By Sarah Gilbert
I'd first heard of Our Lady of Mile End via FB -- by seeing a friend flag that she was going to attend the book launch event at the D&Q
bookstore. I learned later she was actually good friends with author
Sarah Gilbert, not to mention she'd also highly
recommended that I read the book. So when I was at D&Q to do some Christmas
shopping, I decided to purchase a copy so as to support a local
writer and fellow neighbour, even though I didn't know her personally. I’ve lived
in the Mile End for about 15 years while Gilbert has lived here since she was
a university student in the 1990s.
A bit of background about the author:
Gilbert started writing about Mile End while on maternity leave in 2008. “I took a lot of walks with my daughter, and often I was pushing the stroller very slowly to get her to sleep,” she explains. “I got to observe my surroundings in detail.”
The immediate result was Mile Endings, a blog that recorded the people and places affected — for better or for worse — by the neighbourhood’s ongoing gentrification. It found an enthusiastic audience.
So it made
sense for Gilbert to eventually segue into short stories about
the neighbourhood she loves, and the collection became Our Lady of Mile End. Already
loving the cover illustration – Mile End residents "airing out their laundry" on multiple
clothes lines strung between the neighbourhood's signature triplex buildings -- I was very much looking forward to reading the collection, assuming the stories would cover a various cross-section of intersecting
lives of my fellow residents.
First up was “Material”, about a young artist, Alice, who cleans apartments in the Mile End for a living. The story begins with Alice taking a shower at her client’s place. Since she lives at her warehouse studio along with other artists, and it’s located in an industrial zone, the building isn’t fitted with kitchens and showers, and the Y was closed due to renovations. In any case, Alice’s client comes home unexpectedly, surprised to see that Alice had used her shower. Ok, so far an interesting situation that reflects the gentrification of the Mile End, which not that long ago, used to be very affordable for artists and musicians, but rising rents forced many move to cheaper areas. Interestingly, Alice is a textile artist who likes to collect castoffs from her clients, namely the lint that collects in the dryer, to use in her artwork. However, before anything of substance could take root in “Material”, the story was over after a few pages.
The next story was “What If”, about a woman named Meg who left the back door ajar while WFH alone inside her apartment. When she goes into the kitchen, she finds a strange man peering into her refrigerator. He had splotches of blue pain all over his shirt and acted rather nonchalant about his appearance. Since her bf was involved in theatre, for some bizarre reason, Meg assumed that Jason sent a friend over to perform some kind of prank on her, because why would a robber act like he’s just dropping by her place? Later, after talking to her friend, Meg learned a bank heist had occurred in the area and one of the robbers fled the scene while the police went in search for him. Meg realized that the man who was in her kitchen and used her bathroom was probably the bank robber!
This made me recall a fairly exciting news story some years ago about an armed bank robbery attempt which involved a police car chase, then the car crashed, a male suspect fled the scene and was still at large in the Mile End. The police had cordoned off the entire area as they scoured the alleys and yards in search of the fugitive. This happened back in 2016, but Gilbert re-situated the event six months before the pandemic, a time when no once visited people’s homes anymore. “There was no possibility of strangers, no surprise encounters.”
Long after the blue paint-splotched man left her home without incident, and Meg realized she was put in a potentially dangerous situation, she got turned on as she recalled her chance encounter, hence the title “What If.” This made me groan inside (not in a good way), and made me wonder whether Gilbert had this very same "what if" fantasy, ie. “what if a fugitive bank robber ended up hiding in my apartment?” I didn't want to read about the author's sex fantasy, FFS! Gimme some stories about people's real lives!!
By this point, I was getting a little wary. I don’t read short stories often, but I know they can be wispy vignettes and fleeting sketches of life, yet taken together as a whole, they could form an over-arching idea, held together by common themes, etc. This was kind of what I was hoping for in Our Lady of Mile End. But after reading a story, it would leave me feeling unsatisfied, like consuming bland consommé for lunch instead of something more filling.
There was one recurring character who appeared in several stories. Evelyn the English college professor first appeared in an early story “Introduction to College English” in which she gets into a conflict with a student named Maya. The story delves into each person’s POV of the other, and ends up with Evelyn writing a nice reference letter for Maya.
In “The Visit”, Evelyn is at her Mile End apartment when she gets a phone call from her brother Dominiq who had just arrived at the airport for a spontaneous visit. She convinces him to meet her at her chalet in the Laurentians, so most of the story is about her and her brother having fairly mundane conversations about their lives. At the end of the story, we find out that this visit as fabricated and all in Evelyn’s head as her brother never made it out to see her. In reality, he had been diagnosed with late stage cancer and died a few weeks later. Not only was the story barely had anything to do with the Mile End, it was a wish fulfillment fantasy. The story ended with a “—for Bart” so it seemed to have personal relevance for Gilbert, at least. And Evelyn Wilson seems to be a kind of cipher for the author as they are both English professors who live in the Mile End?
Another lacklustre story was “Green Eyes”, about a young woman named Amber somewhere four hours north of Montreal trying to hack tree-planting. I couldn’t remember if her character had appeared in an earlier story, but this was yet another story that didn’t seem to have anything to do with the Mile End except for one paragraph:
The Park Avenue grocery store where she’d worked for two university summers would be busy by now, with lines of shoppers snaking up to her cash… There had to be more to work than being a human robot.
She got the tree planting idea from a friend of a friend who was selling his bags and shovel.
Why couldn't the story be about her experience working at the checkout line instead? Personally, I wasn’t all that interested in reading about Amber tree-planting in some remote area of Quebec, even if she happened to work at the PA Supermarket. I felt cheated somehow!
“Catch” was the final story in the collection based on a rather sensational incident of an attempted kidnapping of a teenage girl in adjacent Outremont. Again, I remembered the news coverage of the incident and fortunately, the girl was able to escape unscathed. Gilbert’s story used all the major facts from the incident:
“The girl, who is a minor and whose name is protected by a publication ban, was walking to her friend’s house Friday afternoon when a motorist pulled up beside her at St-Viateur and Durocher Sts.
The man identified himself as a police officer and said he had to arrest her because she was a suspect in a drug deal. She was handcuffed, placed in the back of the car and blindfolded, she told the police.
After screaming for several minutes while the man was driving, she managed to open the door and fall out onto the street.
A witness took a photo of the suspect’s licence plate as he sped off. Police arrested the suspect about an hour later on Montreal’s north shore…”
In Gilbert’s story, there were also a few witnesses, with the focus on a busybody woman named Irene, who kind of took charge of the situation. She spoke to the police and seeing that the girl was in shock, and recognizing a nun who was living at the nearby Carmelite convent, she got an idea. Irene approached the nun and asked if the convent would be willing to harbor the traumatised teenager until a family member arrived. I think this is where Our Lady of Mile End gets its title from.
It’s clear that Gilbert drew some of her inspiration from local news articles over the years and tried to weave them into her stories. The author didn’t seem to have any real connection to the kidnapped girl. Nor did she seem to know anyone who may have had a run-in with the “sexy” bank robber. I was left disappointed that Gilbert didn’t draw inspiration from actual locals, who either lived or worked in the Mile End. What were their stories, I wondered? I’m sure former bookseller SW Welch had many interesting stories about his colourful customers. Pretty much all the characters Gilbert’s stories were white, Anglo, with similar socio-economic backgrounds. Gilbert definitely followed the adage of writing what she knows. With what she didn’t know, she got from news stories of bank heists and attempted kidnappings. So rather than stories about actual insiders, it felt more like they were written by someone looking from the outside in, which is not so different from her early blog observations.
A good example is the third last story, “The Word”, which once again features Gilbert’s alter ego, Evelyn Wilson (Gilbert taught literature at Dawson College). This time, Evelyn is trying to conduct a post-pandemic zoom class with her students. She decided to read aloud a poem that had the n-word in it, thus promptly losing control of her class as it deteriorates into arguments about whether saying the n-word is racist or not. Part of the story is also told from the POV of the student as the n-word was overheard by his younger brother and his mom, as they live in a small apartment. The student and his family aren’t white, but their racial background isn’t specified. This was the only story that featured people who weren’t white.
The student observes Evelyn as she vainly tries to defend herself: “I read the words in the poem so we could examine the context in which Shire uses the n-word and see her specific purpose for doing so. To clarify, I was not, I am not, using the n-word myself.”
In any case, the class was a failure, and a few days later, Evelyn runs into this student, who was visiting the area with a friend (he doesn’t live in ‘affluent’ Mile End). The story makes it clear that Evelyn, despite being gray and frumpy, lives a privileged life (we should note that she also has a chalet in the Laurentians, as noted in “The Visit”.) and strongly hints that Evelyn has some thinking to do.
Gilbert once again, probably got the idea for “The Word” as the use of the n-word in academic settings has been a hot button issue in recent years about whether freedom of expression can trump the freedom of being othered felt by various minority groups. There have been media coverage of teacher and professors in Quebec and Ottawa being cancelled because they dared utter the n-word in front of students.
Again, like many of the stories, the theme was only lightly dealt with as the stories are limited in length. I very much wanted to like OLoME, and at first it really looked like something I could relate to. But most of the stories were unsatisfying or rather meh. The Montreal Guardian described the collection as “warm-hearted and well-meant” which to me, is code for “safe literature”. If I was a writer, I'd hate it if a critic described my fiction as "well-meant"! I don’t mind if the stories are about ordinary people, like myself, but the content of the stories felt limited in scope and somewhat solipsistic in that it didn’t capture a diverse cross-section of the Mile End. In hindsight, I should’ve just borrowed the book from the library instead of spending $20 on it!
