Instagram story viewer> @oonaghdt> Tagged

Oonagh Devitt Tremblay

@oonaghdt

6K

followers

1999

following

Reviewing books (@the.tls, @friezeofficial, @financialtimes, @lit_review) and writing a novel whenever I encounter sunlight on the side of a house

POSTS STORIES REELS TAGGED

3

2

FINAL TICKETS : 🎟️ book now

https://www.ticketsource.com/veranda-books/book-launch-before-i-forget-by-anne-pauly/e-qryevq

23

3

This Must Be the Place: on Gaining Ground, Landscape and the Divided Woman in the Canadian Canon by Oonagh Devitt Tremblay

@oonaghdt writes about Joan Barfoot, Margaret Atwood and women in the Canadian wilderness.

Read the full essay at the link in our bio.

Image: The West Wind, Tom Thomson, Oil on canvas, 1917. Sourced from Wikiart.

117

8

A letter outwards with @oonaghdt 💌 Our conversation begins with Samuel Richardson’s epistolary novel Clarissa and ends with Miriam Toews’ recent epistolary memoir, A Truce that is Not Peace. Beginning with the fact of Tremblay’s original copy of Clarissa having burned in a fire, we reflect on the impact of loss and lost objects, and how our relationship to loss changes over time; epistolary practice as a mode for processing experience, as diaries you can send away while also holding onto them; the links between epistolary practice and rejection; and writing book reviews as a true response. 💌

87

0

11

0

ode to @cocos.to — who announced this morning their completely upsetting and necessary (the gist is, as always, landlords suck) closure at the end of January. @cocos.to has enabled so much cake theory and cake consumption and pink and green shimmery mugs and community enmeshment and solidarity and anyway, I’m waxing, obviously, and thus I bellow, cake caught in my throat, for everyone to go there as often as possible for the next two and a half months. Merci @cocos.to, mille fois and millefeuille. Many of these photos were taken by @oonaghdt whose visit to Toronto in late September warranted a cake-themed day and absolutely all of it (minus one pink and green macaron) was from @cocos.to

226

7

Thrilled to have reviewed Will There Ever Be Another You by Patricia Lockwood for @thelondonmagazine. I love Patricia Lockwood deeply and it was such an honour to be able to think and write about her work. To clasps, lemon slices, angels and hope 🔗

111

5

I started writing this review on the Eurostar from Paris to London a while back and it’s a joy to see it published today by @friezeofficial. I think I write the same way I read and the same way that I review, which is that I move into a book and live there from the first word to the last. So for a while I lived in Belleville and I thought about Lacan and ravalement. Images here from media I consumed and sights I saw during my time as a tenant in @lauren_elkin_’s mind and book.

147

10

Over a decade ago, when I was an undergraduate student at the University of Toronto sitting in a lecture for a course I took on Asian North American literature, I remember the professor telling us that a short story needed to destroy your life. We were reading the stories of Bienvenido N. Santos, and my professor shared with us the words of Arna Bontemps Hemenway in preparation: “One thing that’s great about short stories is how quickly they can ruin your life...the whole word has been destroyed around you and then rebuilt, and nothing is quite the same again.” On the other side of the snowy campus, in a course on Canadian Literature, I was reading Alice Munro and not knowing the extent to which she was doing this in real life. Bontemps Hemenway says that great stories practice violent beauty, and I think about the tension between violence and beauty and I see a cord pulled so taut it vibrates. Decades before all of this, in sunny Australia in 1989, Helen Garner was also thinking about Alice Munro and wrote in her diary: “She doesn’t answer the questions she makes your ask. She wants you to walk away anxious.” What we have here is a series of vignettes: cold Canada, warm Australia, a terrible mother making terrific art - violence, beauty, violence, beauty - intertwined into misalignment. A story, in short.

For eight days over breakfast, I read one story out of Guadalupe Nettel’s new short story collection The Accidentals. Reading a story each morning felt like entering into a dream state: Nettel’s worlds landed on me like a leaf on puddle and then stayed, hovering slightly for the rest of the day.

About a month after reading the stories for the first time, I did the same thing again: a story a day at breakfast. The second time around the stories dug their claws into me. I was trying to answer a question I had: What is this collection about? I think it’s about life and the terror of it. It’s a collection full of anxiety and beauty, worlds rebuilt and worlds destroyed - very pleased to have my review in this week’s @the.tls. The Accidentals by @la_guadalupe_nettel is translated by @hroslinde and published by @fitzcarraldoeditions.

172

12

Such a joy to write about Lili is Crying by Hélène Bessette (published by @fitzcarraldoeditions) for @lit_review

Lili is Crying by Hélène Bessette was first Lili Pleure published by Gallimard in 1953, with Raymond Queneau as editor. Now for the first time, the book has been translated into English by Kate Briggs and is being published by Fitzcarraldo with a beautiful introduction by Eimear McBride. In an essay on the process of translating Bessette in @yalereview Briggs writes that Lili is Crying “propose[s] the novel as a time-space, a duration” — and within this duration, it is quickly clear why Bessette was lauded by Marguerite Duras as “living literature” in “France today.”

I loved this book and spending time with it. All the characters want things to be nice “For things to be easy” — and it is in this laboured effort that “nice” becomes impossible. The novel vacillates between Lili’s self-desertion and the poisonous ferocity of her mother’s love, which ultimately is the only type of love Lili knows how to receive. By the end of the novel there are plans for the future, there is an energy and momentum that communicates that the story will continue without the reader: “The novel has shifted elsewhere”.

Lili is Crying is a boisterous collaboration with language wherein, as one of the characters says “everything plays out wonkily”. And it is in the duration of its wonkiness that it astounds. The words clank and echo and their clamour is a poem.

155

4

MAY 2025 🃏 🖼️ 🌺 👗 💅🏻 🍷 🦭 🌞

118

2

Les écrivains célèbres

440

16