My second novel, Becalming, is packaged in a beautiful, serene cover designed by Karen Alexiou. In actuality, it is anything but serene.
In nautical terms, a sailing vessel that is becalmed is motionless due to a lack of wind. Becalming is the state of enforced stillness that causes a sailboat to drift with ocean currents as it cannot propel itself. The doldrums: “sort of like my present life,” as Gosia, the Polish-Canadian narrator of my novel, states in the first chapter. Becalming is a book about the rage and frustration of early adulthood in a time of toxic positivity and polished appearances, where we repeat the trite and familiar refrain of I’m fine, everything is fine, it will all be fine. But is it?
In the novel, Gosia and Peter, a couple in their late twenties and early thirties, struggle to make it work (in the face of existential dread, student loans, and lack of generational wealth), when they get some unexpected news that introduces the kind of excitement they were not seeking. The two former collegiate athletes know intimately how to work hard through pain and boredom, but family dynamics and romantic relationships are not sports.
The first kernel of the idea for the novel came from a 2010 Globe and Mail Facts and Arguments essay I published while working on my first novel, Giant. In the essay, I shared my grief about a miscarriage and the untimely death of my then-boyfriend’s father. A decade later, I turned the essay into this novel. The question that kept nagging at me was how well do we know the people closest to us, especially our parents? How does a daughter find empathy for an estranged ‘deadbeat’ dad? How does a son forgive a doting father who betrayed the family?
Whether in childhood, young adulthood, or middle age, it is common to feel as though we have no free will, as though we are victims of chance and other people’s decisions. We get on a conveyor belt and are carried through life. We drift directionlessly until tragedy provides opportunity. Becalming presents moments where it is in fact too late to turn down the inspired path, as well as moments of redemption and victory.
Characters in the novel find their wind, initiate movement in the doldrums despite feeling like they have no agency. For me, as a writer of a novel with several meta parts (during which I poked fun at my own process, acknowledging the artificiality of the novel as a form), I ended up reconnecting with my own father (who lives in Poland and has never been to Canada), an unintended consequence of the project. Even though I created a diorama that’s a literary approximation of life, I ended up gaining some wisdom and forgiveness while asking uncomfortable questions and exploring possible answers.