Angélique Lalonde explores the complexities of love in short story collection Glorious Frazzled Beings
Glorious Frazzled Beings is on the 2021 Scotiabank Giller Prize shortlist
From a somewhat-ghost who tends the family garden to a shapeshifting mother who must sift through her ancestors' gifts and the complexities of love, Angélique Lalonde's Glorious Frazzled Beings is a collection of stories that pays tribute to the homes we make, keep and break.
Glorious Frazzled Beings is o the 2021 Scotiabank Giller Prize shortlist. The winner will be announced on Nov. 8, 2021.
Lalonde is a writer from B.C. Her work has been featured in PRISM International, the Journey Prize Anthology and Room. Her short fiction Pooka received the 2019 Writers' Trust Journey Prize.
Lalonde spoke to CBC Books about Glorious Frazzled Beings.
Home as a complex place
"The theme of the book emerged as I was pulling through stories. As I was going through them, the larger theme of home came out.
Home can be a place where we feel calm and healing, but it can also be a place of strife, fear and trauma.- Angélique Lalonde
"Home is a complex place. Sometimes home isn't a great place to be. Home can be a place where we feel calm and healing, but it can also be a place of strife, fear and trauma.
"Especially if you're living on Indigenous territories — you're thinking about what home is and the relationship to land when you are here because of colonial forces. Home is sometimes a difficult place for the people who are from here and who have been here for thousands of years.
"My own family has been displaced. My mom has an Indigenous background, although we don't know exactly what that is because she left her home as a young person. As I'm raising children, I try to think about what kind of home I'm making for them."
Mother-daughter relationships
"I think relationships between mothers and daughters are complex. Certainly, my relationship with my mom is complex.
I try to form a relationship with my daughter that will hopefully be less filled with certain forms of strife and less trauma — that's not always easy.- Angélique Lalonde
"For me, there's a bit of a language barrier because my parents are both French-speaking and I was raised in English-speaking Canada. When I speak with my mom in French, I'm limited in how I can express myself. Yet I don't feel comfortable speaking English to her. I also grew up culturally different from her, so there's a translating between the cultural worlds happening.
"She's taught me a lot about healing, trauma, struggle and love; all those things are interwoven together. I try to form a relationship with my daughter that will hopefully be less filled with certain forms of strife and less trauma — that's not always easy."
Fluidity between human and non-human
"On a fundamental level, I don't see humans as separate from other beings. Especially on the northwest coast, fluidity between human and non-human is part of being and it's understood that non-human beings are our kin. Whether you see that as myth or story, there's real truth to that fluidity.
That's the wonderful thing about fiction — you can blur those boundaries.- Angélique Lalonde
"That's the wonderful thing about fiction — you can blur those boundaries. In Western culture, that individual identity and subjectivity is something we learn from an early age. I enjoy being able to play with that and to blur those boundaries in making stories.
"I think it's important that we consider our relationships with other beings, how we are in relationship with them, and how we care for the land, the waters and the air that we all share."
Stories that speak the truth
"I wrote these stories mostly for myself. So I can only speak to what they do for me. I am a reader and I know what I hope to take when I read. I'm mostly moved by stories that speak to truth, that help me learn and help me see things in a new way.
I'm mostly moved by stories that speak to truth, that help me learn and help me see things in a new way.- Angélique Lalonde
"I would hope that readers connect with pieces of their own truth and see themselves in a different light. I hope they give space to the complexities of life and the beauty that lives in the fragile and difficult parts of life."
Lalonde's comments have been edited for length and clarity.
