Parting Thoughts

I did not know Jo‑Ann Wallace, the scholar and writer who died at the age of seventy-one in June 2024, but I might as well have — for I seem, somewhat eerily, to have followed her life course. To my mind, A Life in Pieces, Wallace’s posthumously published memoir, offers evidence of a common history, which I couldn’t help but trace as I read her vivid and affecting work of remembrance.

My presumption of kinship originates in Montreal, where in 1953 Wallace was born to anglophone parents of Scottish descent. As she recorded in the first section of her book, “Early,” she was the eldest of four girls, and the family lived in an “upper fourplex” in the working-class neighbourhood of Ahuntsic, in the northern part of the city. Their three-bedroom apartment was accessible via an internal staircase, “past the inside front door” of 43 Leslie Gault. Madame Bergeron, the landlady, spoke no English, and Mrs. Wallace spoke no French. Thus they lived side by side as two solitudes, with Jo‑Ann sitting on the staircase and serving as translator and conduit for the two women.

During the day, the radio was always on and “tuned to CJAD.” In the evenings, the sisters watched Bonanza and Walt Disney in the living room. Sometimes, while watching television, Wallace laid her head in her mother’s lap to have her hair stroked and tucked “behind my ear.” The household was one not of books but of ashtrays: “Murano glass ashtrays; ashtrays that were pieces of furniture, perched on their own pedestals; boomerang-shaped ceramic ashtrays; Spin‑o‑Matic self-cleaning ashtrays; primitive clay ashtrays that kids made at school for Father’s Day.” Both her parents were heavy smokers, and Wallace lived “in a deep fug of cigarette smoke,” with burn marks on furniture and burn holes in upholstery and clothing.

When Jo‑Ann was ten, the Wallaces decamped to a subdivision in the West Island. Although it’s not named, a reference to Westpark School locates it as Dollard-des-Ormeaux, at the time muddy and under construction, strewn with “discarded paint cans and building materials where lawns would eventually dominate.” Their “four-bedroom, split-level house” was spacious, but the move felt like a shift “from one country to another where the language, the games, the expectations were different.” As the first-born, Wallace got her own room and cherished the new privacy. Still, she had intrusive dreams of “atomic warfare, quicksand, and genocidal Nazism.”

Since I am a near contemporary, just five years younger than Wallace, memories of my own early life surfaced as I immersed myself in her evocative first chapters. I, too, was born in Montreal to anglophone parents, though mine were of Eastern European background. We lived in a small Snowdon apartment. My father and mother spoke French as well as English, but as Ashkenazi Jews they formed part of the city’s third solitude. Later I also developed a fluency in French, which I used with friends and came to love.

Like Wallace’s, my parents sought improved living conditions by relocating to the suburbs. When I was two, they purchased a three-bedroom bungalow on the island of Laval, eighteen kilometres north of Montreal. In that modest home — not a split-level — the preferred radio station was also CJAD, the air was filled with smoke, and the ashtrays were brimming with cigarette butts. Key amenities available in Dollard, such as public transit that easily transported commuters to their downtown jobs, were non-existent in Chomedey. Wallace’s “shiny new suburb” even had a tiny public library that “held more books” than she had “ever seen in one place.” Chomedey never provided such a refuge, and I felt its absence.

My parents had two more daughters, and I acquired seniority. When we three played together and I consigned my youngest sibling to “an inferior role”— I’ve written about that in these very pages — my actions were in keeping with Wallace’s own treatment of her sister Nancy, which she regarded as “entirely predictable” behaviour for older sisters. We girls also watched Walt Disney, but Lassie was by far our favourite show (Bonanza was not our thing). Every Sunday evening, we were glued to the television, as my mother brushed out my long hair, gently untangling the knots. In my own bedroom, similarly accorded me as the eldest, I repeatedly dreamt of being kidnapped by a bogeyman, of trying valiantly to calm my frightened sisters, and of never being rescued by our parents, who refused to pay the expected ransom. The threat was not atomic and the imagined abductor was less genocidal Nazi than evil villain, but the recurring nightmare was chilling nonetheless.

In “Middle,” Wallace moves gradually beyond youth, though her path toward maturity — as for most of us — was brambly and patchy. These were years of initiation. When she was “old enough to have small breasts,” she encountered a lecherous male who leaped out of the bush, grabbed her and her friend, and locked “his arms around our necks.” The girls managed to escape and knew never to tell their parents of the danger they had faced. “Silence and subterfuge,” they intuited, were needed to secure their future freedom. Other such incidents occurred: “a stranger trying to grab my breast as he passed in the street, a wedding guest pinning me up against a post . . . , a young man trapping me in the revolving door of the downtown Eaton’s.” It was all “just the usual crap,” Wallace concedes, “relatively minor, stopping well short of violence.”

Boyfriends followed. In 1970, when her first beau took a job in Labrador, she flew out to visit him. She was seventeen, and she remembers her “first plane ride, my first experience of sex, even my first coffee which I drank on the plane, black, a revelation.” A visceral memory of that trip, the pleasurable taste of black coffee, contrasts with the want of strong feeling, either physical or emotional, that accompanied the abortion she had soon afterwards at Henry Morgentaler’s medical clinic in Montreal. (Ironically, when she travelled to Europe three years later with another boyfriend, her aunt’s greatest concern was that she retain her virginity.) Through it all, Wallace was seemingly composed. Moreover, her tenderness for the aborted fetus and the perception that “it wished me well and wanted what was best for me,” that it “was both me and not‑me but mostly me,” remained constant over time. No doubt, women readers across generations will be impressed by her radical self-acceptance.

Although she lacked the “gift of easy gab,” female friendships were vital to Wallace, and three companions, Gaby, Carole, and Dana, feature prominently. Wallace’s oldest ally was Gaby, a ready resource whom she consulted while writing the volume. Gaby corroborated Wallace’s recollections and furnished fugitive details when necessary. Her high school chum Carole shared her “longing for an artistic, a bohemian life.” Together they took the commuter train into Montreal to eat at Pam Pam, the renowned Hungarian coffee shop on Stanley Street. When Carole died suddenly at the age of fifty, Wallace had not seen her for years. To honour their past connection, she knitted a totemic pouch to hold “a tiny silver owl pin,” a gift from her late friend. Dana, a confidante from undergraduate days, recalled best-loved items of clothing and favourite hairstyles. Wallace recorded their common interest in writing and their deep bond, rekindled after a hiatus of twenty years. These dear friends appear as animated figures, their voices clearly discernible to Wallace, as she lovingly wove them into this textured review of her life.

Until she found her academic footing, Wallace was an indifferent student. After completing high school, which she loathed, she attended Vanier College in St‑Laurent but quickly dropped out. After a series of office jobs, she decided to return to cégep. She chose Marianopolis, a small private college in Westmount, where she discovered her love of learning. When Marianopolis proved too conservative, she transferred back to Vanier, where she took a creative writing class and started publishing poetry. Then, at the age of twenty-two, she left her parents’ home in Dollard and entered Concordia University. She had already met the man who would become her first husband, and in 1978, with her bachelor’s degree in hand, they left Montreal for Toronto (where the marriage failed).

Reading about Wallace’s experience of male aggression made me think of strolling along Décarie Boulevard at the age of fourteen. When a lewd trucker pulled up and said, “You could be a model, you know,” I was flattered. One night, some creep flashed me on St. Catherine Street. Another, I was cornered in an elevator by a drunken guy. I was an undergraduate student living in a sketchy part of Ottawa where rent was cheap. Fortunately, when we reached my floor and I raced down the hallway to my apartment, he did not follow me. When a leering exhibitionist took a seat facing me on the Toronto subway, I, too, chalked it up to “the usual crap.”

The year I spent at Vanier College came back to me as well. I was a student there in the mid-1970s, and cégep was exciting after the routine of high school. I explored a new range of subjects with stimulating instructors, but a prolonged strike disrupted my studies, so I couldn’t fully enjoy my classes. I didn’t drop out, but I didn’t continue for the usual four semesters. Instead, I entered Carleton University in Ottawa. My departure from Quebec for Ontario came two years earlier than Wallace’s. I was also accompanied by a boyfriend, but that relationship fizzled out.

I did not become pregnant, but I did work at Morgentaler’s clinic on Harbord Street in Toronto. I was a graduate student, and I answered phones, compiled medical histories, and booked appointments to help pay the rent. Slave Chick was my unofficial title. I relished the sense of purpose and community that the job provided, especially since I had few close friends who offered the warmth and companionship that Wallace celebrated. It was a lonely time in my life.

Wallace and I did not cross paths in Toronto. By the time I arrived at York University, where we both pursued doctorates in English, she had accepted a position in the Department of English at the University of Alberta. Even so, as I read “Late,” the final part of her memoir, I noticed further resemblances.

After Montreal, Wallace found Toronto “alien and unsympathetic.” She was married, which set her apart from most of her fellow students. She wrote a dissertation on Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway and then centred her scholarship and teaching on the work of women, always accompanied by elegant Clarissa Dalloway, who was “keeping step with me for more than forty years.” (Wallace’s obituary cites her feminist approach, focused on “early British modernism, and especially on women whose lives and works did not fit easily into accepted literary critical moulds.”) In Edmonton, she met and wedded Stephen, “a genuinely good man.” After retiring from her university post, Wallace returned to creative writing and began publishing personal essays, including some in this magazine.

As part of her retrospective journey, Wallace reflected on family relations. She came to the realization that her parents’ union “was not a particularly happy marriage, at least not in the later years.” She saw, as well, that she was more like her quiet father than her uneasy mother. Finally, she accepted that her mother, who was “very old” at this point, may have loved her but didn’t really like her much. Wallace would have preferred being liked, however, for “liking implies separateness, difference. You’re over there and I’m over here, and yet I take an interest.”

In the mid-1980s, I also found Toronto inhospitable. I, too, was married, which separated me from others in my cohort. The writings of Adele Wiseman, and especially her novel Crackpot, with its inimitable protagonist, Hoda, became a near obsession, and they still hold a central place in my life. My scholarship and teaching attended to the poetry and prose of Jewish women, Canadian modernists whose achievements warrant wider recognition. I went on to publish poetry and personal essays, some of which probe familial connections, including my parents’ fraught ties and my mother’s changeable nature. Like Wallace, I was eventually lucky; my own marriage endures to this day.

Wallace was especially proud of having “inherited the Wallace self-confidence” and justly so. It sustained her during life’s challenges, possibly never more than in her final years during the COVID‑19 pandemic, when cancer touched her body though not her sparkling mind. She chose to meet the diagnosis by taking up her pen and writing A Life in Pieces, the gift she bequeathed to her students and colleagues; her friends and family members; her husband, Stephen Slemon, and stepdaughter, Allie; and us, her readers.

I have written this in the spirit of whimsy, one of Wallace’s more captivating themes. Whimsy also combines with pluck and candour to render her distinctive voice. I’m aware, of course, that my existence is separate and apart from Wallace’s. I sit here, at my desk, while she writes no more. A Life in Pieces brings her to life, but I wish I had known her in the flesh.