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Review: Where I Live Now by Sharon Butala takes readers on a lovely and dark journey
Book Review
Hawley, Alex http://www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/books-and-media/book-reviews/review-where-i-live-now-by-sharon-butala-takes-readers-on-a-lovely-and-dark-journey/article34771640/
Publisher: Globe & Mail
Date Written: 21/04/2017
Year Published: 2017
Resource Type: Article
Review of a woman's memoir of life on the prairies and the death of her husband.
Abstract:
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Excerpt:
Where I Live Now: A Journey Through Love and Loss to Healing and Hope
Sharon Butala
Simon & Schuster Canada
174pp
$26.99
As Sharon Butala prepared to leave her southwest Saskatchewan ranch, after her adored husband's death, she had a nightmare. In the dream, recounted in her new memoir, Where I Live Now, a black dog comes for her across the fields, "murderous, implacable," and suddenly transforms into three terrible owls, which she placates with a tinfoil-wrapped package of frozen meat. It's a great image, and a good example of the book's meshing of the uncanny and the mundane, depicting that space where loss reshapes everything.
For all that, Where I Live Now isn't a map of grief's progress in the mode of Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking, to which it refers several times. Butala's quiet and unusual book is an excavation of the Prairies, rural life and, above all, herself. She declares: "With this memoir, I hereby claim forever my portion of that country whose many layers … still resonate in my imagination." She also claims an archeological knowledge of her own soul, now that she is in her mid-70s, and the right to take us through it. We're lucky to go along.
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