I woke up thinking about a half-remembered Atwood story, one where a woman is murdered by her husband.
Googling didn’t help, because I only recalled unhelpful details, like the punny wordplay on “strident”. A female friendship. A domestic murder, as we used to call them.
Eventually, though, I located “Heavy” in Wilderness Tips, and it’s not quite what I remembered–but it’s very very good. And disquieting.
First, some additional context. I’m nearly finished (re)reading Atwood’s Book of Lives. At several points, I paused to cross-reference her comments with some of my own notes on the stories and novels. This has taken some time. But I have a sprawling Atwood Thing, that is somewhere between an article and a book project, and Book of Lives is a gift. Mostly.
I paused, too, to re-read Life Before Man because readers told Atwood she was too nice about Shirley Gibson (“It’s fiction!”, says Atwood). Not a book that has aged quite as gracefully as most of Atwood’s fiction. There are some lovely set pieces.
But now I’ve reached the Index and realized, belatedly, that Atwood never mentioned Pat Lowther. This seems odd.
Atwood knew Lowther. “Last Testaments: Pat Lowther and John Thompson” appears in one of Atwood’s books of criticism. Here’s Chris Wiesenthal, Lowther’s major biographer, on this piece: “Atwood, who had been an acquaintance of the person, Pat Lowther, writes as an impersonal, informed advocate of Lowther’s and John Thompson’s poetry in the American literary review Parnassus.”
And Atwood has written Lowther into her fiction, especially, I think, in “Heavy.” She turns the female colleague-friends into lawyers rather than poets, but there are some elements suggestive of Lowther’s murder.
The basic plot–such as it is: a successful and necessarily crafty fundraiser for a battered women’s shelter lunches with a beefy middle-aged businessman, aiming to lure him into a generous donation and, perhaps, an affair. She has no particular interest in him, but he’s something to do, a diversion that staves off thoughts of lonely old age and death. (Ugh.)
And she remembers her late friend, as they lunch. A funny, clever, fellow lawyer who married, had children, and was murdered by her insecure and jealously inadequate husband.
Atwood asked for Lowther’s name to be added to the list of women acknowledged in Songs for Murdered Sisters. Here’s the film version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1vvjPKJi5S0. And here’s the dedication: “Songs for Murdered Sisters is dedicated to the memory of Nathalie, Carol, & Anastasia and Pat Lowther & Debbie Rottman.”
So I’m surprised and a bit troubled not to see Lowther noted in Atwood’s very long book. Lowther was central to the work of the Canadian League of Poets. She was an important poetic contemporary of Atwood’s. She has been used more than once in Atwood’s fiction. This is not to allege exploitation–just proximity, and interest. Atwood is generously attentive to many Canadian writers, including, to my delight, Eve Zaremba, who played a more crucial role in the Gibson-Atwood household than I had quite realized.
Wilderness Tips includes, incidentally, another story about a friend who disappears, a young American camper who vanishes into the wilderness in the title story. Her surviving Canadian friend, Lois, is left behind to wonder–for decades–if Lucy is hidden in the rocks and trees of a Group of Seven landscape.
And it occurs to me, rather belatedly, that this story may be in dialogue with Munro’s story about a camper who goes missing during an excursion, “Open Secrets.” Just checking, and this is interesting: Wilderness Tips came out in 1991 and “Open Secrets” on February 1, 1993; so it’s Munro, then, in dialogue with Atwood. Intriguing.
By 1993, we now know, Munro was a tad concerned that Gerald Fremlin, the sexually abusive predator she had lived with for decades, and who had molested Munro’s youngest daughter, might also have killed Lynne Harper (the young girl that teenager Steven Truscott was originally convicted of murdering; he was sentenced to hang, before he was exonerated).
Rachel Aviv: “Alice also said that she’d always wondered if Gerry had raped and murdered a twelve-year-old girl named Lynne Harper, who was found dead in a woodlot in Clinton, in 1959. At the time, the suggestion struck Andrea as a kind of ‘grab for air in the room.’ (Years later, Andrea began considering the idea more seriously, and she and Jenny spent a long time researching the case, which is unsolved. Andrea reported the suspicion to the police, and was interviewed, but never heard anything more. In a statement, the police said that the investigation is ongoing. Records from the case, along with conversations with people who knew Gerry or Harper at the time, suggest that his involvement was unlikely.)” https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/12/30/alice-munros-passive-voice
His involvement was unlikely.
But Munro wondered.
And Atwood–in case you, dear reader, also wondered–notes in her memoir that she had no idea about any of the Munro family pathology revolving around Gerald Fremlin. She knew Munro professionally, not personally.
But I do wish that Atwood had also mentioned poet Pat Lowther, whose wonderful work is a brilliant legacy that nonetheless doesn’t make up for her long absence in the lives of her children.
Perhaps there will be a Volume II. Perhaps when (and I am dreading this day), Atwood is no longer with us except in spirit, and the archives yawn open and spill their secrets, we will learn more about a Canadian literary paragon who, even in her autobiography, remains blurry, out of focus.
My favourite segment, while I’ve been re-reading, is Atwood’s brief and surprisingly generous assessment of Australian filmmaker Michael Rubbo and his doomed effort to catch a portrait of Atwood and her family in the Canadian wilderness. This is very fun NFB viewing for a wintry day: https://www.nfb.ca/film/margaret_atwood_once_in_august/.
But here’s Atwood’s anecdote: the filmmaker rammed his foot into a tree and was convinced he had broken it; Graeme Gibson gravely advised him to walk to the end of the dark and immerse it there, where the water was colder.
“No, it’s not,” notes Atwood quietly to Gibson.
“I wanted to see if he could walk.”
Not broken, then. A phrase that covers much in Atwood’s life and work, even in the extreme and painful moments.
The Landscape of Canadian Women's Crime Fiction 