Barbara Gowdy
| Barbara Gowdy | |
|---|---|
| Born |
25 June 1950 Windsor, Ontario |
| Nationality | Canada |
| Partner | Christopher Dewdney |
Barbara Gowdy, CM (born 25 June 1950) is a Canadian novelist and short story writer. Born in Windsor, Ontario, she is the long-time partner of poet Christopher Dewdney and resides in Toronto.
Gowdy's novel Falling Angels (1989) was made into a film of the same name by director Scott Smith, from an adaptation written by Esta Spalding, in 2002. The comically dark 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 two 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 and the abnormal, but she manages to make her characters both human and poignant. She often draws on magic realism as a writing style, combining the fantastic or unusual with realistic and believable descriptions, placing her within the tradition of Southern Ontario Gothic.
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's name is taken from a line in the Frank O'Hara's poem "Ode on Necrophilia", and was inspired by a newspaper article Gowdy read about Karen Greenlee, 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 had sex with it for several days before being caught by the police. The entire story collection deals with outsiders trying to find their place in the world and doing whatever they have to do achieve this end. "The Two-Headed Man," for instance, features a man who removes his conjoined head and, therefore, either commits murder or suicide. A third story, "93 Million Miles Away" involves a woman who, in a desperate need to be seen and known, exposes herself through the window of her apartment to the doctor in an apartment across the lane. This story was made into the film Arousal.
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