Life in Pieces, A

A Life in Pieces
by Jo-Ann Wallace
Published by Thistledown Press
Review by Brandon Fick
$24.95 ISBN 9781771872560

Jo-Ann Wallace’s A Life in Pieces is a stunning memoir, brimming with wit, intellect, and poignancy. Wallace, who passed away in June, has left behind a book of gems, thirty short essays that map her life from childhood in a Montreal suburb to grad school in Toronto, onto years chairing a large English department at the University of Alberta, and her final chapter of life on the west coast. Wallace was a longtime academic, but she was also a poet, which is evident in the way these essays move associatively, back and forth in time, back and forth into ancestry, imagining, remembering, and questioning the life she lived, and the lives she did not.

It is a challenge to select essays to highlight because each one offers something to ponder. Most start conversationally with an anecdote, then expand, retract, expand, like an accordion. “Whimsy” moves from the childhood memory of Wallace’s parents watching the Jimmy Stewart movie Harvey, about a man’s imaginary rabbit friend, to her own imaginary friend, to a friend’s distaste for “whimsy,” prompting her to theorize that beneath that “disavowal of whimsy” lies a “beating and vulnerable sensitivity.” “Elvira Madigan” is about watching the 1967 Swedish romantic drama as a teen, then soon afterwards, grappling with her “first overwhelming love” that “opened to the world of death.” Watched by Wallace again, fifty years later, the film is “about loving in the face of mortality, the mortality of the whole world, loving the whole world.” “Mean Girls” is an apology for her part in “perpetuating what must have been the misery” of three fellow high school students, a “sin of omission, not a sin of commission, but a sin nonetheless.”

This is an unabashedly feminist book. It is eye-opening for me, a twenty-five-year-old man who has grown up on the prairies, to read about a girlhood in working-class Montreal in the 1950s and 1960s, and a young womanhood in the 1970s, filled with unpleasant jobs and situations. While working at a factoring company, Wallace began to read feminist writers: “I was reading Doris Lessing. I was reading the early Margaret Drabble, Margaret Atwood, Marie-Claire Blais, Sylvia Plath. Bit by bit I was putting a world together, a world that had people like me at the centre: young women feeling something, wanting something, just about bursting with something.” In “Me and Not-Me,” Wallace reflects on the 2022 overturning of Roe v. Wade, and her own abortion at eighteen. Unlike the writer Annie Ernaux, who had an illegal abortion in 1963, and referred to the fetus as “that thing” in her own memoir, Wallace “felt all along that the fetus and I were in it together, we were a unit.” She notes the “clandestinity” of abortion, particularly in the past, and admits to a “compulsion to confess” to new friends and boyfriends in years to come. She does not know if this is driven by “pride in who I was and the decisions I made” or “a desire to be punished.” The book also considers the importance of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway across her adult life, a touchstone she could repeatedly turn to in order “to find expression for something I [was] going through.”

In the final chapters, Wallace writes about her terminal cancer diagnosis. There is no softening the hard truth, no sentimental prose. In “Cancer in the Time of COVID (Summer 2022),” she states that COVID restrictions have taken “a lot of the weight off” to go through treatment in the expected way: “Cancer has made me realize that my ordinary, daily life is my bucket list… [It] has freed me to live my ordinary life, not heroically, not engaged in a courageous battle: just living. After all, I’m alive until I’m not.” There is something bittersweet yet reassuring in seeing someone face mortality with the same whimsy they had in childhood. Apart from notable adult experiences like marriage, divorce, cross-country moves, ageing, and the death of a parent, Wallace is the same person who played a game called “White Swan, Black Swan” with her sister, and had an imaginary Scottish terrier named Scotty. Fittingly, the last essay, “Mars,” ends with these words: “I’m hardly alone in desiring this, but somehow [my] two fantasies – that the nature of the universe reveals itself [at death], and that one’s dogs are there – seem compatible. It is, after all, a friendly, homely universe.”

At times reading this memoir I was struck by the strange sense that it was about a well-known celebrity, or at least a universally recognized writer. I think some of this has to do with the confident yet conversational prose, as well as the willingness to examine every aspect of life, front to back, even what one’s life meant before it began, through the lens of ancestors. Who is – was – Jo-Ann Wallace? A Life in Pieces tells us. Eloquently. Enjoyably. Who are we, the reader? A Life in Pieces tells us. One need not have grown up in a Montreal suburb or become an academic to see themselves here. In the ultimate goal of memoir, resonance and relevance, it is a success. Of course, those who knew Jo-Ann Wallace will be thankful her life is memorialized. But even more so, those who did not will wish they could thank her for sharing her life in pieces.

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