A polite form letter informed me that she was no longer able to answer her mail as she was writing a book and she hoped I'd (and everyone else, I assume) understand how she just couldn't spare the time anymore. I was a little disappointed, but that was nothing compared to what was to come.
One Saturday as usual I clicked over to the Columnist section only to find her gone. There was no notice, no hints as to her whereabouts, nothing. It was if she had been abducted by aliens or worse, spirited away by some secret government plot to abolish free speech. Of course it was something far scarier – she was on publicity tour for her first book Pearls In Vinegar: The Pillow Book Of Heather Mallick.
Maybe it was some dark recess of hidden resentment, or the fact that I was broke, but I never got around to either buying or reading book one. Now that Knopf Canada has released Cake Or Death: The Excruciating Choices of Everyday Life, her second collection of essays on modern life, I decided to let bygones be bygones (the nice people at Random House Canada sent me a review copy), and see if she's changed at all in her new digs.
Will she have moderated her tone in the hopes of increased sales? Will she stop accusing Tony Blair of being the most duplicitous man on the planet and describing George Bush as the ultimate spoiled rich boy in the hopes of attracting the moderately well-heeled to shell out the necessary readies to buy her book?
I guess Mallick figures there are enough people out there (here) with as highly-tuned a sense of outrage as she has, because she has not moderated her tone a whit. Oh certainly she might spend some time ruminating on the finer things in life. Those that allow her a respite from the reality of a world where in certain countries she's unable to leave her hotel room without crying because of how the people are forced to live.
I'm not going to deny her those two weeks in Paris because she is astute enough to know that the glamour she is revelling in for those 14 days is an illusion, is in fact glamour, a spell. If she were to live there all year round, as she occasionally fantasises, she knows that reality will exist in spite of where you live. That death and cake are always going to be our choices and the former in all its shapes is far more plentiful than the latter.
Article comments
1 - Natalie Bennett
This article has been selected for syndication to Advance.net , which is affiliated with newspapers around the United States, and to Boston.com. Nice work!
2 - Joanna
Heather Mallick now writes a column for cbc.ca (news page, columns tab.)