The Binge

Discovery isn’t invention: before the colonizers arrived, every land they invaded did, in fact, already exist. Discovery is just finding your way to things that have always been there. So I didn’t discover M. A. C. Farrant, who’s been alive since 1947 and publishing since the 1980s. I just started reading her books. And while connecting with something (or someone) new can strike us so astonishingly, and exuberantly, that it feels like a revelation, any such discovery is simply self-discovery — as if some unknown, entombed piece of who we are has been chiselled loose and is falling neatly into place.

I have the writer Gary Barwin to thank for recommending M. A. C. Farrant to me in December 2024. The first book that I read, a week into 2025, was a collection of very short stories, The Days: Forecasts, Warnings, Advice. I loved it, and over the following year or so I read nearly twenty of her books, concluding with her memoir, My Turquoise Years. I can now say with confidence that Farrant is my favourite Canadian writer, this despite knowing so little about her that — after a confusing YouTube search unearthed videos introducing her as “Macy,” “Mack,” and “Marion” and rhyming her surname variously with “errant,” “Arendt,” and the first two syllables of “tarantula”— I had to get Gary to email the woman herself to ask how to properly pronounce her name. (Answer: Enunciate each initial; Fair‑ANT.)

Most of Farrant’s books are, like The Days, collections of microfictions, some no longer than a single page. She has called this format “experimenting with a ‘small space.’ ” Among her stories are one about taking a vacuum cleaner to obedience school, another about a “famous breast historian,” and another about a woman married to Mr. Bean, who in this telling is a ninety-year-old sociopath with an eleven-and-a-half-inch penis. Her characters include Dorothy Parker and Leonard Cohen and Barbie and a young man with “the ability to create new dawns . . . by sliding a credit card into a cloud and shouting, ‘Ta‑da!’ ” Sometimes her stories read like entries in a deranged almanac. “It’s funny out today. There’s a mild grin in the air,” she tells us in The World Afloat, and in The Days she writes of “the calendar of spectacular dreams, that tells us each day begins with, ‘Holy, there’s something going on here!’ And ends with a goosebump factor.” In 2021, she published One Good Thing, an entire book of responses to the gardening column in the Victoria Times Colonist. Her work is hilarious, strange, sensitive, joyous, acerbic, incisive, and, most significantly — and perhaps inarticulately — wonderful.

Farrant’s particular brand of wonderfulness feels unique in Canadian literature. The closest peer I can think of is Ken Sparling, who also mines the uncanny from the banalities of middle-class suburbia. In her ironic, deadpan swerves into absurdity —“We wanted to be in a happy place. So we bought a Lego Farm set and moved in”— she also reminds me of the poet Stuart Ross. And while Farrant might invite more immediate comparisons to American contemporaries — the Williamses (Diane and Joy) and the Davises (Lydia and Kathryn) — her warmth, humility, mischievousness, and bouts of unabashed goofiness make her writing feel distinctly Canadian. And perhaps, because of its recent preoccupation with the grim environmental legacies that her generation has bequeathed to those that follow, it’s even distinctly British Columbian.

A tension between levity and doom haunts Farrant’s books. At times her writing approaches a parody of self-help or at least a probing of the impulses that produce bromides of affirmation and solace. As early as her first collection, she was playing with the language of New Age awakenings: “The path to enlightenment takes work. You don’t give up because of irritating shit like woodpeckers or being afraid about living and dying.” In her more recent work, the satire softens, and her maxims turn meditative. “If things go well during our brilliant and confusing lives, there is a textured blend of young and old, heart and edge. It’s today and tomorrow, and try not to be a jerk,” she writes in Jigsaw. “Life at times seems to have no fixed shape, no starting point, no edges. It is always changing, always beginning, never completed, never solved.”

Motifs, recurring images, ideas, and themes echo across her bibliography, with stories separated by decades seemingly in conversation with one another. In “The Party,” from the 1997 collection What’s True, Darling, a woman kidnaps her house guests before they can head home and demands that they continue to have a good time: “On the count of three, I want everyone laughing. I want mirth on your faces. . . . Louder. Now keep that up.” Nineteen years later, with “It’s Supposed to Be a Fun Deal,” the plot thickens: “Everyone’s so nervous these days. Not me. I’ve been wearing my party clothes all week.”

A sardonic, perversely mordant joy — a kind of metaphysical giggling in the face of death — is also consistent across three decades of writing, as is how Farrant evaluates the utility and cultural worth of literary fiction amid a broader culture that is, at best, indifferent and more often hostile to literature. “I’m enslaved to a vagrant art that rewards fine sentences with a nod of recognition only,” admits one of her more self-referential narrators. “There really is a gun to my head. I put it there myself.” Yet she and her fictional proxies continue to do the work — if not as voices of resistance, then as outcasts yelping their cris de coeur from the cultural margins:

For Farrant, if the writer’s job is not exactly to provide consolation, it’s at least to resist gloom as a dominant mode of the end times and to promote communion in shared joy and laughter, wherever and whenever we can get it. In lesser hands, such a project might feel reckless and irresponsible, a symptom of privilege in a world that affords such opportunities to only an exclusive, fortunate few. But Farrant’s work is not the literary equivalent of those patronizing “Coexist” bumper stickers; rarely does it feel preachy or prescriptive, since her first-person narrators are so brazenly honest about their own terror. In Jigsaw, which doesn’t explicitly claim to be autobiographical but certainly feels that way, the speaker confesses to “fretting about the end of my world,” with that possessive pronoun — my emphasis — offering refreshing, relatable honesty.

It’s a trick to write so acutely about the self and avoid lapsing into solipsism or to lament one’s insignificance amid the end times without turning maudlin and, to be honest, boring. But Farrant is a bit of a magician when it comes to getting away with stuff that stretches my patience in a particularly egocentric strain of twenty-first-century writing. Rather than adopting autofiction’s narcissistic tendency to turn every experience, observation, and interaction into a mirror for self-analysis, her tiny stories, despite their brevity, tend to expand outward from the self with a pluralistic, communal sense of wonder and curiosity. Even some titles — particularly The World Afloat and Down the Road to Eternity and Darwin Alone in the Universe — suggest a grandiose cosmology informing her process of exploration and investigation.

The existentialism of Farrant’s fiction is at once micro and macro, personal and collective, small and big, and its scope often transcends human existence, extrapolating post-apocalyptic scenarios that accept the annihilation of our species as inevitable fact. “Actually, the strange truth is that the future is empty,” she has written. “There is no one and nothing in it.” Still, amid the ruins of the apocalypse, she finds cause for optimism: “I’m hoping there’s a black box out there with my name on it. Hidden somewhere in the rubble of early twenty-first century life. Possibly battered and melted but inside the taped message is still intact. A few succinct sentences which would explain everything — solve the mystery, explain the disaster which is our lives.” Surely in that black box are Farrant’s own books, and if they don’t really offer solutions, their beauty and worth consist in straining to do so.

I have found that struggle completely addictive. It’s rare these days to think of bingeing outside of how we stream television. I’ve certainly never read this many books by a single author, never mind in a single year — not even during a preteen obsession with Stephen King or the Roberto Bolaño kick that consumed me and a few thousand other fanatics in the early 2010s. What is it about Farrant, then? I suppose there’s professional appreciation at play: as a fellow writer, I deeply admire the laconic ease of her prose, her remarkable tonal control, and how gracefully she lightens dark material with wry humour — to borrow one of her own phrases, the caustic levity of “lighthearted spite.”

But Farrant’s books have also inspired an exuberance in me that I can liken only to the thrill of a new friendship. Her work has ignited that insatiable receptivity to novel experiences that peaks, for most of us, in adolescence, when we are most actively trying to figure out who we are. In her writing I find a way of being in the world, and an expression of it, that I like and aspire to; perhaps, when reading her stories, I can imagine myself as a participant in their scenarios rather than just a witness.

There’s a Yeats line I love: “It is well to be close enough to an artist to feel for him a personal liking, close enough perhaps to feel that our liking is returned.” Fellowship is not necessarily something I seek in my reading — many of my favourite authors are or were reprehensible people — but something like camaraderie, when I happen upon it, does feel kind of nice. When I read Robert Walser or James Tate or Georges Perec or Ali Smith or R. K. Narayan, the warmth glowing behind their words feels like affection. That’s been my experience of reading Farrant too: without ever striking a false, cloying, or sentimental note, her humour and honesty and spirit of play — what I appreciate as wonderfulness — convey to me an expression of care.

When Donald Horton and Richard Wohl coined the term “para-social interaction” in 1956, they were referring specifically to the still new “mass media — radio, television, and the movies.” Their focus on the image seemed in dialogue with Marshall McLuhan as well as with Guy Debord’s notions of capitalist spectacle. Horton and Wohl identified a “persona” cultivated by the public figure to whom we attach, hastening a “ramification of intimacy” between us and them. “In time,” they wrote, “the devotee — the ‘fan’— comes to believe that he ‘knows’ the persona more intimately and profoundly than others do; that he ‘understands’ his character and appreciates his values and motives.” So, yes, I am projecting onto Farrant, via her work and its personas, the fabric of a life I admire: one that seeks simple and genuine pleasure in friendships and the natural world and activities and community, and that deploys jokes to soften the existential horror of hurtling toward imminent doom. “I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of people who seem to have been put on the planet to make me happy,” she claims in One Good Thing. I probably can too — at least the people I know and not just the ones I imagine knowing.

M. A. C. Farrant turns seventy-nine this month. I’d like to wish her a happy birthday! And, having exhausted almost her entire catalogue, I hope she’s working on something new. I hope she continues, in all future publications, to push the limits of what prose can achieve and effect in a small space. I hope her next book is funny and smart and weird — and a little sad and scary too. I’m aware Farrant wasn’t put on this planet to make me happy, but I hope she’ll forgive me for feeling that way. Although here’s my favourite Canadian author on hope: “Hope is hugely over-rated, you say. Its sickly fingers, the way it gropes, the way its victims pant for death. I’ve heard it all a hundred times. The fear, the thrill. And there are many ways to kill a plant, all of them wonderful.”