She’s crying because … She doesn’t know why. But when she’s cried herself out, the relief leaves her light-headed. No, it’s more than relief—it’s the same feeling she had up on the roof with their mother and Norma (although she never felt more separate from everyone), when she was above the whole subdivision, and the clouds rolling from horizon to horizon made her think of a great migration. The wind whipped her hair. It was warm and windy. Not dark or light. Their father couldn’t get to her. He couldn’t climb the ladder! Their mother wouldn’t climb down. There was a standoff, a stopping of time. Something was going to happen—Lou felt that much, although she didn’t know it was going to be something so terrible—but in that suspended minute or two, Lou was in heaven, on the verge of flying even. Doing out of no fear what their mother, a few seconds later, did terrified.
Read on
Web Detective
The title We So Seldom Look on Love comes from a line in the poem “Ode on Necrophilia” by Frank O’Hara. To learn about the poet and read more of his poetry, visit:
www.rooknet.com/beatpage/writers/ohara.html
www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/164
Trephination, which Julie unwittingly performs on herself in “Body and Soul,” is discussed in a British Journal of Neurosurgery article on a similar case. The article is entitled “Self-trephination of the skull with an electric power drill.” (British Journal of Neurosurgery, Taylor & Francis, Volume 11, Number 2, April 1997). To read the abstract, visit: www.tandf.co.uk/journals/ (Search for “self-trephination”)
Charles Eisenmann was a photographer famous for his portraiture of unusual people who travelled with circus sideshows in the late nineteenth century. To view one of his photos of a woman very much like the character in “Sylvie,” visit:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myrtle_Corbin
In 1996, the story “We So Seldom Look on Love” was made into the feature film Kissed. To read an interview with director Lynne Stopkewich on adapting the story to film, visit:
www.eye.net/eye/issue/issue_08.29.96/
FILM/cv0829.php
Descant cultural magazine devoted its entire Spring 2006 issue to Barbara Gowdy. For information on this issue, and to read Steven Heighton’s interview in its entirety, visit: www.descant.on.ca./issues/d132.html
Select Awards
Barbara Gowdy received the prestigious Marian Engel Award in 1996, recognizing her contribution to Canadian literature.
We So Seldom Look on Love
• Finalist for the Trillium Award
Mister Sandman
•Finalist for the Trillium Award
•Finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction
•Finalist for the Giller Prize
•Named a Times Literary Supplement “Book of the Year”
The White Bone
•Finalist for the Trillium Award
•Finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction
•Finalist for the Giller Prize
•Finalist for the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize
The Romantic
•Nominated for the Man Booker Prize
•Finalist for the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize
•Finalist for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best Book
•Finalist for the Trillium Award
Praise for
We So Seldom Look on Love
“A writer now emerging as one of Canada’s most accomplished and outrageous…. We So Seldom Look on Love will only deepen her reputation for fine technique and alarming content.”
—The Globe and Mail
“This politically incorrect collection of stories is one of the most enjoyable reads to come my way this year…. There are no ‘perfectly normal people’ in Barbara Gowdy’s fictional world. Quite the contrary. Readers who take the plunge will emerge breathless and refreshed.”
—Books in Canada
“Collectively, these stories are not for readers who insist on a coy handling of uncomfortable situations, who prefer sentences ending with dot dot dot. Like Cormac McCarthy and William Burroughs, two of her favourite writers, Gowdy stares down the things she finds repulsive…. We So Seldom Look on Love is not just a book about freaks. It is a book about coping mechanisms, about the process of learning to live with oneself…. Wonderful and unsettling.”
—Saturday Night
“Undoubtedly one of our best writers, Barbara Gowdy looks on love in a way we seldom do: her gaze is unflinching and courageous. And the vision she delivers to us is riveting and unforgettable.”
—The Kingston Whig-Standard
“Stories alive and on the edge. We So Seldom Look on Love tests our capacity for understanding what it means to be alive and capable of feeling in the late 20th century.”
—The Vancouver Sun
“Barbara Gowdy’s stunning collection of short stories We So Seldom Look on Love plants her firmly in the constellation of Canada’s bright literary lights. Gowdy’s insatiable curiosity, her candor and cool wit emerge like chrysalids from the assembled deformity of this lively and memorable book.”
—The Gazette (Montreal)
“Extremely talented … a very powerful voice, rare in Canadian fiction.”
—Philip Marchand
“We So Seldom Look on Love is witty and incredibly well written. Intellectually gutsy, artistically adventuresome, it takes your breath away. I would read anything she published.”
—CBC Radio
“Gowdy seems not so much to be in the special-effects business, but to be genuinely exploring the conundrums of human existence. Rarely has a story collection combined such outrageous images with such sureness of technique and gentle humour. It’s Canadian and it’s brilliant.”
—Quill & Quire
“There are so many good things to say about this writer from Canada, with her unencumbered prose, her density of ideas, her joyous weirdness … her gaze is thoroughly different, not of pastiche, or of pointlessness, but sympathetic and rehabilitative.”
—New Statesman & Society
“It’s hard to convey the feeling of sheer excitement that builds up as the book progresses. Each story is a journey into a new way of seeing.”
—The Independent
“These eight stories are surgically painful and precise, yet they lead to an enlarged, embracing sense of life. This is fiction that vivifies.”
—The Independent on Sunday
“Gowdy skillfully walks a fine line between sensationalism and sentimentality to give life and love to the feared and forgotten. An impressive accomplishment.”
—Kirkus Reviews
Also by Barbara Gowdy
THROUGH THE GREEN VALLEY
FALLING ANGELS
MISTER SANDMAN
THE WHITE BONE
THE ROMANTIC
HELPLESS
Copyright
We So Seldom Look on Love
© 1992 by Barbara Gowdy. All rights reserved.
P.S. section © 2007 Barbara Gowdy, except for “Points of Faith: An Interview with Barbara Gowdy,” by Steven Heighten, reprinted in P.S. with permission from author.
Published by Harper Perennial, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins ebooks.
EPub Edition © APRIL 2011 ISBN: 978-1-443-40248-4
HarperCollins Publishers Ltd
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M4
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www.harpercollins.ca
First published in hardcover by Somerville House Publishing 1992. First HarperCollins paperback edition 2001. This paperback edition 2007.
This is a work of fiction. All characters, events and dialogue are imagined and not intended to represent real people, living or dead.
Certain of these stories, in somewhat different form, have been previously published: “Body and Soul” in Descant, Number 75, Volume 22, Number 4; “Sylvie” in Story, Spring 1992; “Ninety-three Million Miles Away,” in Canadian Fiction Magazine, Twentieth Anniversary Issue, Number 74/5, winner of Canadian Fiction Magazine’s Annual Contributor’s Prize, and also in Slow Hand: Women Writing Erotica, edited by Michele Slung, HarperCollins, New York, 1992; “The Two-Headed Man” in Quarry, Volume 39, Number 4; “We So Seldom Look on Love,” in Canadian Fiction Magazine, Number 73.
“Ode on Necrophilia” from The Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara, copyright © 1971 by Maureen Granville-Smith, Administratrix of the Estate of Frank O’Hara, reprinted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.
The author is grateful for the support of the Toronto Arts Council, the Ontario Arts Council and the Canada Council.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Gowdy, Barbara
We so seldom look on love / Barbara
Gowdy.
Short stories.
ISBN-13: 978-0-00-647523-I
ISBN-10: 0-00-647523-x
I. Title.
PS8563.O883W42 2007 C813’.54
C2007-900070-3
RRD 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
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