Confessions of a Bookseller

For fifteen years I was a bookseller in Toronto. I would spend four to eight hours a day, three to six days a week talking about books, most of which I’d never read. I had my tastes and my preferred genres, but I also tried to keep up on what was selling well and what was winning awards. Still, small press poetry and weird fiction consistently beat out the Giller short list and hardcover releases on my reading list, so I often found myself stretching the truth. In my experience, many booksellers will do this, especially when the shop is busy. Bolstered by cover copy or an overheard line from a co-worker, they claim to have devoured a title just to nudge the customer to commit to the purchase. The more honest way is to draw from reviews. Then you can say something like “The New Yorker just raved about it” or “So‑and‑so really likes this one.” But sometimes, many times, out of self-consciousness or just laziness, I found myself barefaced lying about my favourite part of a book I’d never cracked the cover of.

February by Lisa Moore was one such book. Published by the House of Anansi Press in 2009, it was one of the titles we had trouble keeping in stock. There was so much positive media and awards attention around it that, quite often, all I had to do was to walk someone over to the front table, put it in their hands, and tell them how much I loved it.

Recently, in a conversation about my own writing, a friend recommended it to me: “It reminds me of the way you play with memory.” Here was a good opportunity to make peace with my past deceit and see if the novel lived up to what I had been saying about it for so long.

Before moving on, I need to apologize to those who trusted my informed opinion as a seasoned bookseller. Sorry, but I was being paid very little and there were many literary temptations to consider. And when it came to blind suggestions, I thought Lisa Moore was a pretty safe bet. In the end, all you did was help support an independent bookstore. So let’s call it square.

At its best, February is a humanizing, dignified look at working-class life in Newfoundland and Labrador. It follows the after-effects of the tragic sinking of the Ocean Ranger oil rig in 1982 that took the lives of all eighty-four crew members. Moore gracefully juxtaposes past and present to explore the way grief changes a small community over time, while never losing sight of her protagonist, Helen O’Mara. After her husband drowns, Helen puts raising her kids ahead of her own needs. In time, she is rewarded for her sacrifices with three successful adult children, grandchildren, and good sex from a satisfying new lover.

At its most irksome, however, February depicts poor people with a double standard. In Newfoundland, characters are drawn with complexity and measured by their actions and behaviours. In contrast, city dwellers in other places often get reduced to a series of negative physical details. “She has the sweet smile and shiny scalded complexion of someone on antidepressants, and there is a scar, a soft white wrinkle, running from her nose to the top of her misshapen lip,” Moore writes of a person working at a Tim Hortons in an airport. The perspective is that of Jane, an anthropology student who is pregnant with Helen’s grandchild and writing a thesis on unhoused populations. Throughout February, she has encounters with “street people.” She seems to have an uncanny ability to understand them after only a brief meeting, usually while navigating the chaotic streets of Toronto. When not providing her with almost magical advice, they are described as “full of worms. They were full of AIDS. They were spiritually bereft. They were luckless. They were a they.”

While housing has long been a salient issue in Canada, February, as it reads today, reveals how much the discourse around homelessness has changed over the past two decades. These seemingly harsh observations may be better understood as remnants of a less nuanced cultural conversation rather than as a reflection of the author’s values.

Nonetheless, for a book so successful at sensitively depicting how tragedy can shake communities to their core, it was disappointing to find that it also sneered sometimes at big cities, like a tipsy uncle at Christmas dinner telling you about his last visit to Toronto — especially since Moore’s writing has a deep tenderness toward the little things that alter our lives forever. I only wish she had been able to extend her sympathies to those beyond the familiar setting of her home island. As I’ve learned first-hand, it’s important to at least be honest when you are describing something you don’t understand.