Adult Onset
By Ann-Marie MacDonald. Alfred A. Knopf Canada, 384 pp, hardcover

It’s hard to dismiss the glaring similarities between Canadian jack-of-all-trades Ann-Marie MacDonald (actor, playwright, CBC host, and novelist, to name a few) and the main character of her highly anticipated third novel, Adult Onset.

Like MacDonald, the protagonist Mary Rose MacKinnon—“Mister” or MR, for short—is a writer living in Toronto with her wife (a theatre director) and two children. The narrative spans the period of one week as Mary Rose, a mature stay-at-home mother, goes through the motions—and banality—of everyday domesticity and caregiving.

A surprise bout of phantom pain from a childhood diagnosis of benign pediatric bone cysts, “cavities in the bone that fill with a yellowish fluid”, causes Mary Rose to parse through her memories to distinguish fact from fiction in family lore, hazy recollections, and her elderly mother’s accidental and seemingly nonsensical confessions.

Tepid resentment over past neglect and suspected abuse bubble to the surface in dangerous ways as Mary Rose confronts her own revolving emotions of love, anger, and detachment: “she would give anything to be able to feel—without the kick-start of anger—the love she knows she has always had for her child. She can see this love. Behind glass. Sleeping. With a fragment of poisoned apple lodged in its mouth.”

Trauma is often relived by painstaking repetition, and MacDonald displays Mary Rose’s anguish as running on a loop, forwarding and rewinding the narrative for emphasis. The words “I wish you had cancer,” told to Mary Rose by her mother when she came out to her family at 23 (a plot point taken from MacDonald’s own biography), are still as potent in the present despite her family’s later blessings.

Adult Onset’s low simmer is a change of pace from MacDonald’s previous murder-mystery spy thriller The Way the Crow Flies, and literary debut Fall on Your Knees, the grim family saga that launched MacDonald to international acclaim after winning the Commonwealth Writers Prize and, perhaps more notably, Oprah’s golden touch as a book-club favourite. What remains, however, is MacDonald’s effortless ability to quickly spin pathos into humour, making the suffering of her characters humane and never heavy-handed.

Ann-Marie MacDonald makes two appearances at this year’s Vancouver Writers Fest: at the opening-night event on October 21 and in conversation with Jerry Wasserman on October 25. See the Vancouver Writers Fest website for details.