Making Peace with Failure

and the possibility that I might never fall in love again

I moved to Prince Edward County two days before my 7th book, The Spectacular, launched. It was 2021, so I spent the day in my house by myself, looking at the flowers my American publisher had sent me. I launched it on zoom that evening. I balanced my laptop on top of moving boxes. It was the first time I’d ever published a book while single. There was no one to buy me dinner and it seemed a bit lonely that the flowers were signed by an assistant on behalf of a team in New York City I had only met once. Before I left the city a guy I’d been seeing a few months previous sent me flowers for the on-sale day. I thought it was both a sweet gesture, and also odd, because we had not been speaking. I’d broken it off because I was not ready to date anyone. If the shoe was on the other foot, I wouldn’t have sent flowers after being rejected. And in some ways when I read the card it confirmed that we were not meant to be together. Despite living alone, in a town where I had only a handful of friends, I knew I was meant to be single. Even if launch day was a little sad.

The book was a follow-up to The Best Kind of People, and there was a lot of pressure for it to be as successful. But it was a different kind of book, harder to summarize, and much easier to criticize. Even though my previous novel was about sexual assault, The Spectacular was more of a capital F Feminist novel. But critics didn’t read it that way. It was about various women who don’t care, or who stopped caring, about what men think. Because I like to make things hard for myself, I suppose, the first page of the book is about a young woman trying to get sterilized before her band goes on tour. I based this scene on an anecdote from a friend who knew she never wanted kids and had tried to get her tubes tied. She was refused, even at 38 years old, because of what an imaginary future husband (she was single) might want. I was shocked that she was denied - three times - when anyone can get a vasectomy at any time and is never questioned. Maybe I was naive to be shocked by this but at the time I’d rarely paid attention to anything about birth control or reproductive health because I never slept with cis men. I’d nursed several friends after hysterectomies but they were all trans men. I had no idea that being a woman who wanted the surgery wasn’t reason enough to make it happen. I thought the scene was ironic and funny and exposed this insane misogynistic issue. Also the narrator is recalling the story of being denied in her memory as she’s having casual, if not entirely present, sex with a relative stranger in a tour bus. Fun! Feminist! And, it turns out, a wildly disliked way to begin a novel. Just ask the New York Times! (Lesson: be very specific about how you word your dreams. Don’t just beg the universe for a review in the NYT.)

I didn’t know many people when I first moved to the county, and I spent that first fall going on a lot of walks in the woods, nervously hoping I wouldn’t be murdered. I don’t like hiking, but I do enjoy a wander on forrest paths. I was trying to challenge myself to enjoy nature the way I had as a kid. Being single after two decades of overlapping relationships was an opportunity to do whatever I wanted, on my own time, in the slow, day-dreaming way I preferred. In my diary I called this time the “great un-masking”. I didn’t have to do much I didn’t want to do. It was very comfortable. I only ever wore sweatpants. I revelled in being ugly, and in rarely being looked at.

Walking was one of the only alternatives to sitting on my couch refreshing the province’s daily covid numbers. When I got a dog a year later, I thought I would walk even more. But my little dumpling is a slow rambler, he stops to sniff every five minutes. My trainer said that I shouldn’t rush him, that smelling everything is like a dog’s social media scroll, and it enriches his brain. I ended up not getting as many steps in after adopting Riggins, because of how slowly he ambles about. And because sometimes, like today, he just refuses to go forward. We walked about halfway down a trail and he started sniffing the air and then stopped. No more walking, unless we turned around. I figured he must smell a coyote, or something ahead that I can’t know is there. So our walk was thwarted.

This is what he looks like when he refuses to go forward.

He has good instincts. I’ve started to, finally, after many years of questioning myself, have those same instincts in romantic situations. Lately, while walking, I’ve been thinking about something I used to consider a catastrophic outcome. What if I don’t ever fall in love again?