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...