'Memoir' a genre-bending experiment that fails

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THIS disappointing volume is ostensibly autobiographical, apparently about a seven-year period in Toronto author Lynn Crosbie's life, though both chronology and locales are unclear.

Its structure is episodic: a page or two of vignette (maybe fact, maybe fiction, maybe both), followed by a page or two of memoir, followed by a page or two of reflection, followed by a page or two of prose poem, followed by a page or two of dialogue.

Some pieces are loosely linked. But just when the narrative gathers momentum, Crosbie inserts a piece that's a non sequitur, and the quickened pace grinds to a halt.

There's little of the punchy yet erudite style familiar to fans of her Toronto newspaper columns. Liberated from the discipline of journalism, her writing lacks coherence and revels in affectation.

Best known for her controversial 1997 non-fiction book about serial killer Paul Bernardo, Paul's Case, Crosbie is also a poet and novelist. In Life Is About Losing Everything, she takes on and sheds multiple identities and personalities, and there's no divining what's fictive and what's factual. On display throughout is a mania for see-how-much-I-can-disgust-you confession.

For example, in a piece titled I'm Pretty Like Drugs, after lines not reproducible in a daily newspaper, she winds up the tale:

"Every day, he cuts another piece of my skin off.

"I'm going to be a skeleton soon, I marvel.

"We hold each other in the pool of blood and gore and I say, No one has ever understood me. No one has ever loved me, baby, not once, not ever."

The seeming object is to turn the reader into a confidante, to make you feel her immediate sensual presence via grotesquerie of language.

But it doesn't work. The devices she uses are transparently gimmicky.

Much of the writing is akin to what's called magic realism, fiction in which elements of the fantastic or macabre blend with the daily and mundane.

But so much of it, despite the realistic settings, comes off as just too bizarre or goofy to believe, or even engage with.

Some pieces have human speakers and human characters. Some are mini-tales featuring anthropomorphized -- and talking -- animals. Some are prose poems. And some are just lists.

Take this one, for example, presented without punctuation: "Piss clam Tiny teapot Blue shoe Acorn Dwarf pine Hypodermic needle Yellow barf 13 chicken heads in a circle 5 combs, different colours Squashed squirrel Pigeon wing," followed by several dozen more entries of like ilk.

This is literature as laundry list, and bespeaks a writer whose self-absorption has toppled over into self-indulgence.

Overall, the book's a genre-bending experiment that fails. It's for people who think prescription-drug addiction, junkie overdoses and scatological language are emblems of romantic freedom.

Worse, much of it is pervaded by an aura of self-destruction and self-inflicted sadness.

Douglas J. Johnston is a Winnipeg lawyer and writer.

Life Is About Losing Everything

By Lynn Crosbie

Anansi, 360 pages, $25

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition May 5, 2012 J7