'I do not know what it is to love like that,' she continues as I drag my thoughts back from Raelian cloning tales.Īlthough Gowdy's writing is not explicitly self-referential, she has mined her own past in a series of haunting novels set mainly in the suburban time zone of her own upbringing in Don Mills, Ont., in the 1950s and 1960s. We So Seldom Look on Love who achieves orgasm by sitting on the faces of dead men. 'I am not going to have babies now - at least not in a natural way,' she says in the same matter-of-fact manner that she introduces bizarre compulsions in her fiction, such as the necrophiliac in

Gowdy always imagined she would have children, but she never got pregnant through the course of two failed marriages and untreated endometriosis, and now she is past menopause. An impacted wisdom tooth, which was extracted a few days earlier, has become infected, and Gowdy is downing Tylenol 4s. She is wearing black trousers and matching sweater, and nursing her left jaw. 'I must tell you that I live in perpetual envy of women with children, no matter how troubled or what they are going through,' she says, as we sit across from each other drinking coffee and nibbling shortbread in her skinny kitchen.ĭoe-eyed, with an appealing vulnerability on her heart-shaped face, Gowdy looks at least a decade and a half younger than her 52 years.

Mister Sandman by Barbara Gowdy