Junction Reads with Jill Yonit Goldberg

Описание: I am so very grateful to have had this conversation with Jill Yonit Goldberg. I hope you enjoy it too! We heard her read an incredible (award-winning) excerpt, and we talked about characters, names, toxic masculinity, strong women, the environment, and how AFTER WE DROWNED might change your view of who are the good guys and who are the bad guys, not only in fiction, but in the world.

From the very first pages of Jill Yonit Goldberg’s novel, AFTER WE DROWNED, we know we’re about to enter a world where the main narrator, Jesse, is powerless to the suffering happening around him.

The very first chapter, told from Jesse’s perspective is titled CRUEL SUMMER. The first line “Ever since the oil rig exploded, daddy’s been obsessed with killing things” tells us there will be death, there will be cruelty and Jesse will watch as his father “acts like life is a punishment, a bitter drink he swallows every single day.”

But it is not all suffering in AFTER WE DROWNED, Goldberg’s first novel. There is hope. Jesse falls in love with a girl who loves him back (or tries to) and whose mother is an empathetic nurse who understands Jesse better than anyone else in the novel. Jesse’s sister Willow Rose is a firecracker determined to be loved by her failure of a father, and the character most likely to succeed if the they all lived in a yearbook. While Jesse’s mother Angeline smokes a pack and day and is sexually abused, she too, feels like she could conquer the world if she could drag her near lifeless body out of the rug of life her husband Emmett rolled her into. There are witnesses to their miserable life, too, who will be there for them should they ever have the courage to ask for help.

And of course there is the 1980s, all “Let’s Make America Great Again” and Reaganomics and let’s make as much money as we can and put all the poor people in jail just for trying to live, but there is also every important song lyric I ever mouthed (if you didn’t spend a portion of your childhood in the 80s, you should create some playlists because the music was magic!) which ground the novel in this place on the edge of change, which feels hopeful…until you turn on the TV and see that world is on fire.

With precise and sensually gorgeous prose, AFTER WE DROWNED is a reminder that while we casually watch the earth become ash, there is a greater toll to be paid, and it we won’t be clear until each and every one of us – like Goldberg’s characters Jesse, Willow Rose and Angeline – is forced to get in a car and drive away from our suffering. But where will we go?

Thanks to everyone who joined us for the event on January 12th. Thanks to Anvil Press for a copy for the raffle on January 26. Thanks to Cayley Brightside for their hard work. Thanks to Heather Wood for the support of the series and to all of you who show up time and again and share your time with us.

Grab a copy of AFTER WE DROWNED from your favourite local indie bookstore. www.indiebokkstores.ca