White Out

White Out is at first glance a woman’s invention, over and over again, of the man who chose not to be her father, leaving his young lover pregnant. Yet, arcing from late-1960s Quebec to the present, it is also the story of a young woman, and a generation of young women, caught between Catholicism and free love. Martine Delvaux’s aching take on her own origin story is a book about words lost in a lifetime of storms, about truth and fiction, a book about how something as seemingly commonplace as parentage can undermine everything—confidence, relationships, the body, memory. Through narrative we try to patch our unknowns but narrative, at once foreign and familiar, fails us.