It is a collection of short stories or essays, inspired by selected events and episodes from [Merilyn Simonds]'s life, which means that Simonds is writing a dramatic memoir and has massaged the turning points of her life into art, or if not art, then into a record of how she remembers her life, which is perhaps more useful.

$29.99 272 pages

Those of us stupid enough to read for a living are always pathetically grateful for a writer who writes as if she were talking straight into one's ear, her voice intimate, her tone honest and stripped of vanity or grandiosity, who does not seek to spike certain kinds of stress hormones in one's body in order to get and keep our attention. Merilyn Simonds is such a writer.

The Lion in the Room Next Door is Simonds's first book after her bestselling The Convict Lover ,of 1994. It is a collection of short stories or essays, inspired by selected events and episodes from Simonds's life, which means that Simonds is writing a dramatic memoir and has massaged the turning points of her life into art, or if not art, then into a record of how she remembers her life, which is perhaps more useful. There are enough apologias from the author and publisher in the notes of this edition to indicate that Simonds, and McClelland & Stewart, think they are treading dangerous ground. Fiction or non-fiction? Memoir or imagination? Literary or genre? These categories are closely guarded by the culture police, mostly used to lash the writer back behind his bars, and irritating and persistent enough to make any writer explode, as the late Bruce Chatwin used to with regularity: "Who cares? It's a book ." Add your own expletives. He did.

Simonds is a middle-class Canadian woman whose father was successful enough to afford her some privilege, though it was a slippery, up-and-down-the-ladder kind of privilege. She spent some of her childhood in Brazil, which affected her deeply and infected her with the desire to slip into other ways of life, as well as a disinclination to stick with her own. This is a familiar and persistent theme for women of Simonds's generation. The world, for girl children raised in the 1950s and early '60s, seemed so harsh, the prognosis so bleak, that a slide into the semi-consciousness of sex, love, motherhood, marriage and hold your nose and squeeze your eyes shut Third World travel seemed the only possible routes.

Simonds describes this condition perfectly, with no confusion or obfuscation. She can see that she is half awake, she has willfully surrendered to the undertow of biological determination. Three-quarters of the way through the book, she purchases a watercolour of a lion-woman, "her hair a wild tangle of curling flames, vines twining her breasts, the flesh on her arms shifting to fur, her hands transformed to paws," the character Simonds believes, despairingly, she has become.

Simonds finds that university is too difficult, despite a hunger for knowledge and a scholarship from a rich, kind stranger. Her nerves are too much for her, she throws herself into marriage, gets pregnant and finds herself mired in the female condition, flailing around for language and the intellectual tools with which to use it. She is a woman who is deeply affirmed by sex, finding meaning and a reason to live within it. Unfortunately for her, sex also means an almost complete loss of self and subsequent revulsion for that state. Travel back to the hot, mysterious, anarchic Southern hemisphere helps her find the strength to try again, to emerge, conscious and maybe pain-free enough to both love and stay awake this time.

This is a fascinating book because it risks not being particularly visceral. One follows the life of an ordinarily privileged white female, listens to her talk about her sisters, her mother, her father, a family death, clothing, teachers, her sons, her husbands. She is musing out loud; it is stream of consciousness, but completely unaffected. The few snippets of magic realism happen mostly when she's writing about her childhood, which is acceptable because children do experience the world as magical. We are not shocked by Simonds, nor are we manipulated. We are listening to a very honest voice describing an all too common state of being, and it is a great relief.