A Life in Pieces

A Life in Pieces, made up of thirty short essays, is a wonderful rendering of fragments of a woman’s life in which the author, Jo-Ann Wallace, gains insight, asks questions, and contemplates and appreciates the dailiness at the end of her life.

In her essays, Wallace refers to the literature that accompanied her throughout her life. It was a memoir by Hilary Montel that prompted Wallace’s memory visit (and virtual Google walk) to 43 Leslie Gault in Montreal where she grew up. The address is the title of the first essay in the book.

In the spring of 1972, Wallace bought the preview issue of Ms. Magazine. She was also reading the early Margaret Drabble, Margaret Atwood, Marie-Claire Blais, and Sylvia Plath, she says in her essay “North American Factors,” a company she worked for when she quit school after a year of college. “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 braids the US Supreme Court 2022 overturning of its own 1973 Roe v. Wade decision with the memories of her own abortion in 1970. Also woven into the story is Wallace’s reading of Happening by Annie Ernaux which, as Wallace describes it, is “a harrowing account of her, then illegal, 1963 abortion.”

The essays are gorgeous in their honesty as well as in their layered themes. They have a conversational tone that is very engaging.

In ‘Poetry,” one of the longer essays, Wallace tells of her friendship with Dana, a fiction writer, while as a Concordia University student, Wallace thought of herself as a poet. Ann Patchett’s Truth & Beauty: A Friendship is the memoir Wallace refers to as it’s about Patchett’s seventeen-year friendship with poet Lucy Grealy.

In the essay, “This Gaiety Would Have Been Mine,” Wallace writes that [the novel] “Mrs. Dalloway has accompanied me through the greater part of my adult life, keeping step with me more than forty years.” The tile is from an exchange between the Virginia Woolf characters Clarissa and Peter.

Wallace decides to have a “full relationship” with her very good friend Stephen, who becomes her second husband. The book is dedicated to him.

In “Virginia Woolf’s Commas,” Wallace writes of typing Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway “from beginning to end.” “There is something surprisingly intimate about entering text in this way,” Wallace says of her approach to preparing a scholarly edition of the 1925 novel for Broadview Press.

She was twenty months into the “chemo-lite” or “maintenance chemo” when she wrote the essay entitled “Cancer in the Time of COVID (Summer 2022).”

“Cancer has made me realize that my ordinary, daily life is my bucket list.” She developed some mantras to help her: “Take one day at a time. Practice equanimity. Live neither in hope nor despair. Live as if I’m going to live, while accepting that I’m not. This means, among other things, planting bulbs in the fall.”

The final essay, entitled “Mars,” is about the Earth’s “little sister planet.” Wallace has a deep yearning to go there. Her ponderings about Mars lead Wallace to realize that most of her life “I’ve harboured a kind of fantasy that when you die, the mysteries of the universe become clear. It’s not so much that the mysteries are revealed as that you just know.”

Her “two fantasies” were that the nature of the universe reveal itself and that one’s dogs are there at the time of death. “It is, after all, a friendly, homely universe.”

We can wholeheartedly celebrate Jo-Ann Wallace’s memoir as she has done what her scholarly research led her to: forging a crucial link between the lived lives of women and the writing they produced.