Imperfect People (by Caroline Adderson)
I am partial to imperfect characters, the kind of people we sidestep in real life because they make us uncomfortable, because we are afraid of them, because we are afraid of being them. How much easier to turn and face them when they are between the covers of a book! This embracing of the imperfect exemplifies, I think, what the act of reading (and for that matter writing) actually is -- an act of compassion: com + pati = to suffer with. Through literature we gain privileged access to the private thoughts and feelings of a character and so become them and suffer with them. Oddly, only as I was pulling books off my shelf to compile this list, did it occurred to me that my second novel, Sitting Practice, had an imperfect character -- Iliana, a paraplegic. I had forgotten about her because she no longer seemed imperfect to me; in fact, she is the least incomplete person in the book. My entire attitude toward disability changed by the time I finished writing the novel so that now, when I tell people it is about Buddhism and spinal cord injury, I have to smile as they instinctively recoil. For how else do they plan to read the book but sitting down? (Caroline Adderson is the author of two internationally published novels (A History of Forgetting, Sitting Practice), two collections of short stories (Bad Imaginings, Pleased To Meet You), and three books for young readers (Very Serious Children, I, Bruno, Bruno For Real). Her work has received numerous prize nominations including the Scotiabank Giller Prize longlist, the Governor General's Literary Award, the Rogers' Trust Fiction Prize, and the Commonwealth Writers' Prize. A two-time Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize and three-time CBC Literary Award winner, Caroline was also the recipient of the 2006 Marian Engel Award for mid-career achievement. Her latest novel is The Sky is Falling.)
