What could have been

A Life in Pieces
by Jo-Ann Wallace

Saskatoon: Thistledown Press, 2024
$24.95  /  9781771872560

Reviewed by Wendy Burton

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A Life in Pieces is a memoir assembled in the final months of Jo-Ann Wallace’s life. She died in June 2024, and Thistledown published the memoir in August 2024. The memoir originated in a writing group Wallace belonged to for many years. There are as many reasons for writing a memoir as there are for reading one. Motivated by others, a desire to make meaning, a wish to explain, defend, expound. Sometimes, death comes stalking, reminding us we’re running out of time. The key to what Wallace might be doing with her memoir and her defence of its style is found here, perhaps: “My friend wants my story to be longer and warmer, but that’s all I’ve got.”

I don’t know what prompted Jo-Ann Wallace to assemble these pieces into a memoir. Wallace was a professor of English Literature at University of Alberta, specializing in Virginia Woolf. The bio at the back of this book tells us her scholarly work focussed on women writers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. That specialty surely introduced her many times to the phenomena of women being written out of history or – more grievously – writing themselves out of their own lives.

Her career has left marks on her stories of her life from beginning to (almost) end. Reading the memories in a collection, I hear her academic voice: wry, witty, reticent. Many of the essays veer into lengthy asides; her story of she and her sister playing an invented game White Swan/Black Swan becomes a digression to Hilma of Klint and Swan No 1. Describing her addiction to collecting melmac becomes a brief recitation on the design and production of melamine household objects. These digressions are interesting, but not compelling. I felt often that I was about to hear a story expressed in vivid detail, with meaning in the conclusion, only to find myself in the company, as Wallace acknowledges, of Google and Wikipedia. Often, after interrupting her narrative with research the reader could easily find on their own, Wallace then asks ‘what does this have to do with that’ or ‘what does any of this have to do with Virginia Woolf’s commas’? A question I shared, and a question she often does not answer.

Edited by Susan Olding, A Life in Pieces remains in pieces. The unifying thread is missing. Many of the pieces were published independently of each other, and it shows. We are, for example, reminded she edited a definitive edition of Mrs Dalloway in the story immediately after the essay on producing that edition, as if it were new information.

Several of the essays follow a predictable format, perhaps required by the publications. The book is divided into sections: Early, Middle, Late. Reading the memoir chronologically, as it is arranged, I found myself wishing she would stay with a memory and give me more detail, more explanation, less Wikipedia, and more Jo-Ann Wallace. Particularly unsettling, for me, was her habit of using Google to look up people in her past on the internet and reporting on where they are now, with little of how such information affected her or what meaning she made of such discoveries. Some of her character sketches verge on the unkind, such as her descriptions of the four women she shared a hospital ward with, presumably when she was being treated for the cancer that ended her life. She shares little of her own experience and records what feels like an invasion of the privacy of the women similarly afflicted. Did she asked permission from these women to tell their stories?

This memoir reads like a conversation one might have with someone on a short bus ride or at an academic conference before the next session begins. Partial. Tidy. I sense the story is much deeper and at times darker, but, as she advises “it is the merely sufficient that suffices.” Her story about her abortion, for example, skips like a stone across the water of the experience. Her few references to her mother are partly unpacked toward the end of the volume, providing a few more details to shore up the ‘my mother never liked me’ thread she unspooled early in the memoir.  The gaps in the narrative are deliberate, I conclude. Perhaps in the gaps are the lives she did not live, the lives she intended to live if she had more time.

In a poignant essay ‘Going to Mars,’ Wallace offers her hope “that after death one’s beloved dogs greet one and the nature of the universe reveals itself.” The postscript poem offers her effort to explain that mystery. These two pieces hint at what this collection of pieces could have been.

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Wendy Burton is Professor Emerita at University of the Fraser Valley, where she taught academic and work place writing, story-telling, diversity education, and Indigenous Adult Education. In 1997, she earned a doctorate for her feminist analysis of story-telling as knowledge claims. Throughout her work life, she wrote creative non-fiction, long and short form fiction, and poetry. Her debut novel Ivy’s Tree (Thistledown) was published in 2020. She writes fiction and creative non-fiction. Her most recent essay is “Meditations on the Headstand,” Folklife, Winter 2023. [Editor’s note: Wendy Burton recently reviewed books by Chris Arnett, Susan Blacklin, and Tara Teng.]

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The British Columbia Review

Interim Editors, 2023-26: Trevor Marc Hughes (non-fiction), Brett Josef Grubisic (fiction)
Publisher: Richard Mackie

Formerly The Ormsby Review, The British Columbia Review is an on-line book review and journal service for BC writers and readers. The Advisory Board now consists of Jean Barman, Wade Davis, Robin Fisher, Barry Gough, Hugh Johnston, Kathy Mezei, Patricia Roy, and Graeme Wynn. Provincial Government Patron (since September 2018): Creative BC. Honorary Patron: Yosef Wosk. Scholarly Patron: SFU Graduate Liberal Studies. The British Columbia Review was founded in 2016 by Richard Mackie and Alan Twigg.

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