A Memoir of Friendship: The Letters between Carol Shields and Blanche Howard/Random Illuminations: Conversations with Carol Shields

Blanche Howard and Allison Howard (eds), A Memoir of Friendship: The Letters Between Carol Shields and Blanche Howard (Toronto: Penguin Canada, 2007), 352pp.Cased. $35. ISBN 978-0-6700-6613-1. Paper. $19. ISBN 978-0-1430-5226-5. Eleanor Wachtel, Random Illuminations: Conversations with Carol Shields (New Brunswick: Gooselane, 2007), 180pp. Paper. $19.95. ISBN 978-0-86492-501-5. These two rewarding volumes constitute a valuable supplement to Carol Shields's literary legacy. The first collates Shields's correspondence with her friend and fellow author Blanche Howard, with whom Shields collaborated on the epistolary novel A Celibate Season. The second volume brings together Shields's interviews with Eleanor Wachtel conducted between 1988 and 2002. Edited by Howard and her daughter Allison, A Memoir of Friendship begins with Anne Giardini's Foreword, which reflects upon the dying art of letter writing and contextualises Shields's and Howard's relationship. Shields first met Howard in the early 1970s in Ottawa and formed a friendship that would endure until Shields's death in 2003. Howard was, at the time of their first meeting, the more established writer, having won the 1972 Canadian Booksellers' Award for her novel The Manipulator. 'I have an overwhelming wish just to talk to someone about the whole subject of writing', Shields states in an early letter (p. 4), as she was embarking on her own literary career. Books would remain a focal point of the women's correspondence over the next thirty years. The volume is particularly fascinating for the intimate insight that it gives into the writing life, both private and public. Howard read drafts of almost all of Shields's novels and offered advice and suggestions that were usually incorporated by Shields into her work. Unfortunately, excessive editing of some of these comments makes this aspect of the volume rather less revealing than it might have been, though the development of A Celibate Season is covered fairly comprehensively. Both authors are disarmingly frank about their own writing. 'Some days I'm astonished by my brilliance and others I feel lower than Danielle Steele', Howard confesses (p. 499), while Shields wonders whether 'writers ever get to the point of complete faith in their blatherings' (p. 510). Howard's increasing struggles with publication are juxtaposed with Shields's growing success and fame, and reflections upon literary prizes and the stresses of promotion are also enlightening. Another highlight of the volume is the discussions of the books Shields and Howard are reading and their sometimes acerbic, pleasingly unorthodox comments on fiction, Canadian and otherwise. The Double Hook is dismissed as 'dreadful imitation Faulkner' (p. 10), The God of Small Things as 'high trash' (p. 377), The English Patient as 'awfully studied, terribly solemn, taking itself incredibly seriously' (p. 274), and The Blind Assassin as 'a long, dull read, alas' (p. …

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