Odds & ends

• I've whined -- umm, commented ;)  -- a couple of times in the past here about Kamala Harris's apparent reluctance to acknowledge the formative teenage years she spent here in Canada (Montreal, specifically), during the late 1970s/early 1980s (a turbulent time in the country/that province's history). She's still not commenting about that time in her life, but the Washington Post investigated and produced an interesting article about it this past weekend:  "These five tumultuous years in Montreal shaped Kamala Harris."  Here's a gift link, if you're interested!  
• My 2021 review of Harris's memoir. 
• From this past August in the Toronto Star: "Forgive Kamala Harris for downplaying the formative years she spent in Montreal. She has an election to win." (No gift links, sorry, but if there's a paywall, sometimes saving to Pocket.com and then opening it there will work.) 
• 2020 New York Times story: "In Canada, Kamala Harris, a Disco-Dancing Teenager, Yearned for Home."
• Speaking of the upcoming U.S. election (well, I was, sorta...), my 83-year-old American mother voted by absentee ballot in the last election for the very first time! -- she married my dad and came to Canada when she was 19, and the voting age back then was 21. (She didn't obtain Canadian/dual citizenship until she was in her 50s, I think? -- and so was not eligible to vote here either until then.)  
• She's casting an absentee ballot again this year, with the help of my sister, who (as in 2020) will courier the ballot to the courthouse in Mom's home county this week to be tabulated. I told her I'd gladly chip in for half the cost. :)  
• I enjoyed this chat (gift linked) among three Washington Post writers, revisiting Helen Fielding's  "Bridget Jones's Diary,"25+ years after its publication.  I first read "Bridget" back in 1998, I think -- not long post-loss, when I thought I might never laugh again, but desperately needed one.  This was pre-blogs or Goodreads, so I never wrote a full review of it -- but I've mentioned it several times on this blog over the years, most notably here and here. I still think of Bridget fondly.  :)  
• If you love books as I do, you will love Lyz Lenz's wonderful tribute to the power of books, reading and librarians: "I understand why people ban books."  (It's the text of her speech accepting a 2024 Iowa Authors Award from the Des Moines Public Library Foundation.) 
• To mark Baby Loss Awareness Week in the U.K., Jennie Agg, who Substacks (is that a verb?) at "Life, Almost," recently wrote a guest post for another Substack, "Books & Bits," about the books, poems and essays about pregnancy loss that have sustained her: "When a woman loses a baby, she is not transformed into an ethereal heroine." 
• Appropriately on Oct. 15th (Pregnancy & Infant Loss Awareness Day), Sari Botton featured Colleen Long & Rebecca Little, authors of the new book "I'm Sorry for My Loss" on her Memoir Land Author Questionnaire #45 on Substack. (I really want to read this soon!)   
• The authors were also recently interviewed by Ryan Rose Weaver for her Substack, In Tending. 
• I've mentioned this book in two other recent posts, here and here. 
• A Latina woman writes in the New York Times about the unique pressures she faced until she decided to freeze her eggs:  "I Froze My Eggs to Reclaim My Right to Rest." 
• Mary Elizabeth Williams of Salon writes about family secrets, including an adoption:  "My mother's final secret: Searching for the little sister I never knew I had."  Sample passage (I love the image of "a tidal wave of skeletons shaken from closets"): 

I am now one of an ever-widening population of people whose lives have been abruptly upended by the revelations of long-held family secrets. The proliferation of at-home DNA tests has ushered in a tidal wave of skeletons shaken from closets, while generational shifts — and rising secularism — have made things that were once life-ruiningly shameful exponentially less taboo.