Is it that she is an immigrant to the US and was an immigrant to Canada before that, a brown woman on both sides of the border, viewed with suspicion that sometimes gets explicit?
Growing up, I understood my father through observation, and I suspect that he understood me much the same way. I liked to think our love was purer that way. Like two stray dogs who found each other and are blessed enough to just get along.
But I didn’t understand, then, how important memory is, for how do we know who we are without memory? How does anyone else know who we are, but for their memories of us?
Ann Packer discusses her most recent novel The Children's Crusade, artistic mothers, the writer and her “first principle,” and the fight to like your own characters.
How does one scene impress itself on us, so that we remember it better than we should if we were in it? Or rest, just below the surface, present, but unnoticed?