A relentlessly honest depiction of motherhood
In her debut novel, theatre artist Erin Brubacher explores the hope and heartbreak of creating a child
Multidisciplinary theatre artist Erin Brubacher knows a thing or two about human nature.
She’s directed some of the most provocative and lasting theatre projects in Canada, from Jordan Tannahill’s coming-of-age requiem “Concord Floral” to Evalyn Parry and Laakkuluk Williamson Bathory’s autobiographical concert “Kiinalik: These Sharp Tools.” Time and again, Brubacher has proven herself as a shaper of stories, using time, music and human connection as her clay.
In her debut novel “These Songs I Know By Heart,” references that align with Brubacher’s theatrical career tether the inner life of an unnamed narrator to the here and now of recent Toronto.
Over a breezy 200-plus pages, we follow a theatremaker on the threshold of 40 as she juggles domestic life — a significant other, called the Turtle; his tween daughter, called the Kid; and an as-yet unconceived baby — with a career that volleys her from Toronto to Iqaluit and all over Europe. Our narrator sees the world through the gauzy haze of her memories and, as such, time unfurls at an inconsistent pace: in the pages leading up to the pandemic, life flits quickly from scene to scene, as bittersweet endings swiftly pave the way to new beginnings.
But when the pandemic hits around the halfway point, time slows down to its most torturous nanoseconds. When can our narrator have a baby? Thanks to the shutdown of non-essential medical services like IVF, it’s hard to say. When can she return to her life as an internationally renowned director and collaborator? That’s not clear either. How will she survive each day in blisteringly close proximity to her life partner and stepdaughter? No idea.
“These Songs I Know By Heart” is tender, gripping and relentlessly honest in its depiction of motherhood and the years leading up to it. Our narrator doesn’t sugar-coat the anxieties of becoming a step-parent — there’s a certain calculus to bonding with a tween, no matter how cool they might seem — and the journey to our narrator and the Turtle’s eventual blended family is gorgeously nuanced. There are no heroes in this story and, as painted by Brubacher, the only villain seems to be a ticking clock.
But what makes “These Songs I Know By Heart” so successful is the double-edged gifts afforded to our narrator by time; life lessons that almost quiet the urgency to have a baby as quickly as possible. In between snapshots of daily life — a chest filled with blankets and pillows here, a conversation with an unnamed playwright who may or may not be Hannah Moscovitch there — we follow our narrator on a camping trip with an old friend named Alice. In these moments, the freneticism of work quiets to a blissful hum. That's female friendship, captured perfectly and in all its quirks by Brubacher.
In an afterword, Brubacher contends that “These Songs I Know By Heart” is a work of fiction, despite drawing from Brubacher’s own “impressions and experiences of living.”
To describe the book as a memoir would be to ignore the painstaking, gossamer layers afforded to each character by our narrator’s memories of them — memories inspired by Brubacher’s own life, sure, but the narrator of “These Songs I Know By Heart” is a woman all her own, a fictional artist in a world of fictional art.
Brubacher’s novel shows off the same flair for dramatic intimacy that makes her such a sought-after collaborator in the theatre world. It’s brisk, poetic, relatable read.