New Moon in Cancer, yes. I wrote another fucking novel! Oliver A Lover All Over is a psychogeographical exploration of intimacy and betrayal, repetition compulsion, open relationships, empathy, therapy, and art. You can pre-order a paperback copy of my new novel at schoolformaps.etsy.com.
Look at this gorgeous cover! The photo used for my book jacket is one I took last Fall, walking along Queen West. The cover and interior design are by Caligula Caesar, a long-term creative co-conspirator of mine. Paperback copies will be printed and snail-mailed Mid-Summer 2019. Pre-orders go toward living expenses, printing expenses, and paying for all the beautiful design skills and time devoted to the work.
♥ ♥ ♥
When their partner leaves them a week after their hysterectomy, Magenta becomes determined to resist suicidal despair by leaving the stale solitude of their downtown apartment, with a plan to ride every streetcar, bus, and subway line in Toronto. Instead, they ride back and forth along romanticized and mythical Queen Street, from Parkdale to The Beaches, from the first to final day of August. The city is heatwaves and thunderstorms, empty storefronts and chain businesses, suffering the paired crises of climate change and gentrification.
An unemployed fiction writer turned sex worker, and compulsive consoler of the lonely, Magenta ruminates on the desires they feel ashamed of, on poetry and books and lyrics, and on their fear of being used as a muse, while Oliver, a comedy school dropout turned gardener who’s abandoned them to live on an isolated farm, struggles with existential ambivalence and his contradictory desire to build a life and a home in the forest vs. the city. As they ride the streetcar, Magenta becomes fixated upon poverty and melancholy, mood-dependent behaviours, disability and remission, and literary clichés and lazy metaphors, obsessively documenting their thoughts and memories of a relationship that lasted thirteen months.
A psychogeographical exploration of intimacy and betrayal, repetition compulsion, open relationships, empathy, therapy, and art, Oliver A Lover All Over is a work of present-tense stream-of-consciousness and self-consciousness, a novel in the form of a mix tape, a collage of the languages of autofiction, songs on late-night radio, journal entries, therapy sessions, and messages exchanged through online dating apps. In their third novel, Maranda Elizabeth employs lyrical experimentation to analyze perpetually lost, unestablished and anti-establishment, alienated thirty-somethings on the cusp of self-awareness.
♥ ♥ ♥
Want some related reading while you wait for your order to ship?
Last Summer, I wrote a long-form piece, Surgery As Initiation: A process of experiencing, witnessing, & sharing my hysterectomy. It’s labelled Part One, as I’d intended to write a follow-up after healing, but I became distracted and avoidant, and then wrote this unexpected novel instead. Other parts may happen yet.
Eight months ago, I wrote Messy November: we’ve got a lotta care work protest conversations dreams to do together, let’s go. Notes, ideas, and strategies for taking care of ourselves and one another as poor, disabled weirdos surviving austerity and fascism under the current Ford government, relevant always. And in May, I wrote The speech I delivered at The People Phone Ford Rally, with notes on care, rage, disposability, & solidarity, organized by No One Is Illegal and co-sponsored by Ontario Coalition Against Poverty.
Thank you, as always, for supporting my work in whatever ways you’re able to!
Fictionally Yours,
P.S.: If you’ve benefited from my writing in any way – if my words have inspired you, helped you feel less alone, or sparked some weird feeling within you; if you’ve felt encouraged, or curious, or comforted – please consider compensating me by offering a donation of any amount. Whether you’ve been reading my writing for years, or just stumbled into me this afternoon, I invite you to help me sustain the process!
Maranda Elizabeth 