What is Lynn Crosbie’s new book about? Pitched as a “fiery, honest, and heartbreaking blend of fiction and fantastical memoir,” Life Is About Losing Everything has already forced several critics to tread water and do their absolute best to avoid answering that question. On one level, it makes sense that the default reaction to a book so fragmented and willfully opaque is a polite surrender to its unique terms of engagement. But I can’t abide. This is noisy, convoluted nonsense.
As there are very few clues within the text as to what, exactly, Crosbie’s project is, let’s again turn to the promotional material. Life Is About Losing Everything is said to cover “seven tumultuous years” in the Toronto author’s life. I can verify that it contains approximately 100 short pieces, and roughly the same number of blink-and-you’ll-miss-them characters: neighbours, students, strangers on the street, and plenty of male romantic figures. Also, pets—some of whom are not easily distinguishable from the aforementioned romantic figures. This is confusing, but here you can sense the larger point being made: namely, that dogs are more reliable companions than men. I won’t contest that.
And the book does feel honest, as well as frequently therapeutic. The problem is its honesty spills right into self-indulgence, and its therapy only runs one way. Crosbie is out to help herself; any similarly redemptive properties the book may have for its reader are accidental. She never acts like she owes us anything, and that includes storytelling, psychological insight, or even any character development beyond what her narrative persona buys at the thrift store that day.
Let’s start with the intensely private nature of many of the pieces. So intimate are they, in fact, that it feels like listening in on a conversation where any context was established long before you got there. Crosbie writes longingly about many former friends and lovers from her youth, but never with the depth required for readers to forge their own feelings about them. You’ve got to meet her well over halfway. New people drop in and out in the span of just a few pages. Only one—a man named Stephen, who died in a car accident—leaves any kind of impression, and that’s through sheer repetition. If these are eulogies, then they’re the kind that should have stayed private.
What moves the book from merely innocuous to infuriating, however, is that the pieces are littered with a kind of emotional bait—the kind of thing that looks like real work is being done on the page, but which is in fact a shortcut to actual stakes. “What I Meant to Say” does this with a young cancer patient; “Angel” and “I Cry” do the same thing with unearned images of child abuse. This is cheap button pushing, repeated dozens of times over. And even Crosbie’s cynical seriousness gets undercut by the more farcical pieces about vampires, or having sex with a robot she meets online.
It’s not that this kind of genre-colliding is by default a bad move. In fact, the same publisher, House of Anansi, put out a brilliant book in the same vein a couple of years back: Sheila Heti’s How Should a Person Be? (And, judging from some of the names dropped in both books, the two authors appear to have some close friends in common.) But where Heti’s book was soulful, and generous, and took major risks, Crosbie’s feels as though the entire thing was written from a defensive crouch. It’s also completely self-absorbed. Read a few dozen of the pieces that feature kooky, semi-unhinged Torontonians of all different stripes, and you’ll come away with the distinct underlying whiff of Crosbie patting herself on the back about what interesting people she can’t help but attract. It’s the definition of a humblebrag.
Further frustrating is the fact that Crosbie does know how to write a sentence. And there are a few real diamonds in the rough. Early on, she imagines a sonnet that concludes, “Bourbon distilled from God’s brown eyes / Sandwiches, crustless, of miniature size.” Or, later, thinking aloud while book shopping: “Every book is about cancer or dieting. I am surprised there is no book called The Cancer Diet.”
Focused, lucid, and darkly comic—I wish there were more of these moments to go around. Believe me, I was looking. But they just aren’t there.
Anansi| 275 pages | $24.95 | paper | ISBN #978-1770890039
‘Life Is About Losing Everything’ by Lynn Crosbie
Book Reviews
What is Lynn Crosbie’s new book about? Pitched as a “fiery, honest, and heartbreaking blend of fiction and fantastical memoir,” Life Is About Losing Everything has already forced several critics to tread water and do their absolute best to avoid answering that question. On one level, it makes sense that the default reaction to a book so fragmented and willfully opaque is a polite surrender to its unique terms of engagement. But I can’t abide. This is noisy, convoluted nonsense.
As there are very few clues within the text as to what, exactly, Crosbie’s project is, let’s again turn to the promotional material. Life Is About Losing Everything is said to cover “seven tumultuous years” in the Toronto author’s life. I can verify that it contains approximately 100 short pieces, and roughly the same number of blink-and-you’ll-miss-them characters: neighbours, students, strangers on the street, and plenty of male romantic figures. Also, pets—some of whom are not easily distinguishable from the aforementioned romantic figures. This is confusing, but here you can sense the larger point being made: namely, that dogs are more reliable companions than men. I won’t contest that.
And the book does feel honest, as well as frequently therapeutic. The problem is its honesty spills right into self-indulgence, and its therapy only runs one way. Crosbie is out to help herself; any similarly redemptive properties the book may have for its reader are accidental. She never acts like she owes us anything, and that includes storytelling, psychological insight, or even any character development beyond what her narrative persona buys at the thrift store that day.
Let’s start with the intensely private nature of many of the pieces. So intimate are they, in fact, that it feels like listening in on a conversation where any context was established long before you got there. Crosbie writes longingly about many former friends and lovers from her youth, but never with the depth required for readers to forge their own feelings about them. You’ve got to meet her well over halfway. New people drop in and out in the span of just a few pages. Only one—a man named Stephen, who died in a car accident—leaves any kind of impression, and that’s through sheer repetition. If these are eulogies, then they’re the kind that should have stayed private.
What moves the book from merely innocuous to infuriating, however, is that the pieces are littered with a kind of emotional bait—the kind of thing that looks like real work is being done on the page, but which is in fact a shortcut to actual stakes. “What I Meant to Say” does this with a young cancer patient; “Angel” and “I Cry” do the same thing with unearned images of child abuse. This is cheap button pushing, repeated dozens of times over. And even Crosbie’s cynical seriousness gets undercut by the more farcical pieces about vampires, or having sex with a robot she meets online.
It’s not that this kind of genre-colliding is by default a bad move. In fact, the same publisher, House of Anansi, put out a brilliant book in the same vein a couple of years back: Sheila Heti’s How Should a Person Be? (And, judging from some of the names dropped in both books, the two authors appear to have some close friends in common.) But where Heti’s book was soulful, and generous, and took major risks, Crosbie’s feels as though the entire thing was written from a defensive crouch. It’s also completely self-absorbed. Read a few dozen of the pieces that feature kooky, semi-unhinged Torontonians of all different stripes, and you’ll come away with the distinct underlying whiff of Crosbie patting herself on the back about what interesting people she can’t help but attract. It’s the definition of a humblebrag.
Further frustrating is the fact that Crosbie does know how to write a sentence. And there are a few real diamonds in the rough. Early on, she imagines a sonnet that concludes, “Bourbon distilled from God’s brown eyes / Sandwiches, crustless, of miniature size.” Or, later, thinking aloud while book shopping: “Every book is about cancer or dieting. I am surprised there is no book called The Cancer Diet.”
Focused, lucid, and darkly comic—I wish there were more of these moments to go around. Believe me, I was looking. But they just aren’t there.
Anansi| 275 pages | $24.95 | paper | ISBN #978-1770890039