Aging widow fills life with online obsessions

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This article was published 11/05/2024 (870 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Norma Nimmo, the central character in Sarah’s Mintz’s experimental novel Norma, is a recently retired, aging, crotchety, lonely and grieving woman. Newly widowed, Norma spend her days cleaning her house, wandering the aisles of her neighbourhood grocery stores, responding to online surveys and working as a digital audio file transcriber for 50 cents a minute.

Excerpts from those audio files — many of which are word-to-word transcriptions of over-the-top soap operas — are interspersed throughout the novel and, in fact, make up a good portion of the book. While essential to an understanding of who Norma is and how her life is unfolding, the frequency of these snippets tend to distract from Mintz’s otherwise gorgeous, evocative prose.

Mintz, a self-described wandering Canadian and a graduate of the English MA program at the Univesity of Regina, is the author of the flash fiction collection Handwringers. In a letter about Norma on the Invisible Publishing website, Mintz classifies her debut novel as midfiction, a kind of fiction that “reveals the extraordinary in the ordinary and creates out of dailiness, parable — concerned not with the world (as in realism), but our connection to it.”

In the course of her virtual transcription work, Norma comes across a police file depicting the sexual abuse of a teenage girl named Marigold. With little else to occupy her mind, Norma becomes obsessed with the girl. That obsession gradually leads Norma to well-intentioned but near criminal behaviour.

Mintz depicts this parasocial relationship with tenderness and a touch of humour. She makes it immediately clear to readers, and eventually to Norma herself, that Norma’s obsession with her online files, and with Marigold in particular, is a consequence of what Norma sees as the emptiness of her life following the deaths of her mother-in-law, sister-in-law and husband in quick succession. Norma is missing the ease and routines of the life she had, and grieving all three members of what comprised her only family and social connection. She is especially surprised to recognize that she is mourning the loss of her husband Hank, whom she didn’t think she particularly cared for or even loved.

“…I don’t know what Hank knew, or what Hank cared about, besides fishing,” Norma considers. “It never showed, or I never bothered looking. When we were one thing, I could hate him and it was no worse than having a mood, my own mood, and a mood passes. But in this pit — all moods are augmented, all moods are reasons and regrets. I did this, I wished this. And now I don’t know what I am because I’m no longer me without the cult of us, me and him and his relations — a small but practised gang of habits — a shifting organism.

“Now cut free,” she adds, “I could be anything, but to be anything I would have to want something. In this world in this world.”

It is the use of the phrase “in this world” that is so critical to this narrative. Since losing her loved ones, Norma has spent far too much time online. When Mintz lets her step, or even misstep, beyond that virtual world, she offers Norma a possible path forward to future fulfilment. At the same time, she gives readers a chance to feel something beyond pity for her hapless heroine.

Sharon Chisvin is a Winnipeg writer, editor, and oral historian.