Barbara Gowdy

Barbara Gowdy, born in 1950 in Windsor, Ontario, Canada, is a novelist. She was nominated for a Governor General's Award for her novel Mister Sandman in 1995 and her novel White Bone in 1998, the latter also nominated for the Giller Prize. She is married to poet Christopher Dewdney.

Her novel Falling Angels was published in 1989 and was made into a film by director Scott Smith in 2002. The novel focuses on a nuclear family in a 1960s Ontario suburb. The main characters are three sisters who come of age in a house run by their abusive and womanizing father and must constantly find ways to take care of their depressed and alcoholic mother. Gowdy says her inspiration for the book was the idea of a Canadian family living during the Cold War and practicing using their bomb shelter in the back yard. In the novel and movie, the family spend 2 weeks trapped in the bomb shelter as an "exercise" rather than going on a family trip to Disneyland.

Authors such as Alice Munro and Carol Shields look at the everyday, but the bulk of Gowdy's work reflects upon the opposite. Gowdy's stories look at the extreme - the strange, the abnormal - and she is able to make her characters relatable, poignant. She often uses magic realism as a writing style, combining the fantastic or unusual with realistic and believable descriptions.

The narrator and main character of the title short story of her 1992 collection, We So Seldom Look On Love, for instance, is an assistant embalmer at a funeral home who makes love to the bodies of attractive young men before they are buried. The story was the inspiration for the 1996 Canadian independent film Kissed, directed by Lynne Stopkewich and starring Molly Parker. The story is based on Frank O'Hara's poem "Ode to Necrophilia", and was inspired by a newspaper article Gowdy read about a young California woman who hijacked a hearse on its way to a funeral, took the corpse of the young man inside the coffin to a motel room and made love to it for several days before being caught by the police.

We So Seldom Look On Love is meant as a compilation of circus-type charactrers and their quest to find connection with others. Another story features a two-headed man who removes one of his heads. A third story in that collection involves a woman who masturbates and exposes herself through the window of her apartment to a man in his apartment across the street.

Her novel The White Bone is written from the perspective of an elephant. Yet, her work is not about the shock value, but finding what is universal in us, as readers, to each of her characters.

See also Southern Ontario Gothic.

Bibliography

• 1988 - Through the Green Valley (ISBN 0312018053)
• 1989 - Falling Angels (ISBN 1569471169)
• 1992 - We So Seldom Look On Love (ISBN 1883642000)
• 1995 - Mister Sandman (ISBN 3596134196)
• 1999 - The White Bone (ISBN 0312264127)
• 2003 - The Romantic (ISBN 0312423241)