Mad Hope

By Heather Birrell

In the stories of Mad Hope, Journey Prize winner Heather Birrell finds the heart of her characters and lets them lead us into worlds both recognizable and alarming. A science teacher and former doctor is forced to re-examine the role he played in CeauÅ?escu’s Romania after a student makes a shocking request; a tragic plane crash becomes the basis for a meditation on motherhood and its discontents; women in an online chat group share (and overshare) their anxieties and personal histories; and a chance encounter in a waiting room tests the ties that bind us. Using precise, inventive language, Birrell creates astute and empathetic portraits of people we thought we knew – and deftly captures the lovely, maddening mess of being human.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Coach House Books
• Release date: Apr 1, 2012
• ISBN: 9781770563148

Heather Birrell

Heather Birrell is the author of two short story collections: Mad Hope (Coach House Books, 2012) and I know you are but what am I? (Coach House Books, 2004). Her stories have been shortlisted for both the Western and National Magazine Awards and have appeared in numerous Canadian literary journals. A frequent book reviewer and winner of the Journey Prize, she also works as a high school teacher and a creative writing instructor.

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Reviews for Mad Hope

[randymetcalfe · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

“You’ll never succeed in pleasing everybody,” says Geraldine, a grieving widower waiting in a doctor’s office for a mammogram. She says this to Jerome, an insouciant teen who is waiting as well, in this case for his mother, who has had a mastectomy. Geraldine is not entirely certain herself whether her advice is something she still believes, or whether it is just something someone told her once. It doesn’t matter. Jerome is having none of it. “‘I got mad hope,’ Jerome said. ‘Mad hope.’” In the face of everything, perhaps only mad hope will do.Heather Birrell’s stories are not all filled with mad hope but hope does burble up here and there, insistently. At her best, for example in her award winning “BriannaSusannaAlana”, the voices of young urban girls and women are precise and nuanced and full of life. Children, longing for children, loss of children, and loss of innocence feature prominently. In “Wanted Children”, depression following a miscarriage is compounded by a misguided exotic vacation that was intended to shake the couple out of their disappointment. In “Drowning Doesn’t Look Like Drowning”, a young mother frets over her three children as recompense, perhaps, for losing her own mother at a young age. In “Frogs”, a physician who had been co-opted by the Ceaușescu progeny programme in Romania confronts his guilt and repentance teaching high school biology in Canada years later.Few of these stories strike new narrative ground but they are all rich in their way. The three stories in the middle of the collection — “Dominoes”, “Bye Bye Flangle Nuts”, and “Dingbat” — tread the same ground and indeed involve the same set of incidents (death of the father and estrangement of the family) from different perspectives. They aren’t linked per se. Rather they feel more like three separate attempts at ferreting out some truth from those events. The iterations being both a sign perhaps of failure, as well as continuing hope that the author will finally get it right. And that probably is as mad of a hope as one could hope for. Gently recommended.