Biography & Autobiography Criminals & Outlaws
Like Every Form of Love
A Memoir of Friendship and True Crime
- Publisher
- Random House of Canada
- Initial publish date
- Aug 2023
- Category
- Criminals & Outlaws, Friendship, Personal Memoirs
-
Hardback
- ISBN
- 9781039006201
- Publish Date
- Aug 2023
- List Price
- $35.00
Classroom Resources
Where to buy it
Description
From the Scotiabank Giller Prize finalist, a gripping exploration of class, race, friendship, sexuality, what an author owes her subject and what it means to be a good person—all wrapped up in a riveting Canadian true crime story.
Padma Viswanathan was staying on a houseboat on Vancouver Island when she struck up a friendship with a warm-hearted, working-class queer man named Phillip. Their lives were so different it seemed unlikely to Padma that their relationship would last after she returned to her usual life. But, that week, Phillip told her a story from his childhood that kept them connected for more than twenty years.
Phillip was the son of a severe, abusive man named Harvey, a miner, farmer and communist. After Phillip’s mother left the family, Harvey advertised for a housekeeper-with-benefits. And so Del, the most glamorous and loving of stepmothers, stepped into Phillip's life. Del had hung out with Fidel Castro and Che Guevara in Mexico City before the Cuban revolution; she was also a convicted bank robber who had violated her parole and was suspected in her ex-husband’s murder. Phillip had long since lost track of Del, but when Padma said she’d like to write about her and about his own young life, he eagerly agreed. Quickly, though, Padma’s research uncovered hidden truths about these larger-than-real-life characters. Watching the effects on Phillip as these secrets, evasions and traumas came to light, she increasingly feared that when it came to the book or the friendship, only one of them would get out of this process alive.
In this unforgettable memoir, Padma reflects on the joys and frictions of this strange journey with grace, humour and poetry, including original readings of Hans Christian Andersen fairytales and other stories that beautifully echo her characters’ adventures and her own. Like Every Form of Love is that rare thing: an irresistible literary page-turner that twists and turns, delivering powerful revelations, right to the very end.
About the author
Contributor Notes
PADMA VISWANATHAN’s fiction has been published in eight countries and shortlisted for the PEN USA Prize and the Scotiabank Giller Prize. Her stories, essays and short translations have appeared in Granta, The Boston Review, BRICK, and elsewhere. Her translation of the novel São Bernardo, by the Brazilian novelist Graciliano Ramos, was published in 2020 by New York Review Books. Originally from Edmonton, Alberta, she now divides her time between Montreal, Quebec, and Fayetteville, Arkansas, where she is Professor of Fiction at the University of Arkansas. She has served as fiction faculty at the Banff Centre, the Vermont Studio Center, Kundiman Asian-American Writers Retreat, Bread Loaf Writers’ Conferences and the Low-Residency MFA of Fairleigh-Dickinson University. She is married to the poet and translator Geoffrey Brock.
Excerpt: Like Every Form of Love: A Memoir of Friendship and True Crime (by (author) Padma Viswanathan)
In September 1997, I went to stay on a chunky decommissioned tugboat moored in Genoa Bay, a tiny marina on Vancouver Island. My plan was to spend a couple of weeks writing, alone.
Instead, I made a friend.
On arrival, I’d quickly drawn the attention of my neighbours, people who lived on their boats and spent any spare time or money grooming them, who made their living restoring antique wooden boats, even a woman who had sailed the entire southern hemisphere with her young kids. When I mentioned that my husband was coming out from Edmonton to Victoria for a visit, and that I needed to go see him, they introduced me to Phillip, a fellow landlubber, who was occupying a friend’s boathouse for a few months. He was going to the city for a haircut and could take a passenger.
The marina’s permanent residents gave off some snide energy when they mentioned Phillip, but the Genoa Bayers were all characters of towering eccentricity and outsized opinions. Rumours and slights darted between the piers like schools of tiny fish; cliques formed and exploded with the predictability of a lava lamp. Innuendo wasn’t to be taken too seriously. My own membership in Genoa Bay society was practically affirmed by a couple of snarky comments about the derelictcondition of my tugboat, property of my husband’s family.
Phillip was buff, with hollow cheeks and expressive blue eyes: flinty or inquisitive or fonts of loving kindness by turns. There was nothing femmy or camp about him, yet he affected a performative masculinity in public, brusquely calling security guards and checkout clerks “man” and “bud.” In private, he unloosed throaty, symphonic laughs, blasts from a rogue angel’s trumpet. (God, I loved his laugh.) He’d locked that hard body around a tender heart.
His defences dropped quickly; after that trip to the city, he pursued my friendship. My other project in this time, though, was a three-day fast (either confronting or avoiding my then life’s most urgent subject, my disastrous marriage—I’m still not sure). And as my mother had told me, a food fast is traditionally done with a social fast. She used a Sanskrit word for it, maunam, silence.
Phillip didn’t believe in it, not like the fast conflicted with his beliefs, but like he couldn’t absorb the fact of its existence. He wanted me to come thrifting with him; he wanted me to taste a delicious cookie he’d bought. I caved on all counts. I had only a few days left in Genoa Bay and was charmed and intrigued. He was so different from my other friends. His courtly manners, opening doors for me and making me walk on the side of the street away from the curb; the way he spoke,in a thick BC lilt, his speech peppered with “fuck” the way others use “like” or “um,” using colourful, unfamiliar idioms I’d repeat to myself and write down later. I heard the stern, brass-knuckled poetry of the dangerous classes in his waxings-on about his main topic, the pursuit of rough sex, “the game, the gay game,” as he put it.
After his haircut in Victoria on our first time out together, he ran a hand along his new fade and mused, “Maybe I’ll find me a long-haired motorcycle dude, with my soldier’s buzz cut.”
He told me he hadn’t been sure how I would “take the whole homosexuality thing, being straight . . .”
“And Indian?” I guessed.
“Well, yeah,” he admitted, “of the culture. But I used towork at a pulp mill, and all the guys there”—Sikhs, I supposed, since they’d been stalwarts in BC’s lumber industry for generations—“they’d be having sex with women, men, everyone. I’d get to know these guys and get to know their dads and go to bed with them.”
Stories: he had a million of ’em.
On my last afternoon, he invited me for tea at the boathouse where he was living, a floating bungalow with walls of some honey-coloured wood, maybe pine. To one side, its windows showed a low black cliff like a side-hugging arm around the bay; to the front, open water. I’d recorded in my journal that week a series of seal sightings over successive dawns, and also birds: black oystercatcher, mountain bluebird, mute swan, hairy woodpecker, belted kingfisher, and a great blue heron I saw daily from my writing desk, the tugboat’s helm. Once, I took my seat to find my eyes level with its scaly feet on the pier beside me.
As Phillip fixed our tea, we chatted idly about desserts. He mentioned a delicious coconut pudding he’d sampled in Cuba and never forgotten.
Cuba? What was he doing there?
It turned out to be the only topic that day: a single story, it took up the entire afternoon.
Editorial Reviews
“Padma Viswanathan . . . evokes an impressive mix of memory, friendship, true crime—and a detective story where her own skills play an important role. It’s her first foray into true crime, a genre that allows her to employ the breadth of her literary skills. . . . The resulting memoir is painstakingly honest, always complex, sometimes strange.” —Toronto Star
“Viswanathan’s struggle is fascinating and humanizing. . . . A thought-provoking and personal examination of a difficult friendship and what sometimes gets sacrificed when a writer is determined to see a project through to its conclusion.” —Winnipeg Free Press
“Like Every Form of Love is a rich hybrid of biography, autobiography, fairy tale and detective work. In moments of lyric intensity, Viswanathan searches others’ minds, others’ memories and discovers how fluid and fragmentary identity is. A potent meditation on what it means to turn others into story.” —Rosemary Sullivan, author of The Betrayal of Anne Frank: A Cold Case Investigation
“Everyone knows that the teller tells the tale, but master tellers also know how the tale tells them, exacting a toll. Padma Viswanathan is a born teller, a master reporter, a master senser, and indeed this may be her masterpiece. The tale she tells is a doozie, but so has been its toll, and her reader will experience the rare, sometimes heartrending privilege of partaking in both.” —Lawrence Weschler, Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Love and Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees
“As Padma Viswanathan’s unlikely friendship with a stranger develops over twenty years, the two uncover his perilous childhood, his loving and dangerous stepmother, an unsolved murder and a thousand shards from his mysterious past. Between them, they connect the dots but lose each other in the long painful process of reassembling his history. This is the searching story of how digging for the truth tests the boundaries of a passionate friendship.” —Linda Spalding, author of Who Named the Knife and The Purchase