"Snow Road Station" and "All Things Consoled," both by Elizabeth Hay

I try to keep up at least a little bit with Canadian literature, since I was born in Canada, where my parents grew up and where I still have a large extended family, and feel connected to it, even though I have lived in two other countries (India and the United States) most of my life. But I did not know Elizabeth Hay's work until I recently read her 2023 novel, “Snow Road Station” (Knopf Canada). It is a wrenching story about a woman in her sixties, an actor who feels herself being edged out of the theater world and retreats to the small town of Snow Road Station, Ontario. There she tries to assess her life, past and present; her perspective is bleak. The big focus, aside from but related to her loss of career and identity, is her lifelong essential but complex friendship with another woman, as they try to untangle their lives and the friendship. This is a beautiful book, but not actually the one I especially want to focus on in this post. Reading “Snow Road Station” led me to Hay’s piercing, melancholy, grief-filled memoir, “All Things Consoled” (McClelland & Stewart, 2018), one that manages, despite the grim events that Hay describes, to be life-affirming. The focus of the memoir is the difficult, trying time in which her parents are aging, and the ways in which Hay’s often fraught relationship with her parents in the past complicates her current relationship with them as, despite herself, she worries more and more about them, and takes on more and more of their caregiving. This memoir is so moving, so uncomfortable, so heartbreaking to read that I can barely write about it. But it is also so important, so beautiful that I feel compelled to bring it to your attention. The pain is in the way that the heartbreak co-exists with so much (complicated) love. Hay describes her parents so well, such as her father’s frightening temper and her mother’s extreme frugality. The details of these qualities and other aspects of their lives are distressing but perfectly wrought. And the situation of adult children’s taking care of, worrying about, tending to, loving but sometimes resenting their elderly parents, is so common that many readers will be able to relate to it, even if the particulars of their situations and feelings are different. I highly recommend this gorgeously written memoir.