Maclear, Kyo. Unearthing. Knopf Canada, Toronto, 2023. Mem; 6/23.

The cover of this lovely memoir calls it “tangled” and is it ever. But it’s also just beautiful because of how much emotional and philosophic content the author packs into it and because she writes like a generously accessible lyric poet. Tangled because at times we lose sight of the main metaphor – plants and soil – as it gets overgrown, occasionally obscured, with that content: parents, family, love and fear, What’s human experience all about? heredity, secrets, DNA, Japanese/Jewish/Scottish etc. culture, comfort with ambiguity, and unseen spiritual forces. I got the feeling Maclear let her emotional life vision loose to lead her where it wanted to go.

I’ll keep the outline vague to avoid tedious plot alerts. Kyo’s Japanese mother is an enigmatic attractive tough-minded independent (“I lost everything this week,” I overheard my mother say to a man offering her coffee in the corner. “I lost my husband and I lost my Air Miles card.”). The Scottish father turns out to make “Ma”’s enigma look straightforward as we steer off into biologic and spiritual heredity, a mashed-up coiling melange of love affairs, secrets, and name changes. All being told by a mature author of a narrator with a husband and two grown sons.

These days anyone can find out their biological heredity, but the purveyors of the information warn, “You may discover unanticipated facts about yourself or your family when using our services that you may not have the ability to change.” I appear WASP while my brother looks Jewish, each of us potentially representing opposite sides of our parents’ marriage (which ended when we were both in high school). I was curious enough to recently send my spit off to Ancestry DNA and was happy with my 50% Ashkenazy along with English and Irish genes, all as expected. Maclear’s DNA results however produce more questions than answers.

This memoir is a story of finding how to encompass ambiguity where “life (is) a seething and electrifying panorama.” Neither one of Maclear’s parents finished high school, one result of which was that she was raised by people who “discovered the movement of their minds without thought of permission, without an eye on a good grade.” She explores the character of her “true father” and intentionally or not leaves us at times wondering exactly who that is. Family isn’t so much a “perimeter we draw against all those we don’t know … (but is) forever fluid, regularly and gladly made strange.” It’s somehow safely okay not knowing exactly what is going on but being prepared to confront it as it develops. Middle-aged Maclear casts her own sons as a kind abstractly observing Greek chorus checking “in for regular updates, to see if I was still gathering siblings.” It sounds like they are growing up – as we do a bit more quickly reading their mother’s story – agreeing with F Scott Fitzgerald that the “test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposite ideas in the mind at this same time, and still retain the ability to function.” Maybe that’s also a test of hope for surviving with an intact imagination.

The friend who recommended this book to me said of Maclear he’d found himself “gasping in awe and gulping her descriptive aesthetic air.” Me too. Apropos of her ambiguity she suggests keeping “… this kiosk of unknown clowns ready to say: ‘Surprise! For better or worse, we are here to aid you in becoming undone.’ “ I like potentially worrisome freakish characters jumping unpredictably out of the kiosk. All new mothers who haven’t slept very well are “ready to sidle away, like a baby meteor has just landed in their life.” And along similar lines human reality we may grasp only vaguely gets sharply illuminated: “Sometimes you have to bury the facts to give a feeling … every feeling and every fact is spring-loaded.” (italics mine). Of course these snippets don’t convey the context where emotion often builds to a surprise.

There is a framework of Japanese seasons. The deaths of both parents are almost unbearably realistic while routine goings-on in a nursing home continue and there’s play-by-play of an NBA game on a nearby TV. Obscure short references to writers appear. There is no difference between love and fear we are told Maclear gleaned from A General Theory of Love, one of the few references I’d read. She takes from her experience of family ambiguity that “the injuries and inheritances that preceded my arrival, which now included this genealogical shadow I might have been dragging around unwittingly”. I recognized her appreciating this from Denis Noble’s Dance to the Tune of Life: DNA probably isn’t the only thing we inherit biologically.

Without getting spooky Maclear has no trouble with the necessity but moral worries about secrecy nor with the metaphysics of unseen force. In an art gallery

the structure was there even if it was not painted or expressed directly. It was present in the mood of softness bordered by solidity, in a view of a world edged by turbulence, in brushstrokes that registered perceptual upheaval, a canvas recording forces and feelings beyond pure light and weather. A man turns inward while feeling the storm at his back.

I can’t remember a memoir this captivatingly philosophical and literary. Or written with such graceful but sharp-edged style. Please consider giving it a try. I don’t think I’ve done it justice here.

9.3/9.6.