It’s a powerful novel written by Lisa Moore with How to love. A novel about family, about unconditional love – but also about the love that we pass on to those who cross our path, against all odds.
A novel that takes us to Newfoundland, into the heart of the most violent storm the island has ever known and into the abyss of a mother who finds herself at the bedside of her son, savagely beaten. A moving novel animated by a disturbing sincerity which recalls a title like Poor little sorrowsby Miriam Toews.
“I wanted to imagine a family that wasn’t the typical heteronormative family,” confides the Newfoundland writer, contacted in St. John’s. I meant that for us to truly love, we must love outside of our circle, of what we sometimes think of as the family structure, that is, those related to us by blood or whom we let’s marry. »
Her character Jules is the kind of mother everyone would dream of having. The kind of mother that the author ofAlligator must have been herself, one guesses when listening to her say that in the house in downtown St. John’s where she still lives, the neighborhood children were always able to come and go as they pleased. “We always had a lot of neighborhood kids running around our house, and I wanted to love everyone. Of course I failed, she said with a laugh, but that was what I wanted. »
I like the idea of being open to chance, to those that fate puts in our path, of simply trusting – even if it’s a bit ridiculous to trust anyone – and of accepting to love [ces personnes].
Lisa Moore
Love unconditionally
From the first lines of How to love, Jules and her husband receive a call that disrupts their vacation in Mexico. Their son Xavier is in hospital in critical condition. Jules takes the last flight back to St. John’s, just before the airport closed due to the storm of the century – the “snowmageddon” of January 2020. The entire city was then locked down, as a prelude to the pandemic which was to strike a few weeks later. “It was quite dramatic,” remembers Lisa Moore. It was strange, everything was white and buried. It was the first time I saw the impact of the climate crisis so real in my own city. »
Alone at the bedside of her unconscious son, the hospital refusing visitors, Jules seeks to trace “the thread of why” and “handcuffs the past to the present,” writes Lisa Moore. To try to understand. So as not to sink.
This is how his memories resurface in disorder. And from the past comes back to him the story of his stepmother, who grew up in a foster family and who tried to teach him how to love; that of little Trinity, too, who was welcomed by one of their neighbors and who spent her childhood alongside her son, continuing to visit Jules well after her friendship with Xavier had faded.
It is easy to get along with or like people who are like us and assigned to us by birth or blood; it’s harder to love those we disagree with or feel empathy toward those outside our circle of values. And that’s something I wanted to explore in the novel.
Lisa Moore
These ties that unite us
Behind How to love, there was also the author’s deep dismay at the number of violent attacks committed against young men in recent years in St. John’s. The city where she grew up in the 1970s and 1980s had the lowest crime rates in the country at the time, she says; the police did not even carry weapons there. But the divide that dominates our time is granting new permission to cruelty, to the detriment of empathy, in his opinion.
And in the face of chaos, the writer becomes an observer of these links which unite us – sometimes without our knowing it – in an unwavering way.
“I’m interested in the complexity of our social lives and how all of our interactions influence the lives of others, whether we want them to or not. And I’m interested in the formation of our personality in relation to society, in the way society exerts pressure on each of us and shapes us, and the power we have to shape society, as individuals and as a group. »
His next novel, which is due to be published in English in the fall, is co-written with Jack Whalen, a man who was confined during his adolescence in a government institution, the Whitbourne Boys Home. When asked if the writer has a mission, she responds with reserve. If that were the case, she argues, it would be to create beauty; or, at least, “something” that would help us see the beauty in the world. And that alone, for her, would be a radical act in itself.
In bookstores January 30
How to love
Boreal
488 pages