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It's seven, seven-thirty on a hot summer morning and I am on the Portobello Road in London. The street is stirring; there are flickerings of scents, some of which will be too pungent by nine: oranges and lilies on the greengrocer carts rolling to the curb to set up as they have every day for twenty years, a small dog discreetly claiming ownership of a tree, the flat beer in a mug on a picnic table, unclaimed by the publican the night before.
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More books about women and sex
February 2006
book review
The Globe and Mail
First of all, it must be said: both of these books claim to be revelatory, exposing "hidden" realities about women, and I would say that is mostly nonsense. I do not know any woman in her fifties who is not acutely aware that she suddenly has explosive energy, clarity and focus, a big, bubbling desire for change or if she is luckier she is already in mid-change. I have the same conversation with many such women, single or coupled: now what?
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The Year of Magical Thinking
by Joan Didion
October 2005
book review
The Globe and Mail
How could he come back if they took his organs? How could he come back if he had no shoes?
That is the kernel of thought, if indeed that is something as rational and calm as thought, around which Joan Didion's brief book, The Year of Magical Thinking, is organized.
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A Take on New Books by French and Gilligan
July 6, 2002
Book review, Globe and Mail
I was asked by the Globe and Mail to review two books about women by two
renowned American feminists. The result was more of a review-in-progress
than a definitive judgement. Read the article...
Of bimbos and bachelors
April 28, 2002
Op-ed, National Post
The finale of the TV show The Bachelor made nonsense of a National Post
op-ed in praise of smart women.
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Bawdy Talk
October 13, 2001
National Post
They love their lives, their independence, their big brass beds. But they'd kill for sex – or for someone to help clean out the basement. They feel strong, alive, exuberant; they feel lonely, isolated, selfish. For the more than four million single women in Canada, singlehood can be a state of enormous ambivalence.
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Ten Days and Nights in a Latin American Novel
In February, 1999, I went to Lima, Peru with three other members of International PEN, writers from Sweden, Denmark and Spain, on behalf of Peruvian writer Yehude Simon Munaro, in the seventh year of a 20-year sentence for collaboration with terrorists.
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Graveyard Shift: The Last Gold Mine
[a different version of this piece appeared in Toronto Life magazine in February, 2001]
I once asked my father to explain why gold and gold mining are so compelling. He said, if you don’t know, I can’t tell you. But watch an old prospector, he said, he’ll always have a little nugget of gold in his pocket, and he’ll pull it out and he’ll look at it and look at it and look at it. Gold is fascinating, he said.
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Memo: to Hollywood Producers
From: Botsford/Botsford Fraser
Re: Geriatric Superstar Chick Flick. URGENT!!!
[this is a piece I dashed off with my sister the actor Sara Botsford, in August, 2000. It appeared in the National Post.]
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Euripedes of the Arctic
The Globe and Mail
Saturday, September 30, 2000
Review of Walking on the Land
By Farley Mowat
Key Porter, 208 pages
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