth Writers Prize for a first novel. Along with $10,000 came trips to New Delhi to receive the award and to London to meet the Queen, as well as international publishing contracts for both Prisoner and Moore’s next work of fiction. The Memory Artists is that...