The story is complex, so we'll start with the family: a mother, a father and their two girls, one of whom is fifteen and recently lost her virginity (albeit somewhat unwittingly; she turns to the man directly thereafter and gasps, "Did we go all the way?"). Oldest daughter becomes pregnant. Mothe...
I read this book when it first came out back in 1998. At that point, I was still in middle school and had seen it featured at our library. Through the years I have often thought back on that book and while I couldn't remember precisely what it was about, I knew it involved elephants and for some ...
This is a disturbing book, one that once begun kept me turning the pages. It is very typically Gowdy, meaning that the protagonist is a humanized creep. And that is what marks Gowdy apart from the good writer — the ability to bring to her readers a feeling of understanding, and even some empathy,...
Deep down, beneath the lurid sex and freakish characters, this collection of short stories, We So Seldom Look on Love -- a gorgeous title borrowed from a poem by Frank O'Hara --, has a gooey, warm heart.I think, this book is absolutely divisive. Some people will see Barbara Gowdy's stories as exp...
© 1992 by Barbara Gowdy. All rights reserved. Published by HarperCollins Publishers Ltd. This short story was originally published in We So Seldom Look on Love by Barbara Gowdy, first published in print form in 1992 by Somerville House Publising. First published by HarperCollins Publishers Ltd. i...
When she was four, her family moved to Don Mills, a suburb of Toronto that would come to inspire the settings for much of her fiction. Gowdy considered a career as a pianist until she decided her talent was mediocre. While working as an editor at the publishing house Lester & Orpen, she found...
I picture myself trudging up the Rockies, sleeping in caves, then slogging across the Prairies, through walls of wheat. I get lost in a corn row. I give birth in a barn, in the hay, the cattle are lowing and dipping their big slab heads over my stall. To hold my course, this one in Vancouver, I r...
When she was four, her family moved to Don Mills, a suburb of Toronto that would come to inspire the settings for much of her fiction. Gowdy considered a career as a pianist until she decided her talent was mediocre. While working as an editor at the publishing house Lester & Orpen, she found...
© 1992 by Barbara Gowdy. All rights reserved. Published by HarperCollins Publishers Ltd. This short story was originally published in We So Seldom Look on Love by Barbara Gowdy, first published in print form in 1992 by Somerville House Publising. First published by HarperCollins Publishers Ltd. i...
Except for a big black spot like a saddle on its back, it was all white—white fur as silky as angel hair. “Her name shall be Rapunzel,” Lou announced, since she’d just read that story. They carried her home, into the house and down to the t? room, where—a surprising sight—their father was loungin...
I’m flooded with memories, mostly images from dreams I’ve had. A leather jacket with four tulips, eating blueberries half blind and having blueberries scattered on the ground, growing limbs that turn out to be tree limbs, useless. I remember all my nightmares, they come back twice as horrible. My...
Some of the women are covering their ears. Hot Rod doesn’t care. He struts around mouthing the words. He has disastrous teeth, crooked and bucked, and there’s a gap on the upper left side where at least two are missing. Every time he reaches the end of the runway he flicks his tongue in and out a...
© 1992 by Barbara Gowdy. All rights reserved. Published by HarperCollins Publishers Ltd. This short story was originally published in We So Seldom Look on Love by Barbara Gowdy, first published in print form in 1992 by Somerville House Publising. First published by HarperCollins Publishers Ltd. i...