Laura Repas Defends Kathleen Winter’s Annabel
Click here to read Salty Ink’s introduction to Kathleen Winter, Annabel, and nominator Laura Repas.
I expect the novels I read to be a lot of things. I want them to be beautifully rendered and still emotionally honest. I want to care about the characters, but I prefer them to be flawed. I want to be drawn into a story, no matter how small or meandering, and I want to want to return to the book at every chance. I want to forget myself while I’m reading, and I want to think about the book long after I’ve turned the last page. It’s a tall order, but I’m happy to say that Kathleen Winter’s novel Annabel fills it.
Annabel is the story of a child, born in a small Labrador town in 1968, that is intersex – neither male nor female, but both sexes at once. The child’s parents, Jacinta and Treadway, and their friend Thomasina, the other adult present at the birth, make the difficult decision to allow surgery and raise the child as a boy named Wayne. The rest of the novel tells the story of Wayne’s growing up, and explores the aftermath and consequences of this decision.
Annabel manages to combine some straight up great storytelling with complex explorations of character. It’s a novel about identity, about what it means to be male or female, but to me it is also a novel about parenting, about the desperate mixture of love and anxiety that is being a parent, and about how that mixture can be blinding. Winter writes the scenes of parental confusion and desire so sparely, openly, and delicately that I found myself brooding over them for hours. It’s also suspenseful in its way. I couldn’t wait to return to it every chance I got because I had to find out what would become of Wayne, would he ever be accepted, or accept himself? Would he even be safe if he revealed Annabel?
The questions about identity Annabel asks are important ones. As readers, we understand and accept Wayne as the person he is, regardless of how he is formed, from the moment we meet him. We see him only as a person, we root for he and Annabel both, and we just want him to be happy. We have to ask ourselves if we would feel this way if Wayne/Annabel were someone we actually knew in real life. Granted, we wouldn’t see the world from the real-world Wayne’s point of view the way we can in a novel, but would we find him weird, or be intrigued in a puerile manner? Should we be asking why we care so much about gender identity in the first place, even in a newborn, when like anything about us, it needs time and space to develop. This is the true gift of a book like Annabel, and of all great fiction. Through knowing and understanding the characters in the book, we can attempt more compassionate and thoughtful answers to our questions, and then ask even deeper ones.
In the interest of full disclosure I should tell you that I’m working on Annabel right now as a publicist. I’m quite lucky in my job, I genuinely like most of the books I work on, and I’ve loved many. Sometimes I have to promote a book I don’t like at all, but that’s rare. Annabel falls firmly into the love category. You can take my word for it, but you’d be better off reading it and finding out for yourselves.
On June 18th, polls will open for the public to vote for the book, by an Atlantic Canadian author, that they think the country should read this summer! Follow the contest here: http://saltyink.com/atlantic-canada-reads-competition/
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