Rebecca Rosenblum’s memoir of the Covid-19 pandemic, These Days Are Numbered, Diary of a High-Rise Lockdown, had an unusual genesis. As the virus arrived in Toronto, Rosenblum began writing numbered Facebook posts, one every day, about the life she and her husband were living in Toronto’s St. James Town neighborhood. With its forest of high rises, St. James Town has been called the most densely populated square kilometre in Canada, and Rosenblum and her husband Mark Sampson lived through the first two years of the pandemic in an apartment there, one they shared with their two cats. Both are writers, both had other jobs at the start of the pandemic—day jobs, paying jobs—and both were soon working from home. Now Rosenblum has cut the 206,000 words of those posts into a memoir of daily life during an international emergency, and it’s been published by Dundurn Press. 

Rosenblum dedicates her book to Sampson, her mother, and her 523 friends on Facebook. Full disclosure: I’m one of those friends, although in real life, not a close one. However, I couldn’t write about many of the books published in this country if I only reviewed the ones written by people I haven’t met. I don’t feel it inhibits me, although it’s true I’ll only write a really stinky review of a book by someone I don’t know and am very unlikely to meet. 

In this case, I also feel I can bring a different perspective to the review. Having read most of the original Facebook posts, I read the book thinking not only about what was in there, but also what Rosenblum decided to leave out. Unless you’re an editor, you don’t usually get to see a rough draft morphed into a published memoir. Of course, my memory of what Rosenblum wrote on Facebook is imperfect, but one thing struck me throughout. I think she has left out many of the things she wrote about her immediate neighbours and other people living in St. James Town, and I imagine this is because of privacy concerns. It’s one thing to write about your unnamed neighbours on an ephemeral Facebook post available to 523 people. It’s another to put them between the covers of a book. And since Rosenblum is clearly sensitive, compassionate and deeply concerned with doing the right thing, a certain amount of self-censorship follows.

This means the memoir is focused very directly on Rosenblum and her husband, Mark, and becomes the portrait of a marriage during the pandemic. It’s both moving and funny, with Mark cast as a wry and witty foil to the sensitive and often worried Rebecca. She writes about the way they have to shop for groceries under the strictures of the 2020 lockdown, the way they shy away from others in their apartment elevators and on their daily walks, and her delight when a new pool opens in St. James Town, along with a detailed description of the way people dress and behave when she starts swimming there every day. 

Reading all these details made me think about researching historical novels, or historical parts of novels I’ve written. At one point when I was writing Mad Richard, my novel about the 19^th century British painter Richard Dadd, I wanted to set a scene in the Hummums, a famous bathhouse and brothel in Covent Garden. It was referred to frequently in accounts of the period but seldom described in detail, and I knew the police sometimes shut it down. I could have made things up (I mean, it was a novel) but I like working within a boundary of known facts. It was a relief and a victory to finally find the out-of-print diaries of the Victorian actor William Charles Macready, whom I blogged about previously. At one point, Macready wrote that he had gone to the Hummums the previous night, confirming they were open when I wanted Richard Dadd to go there, and giving a backhanded description of the interior that I could triangulate with maps and illustrations to create a plausible visit. It was also clear from what he wrote that it was routine for men in Victorian England to go to the bathhouse without apology or shame, and that was useful as well.

In writing last time about Elizabeth Strout’s pandemic novel, Lucy by the Sea, I mentioned that when reading both her book and Rosenblum’s, I didn’t just read the narratives, I also thought of them as material for future novelists and historians. This makes the details important, but to me it’s also crucial that they get the overall experience right. I want stories of daily life during the pandemic to feel true, speaking as someone else who lived through it. I don’t want them to be falsely sentimental or too knowing or, God help us, deeply symbolic of something else going on in the characters’ lives. As Anton Chekhov said in an 1887 letter, “Literature is called artistic because it depicts life as it actually is. Its aim is truth, unconditional and honest.” Give us the facts, please, then go deeper, and find something to illuminate what happened (and is still happening) so maybe I can understand this whole awful and overwhelming experience a little better. 

Strout’s book is a novel, but I think it accurately reflects the confusion, the extemporaneous coping mechanisms, and the slow-growing changes that the pandemic has made in our lives. And yes, I think in the end she delivered the depth I’d hoped for. 

In Rosenblum’s case, what accrues is the feeling of being trapped—she’s stuck in a high rise apartment—and practical-minded about it. I think we all felt that. But there’s also a deeper sense of unease that permeates her memoir, even when it’s funny, and that feels right, too. The pandemic wasn’t (and isn’t) a war, despite the belligerent talk we used to hear about defeating the virus. We didn’t (and don’t) have a clear enemy, a Hitler. Covid-19 is an invisible malaise that strikes people down unpredictably. The virus is everywhere and nowhere, and I think Rosenblum accurately captures how you walk, shop, ride elevators, and sometimes feel overwhelmed, not just by the abnormality of it all, but also by the growing normality of the experience. 

Second disclaimer: I went to her book launch, and Rosenblum said there that she’d hated the lockdown, being a sociable person. I said to mutual friends sitting next to me that I hadn’t minded it nearly that much. Freed from distractions, I got a lot of writing done. Yes, they answered, but you’re privileged. You live in a house with a garden. Well, I said, I think it’s partly also that I’m a bit of a loner, and that living with a husband who has MS means there are a lot of things that slowly closed down for us in the years before the pandemic. Restaurants with two steps up to the door and no wheelchair ramp, for instance. A lot of travel. So I was used to facing increasingly restrictions as the disease progressed, while the sociable Rosenblum—who liked working in an office, which I don’t—saw her life shatter.

When reading her book, I didn’t get the impression Rosenblum hated the lockdown as much as she said at her launch. Of course, we all create a persona when writing about ourselves, something that Rosenblum probably started doing when she crafted her first Facebook post. She’s pretty candid in this book, which is part of what makes it so enjoyable. (I’m nosy.) But there are no-go areas, like the bedroom and bathroom, which means there’s a slightly incomplete person narrating the story, a slightly fictitious person, as there always is in a memoir. I have the impression she cut out a few Facebook posts about being unhappy, although I honestly don’t remember a great many of those. Overall, you get an impression of someone finding workarounds, someone being nice to people who were having a harder time than she was, someone who found the restrictions unpleasant, the malaise pervasive, but overall coped admirably.

Myself, I posted a series of 20 so-called Plague Blogs on this website starting in March, 2020, when I was recovering from an illness. Not long before starting the blogs, I’d felt sick enough to go to the doctor, and found my own doctor wasn’t available. Instead, I saw one of the other partners in the clinic, who said that Covid-19 hadn’t yet arrived in Toronto and that I had a bad case of the flu. It eventually turned out that my own doctor wasn’t available because she’d been spending two weeks working on the Covid ward in one of the Toronto hospitals, which might have given the other doctor a bit of a clue. When my own doctor came back, she ran through my symptoms and said I’d had Covid, which was later confirmed by a test I took when they were finally available. (You can read the first of the blogs here.)

What I mean to say is that a lot of people got a lot of things wrong at the start of the pandemic, and maybe we remember it a little wrong as well. It was a confusing time that asked a great deal of everybody, especially health care workers and parents. When I recently re-read the blogs, I found I was less productive than I’d told my friends at the launch. I blogged at the time that I found it hard to concentrate. I could only manage to work four or five hours a day on my novel, even though I had whole days—weeks—months—clear to write. It’s true I finished the book, but more slowly than I remembered in retrospect, and with a lot more rewriting.

So if I got that wrong, I wonder if Rosenblum might have hated the pandemic a little less vehemently that she remembers, too. Maybe she left that out, but here’s my point: what makes These Days Are Numbered valuable as well as entertaining is that it is a detailed record kept at the time of someone’s life during a historic emergency, and as I say, I think she got it right. There was something insidious going on, a malaise we didn’t understand that both invaded and pummelled us, and we coped, and it’s very important for the future to know that.

When I started out writing about these two plague books, I quoted a recent review in The Economist of a history of the first year of the pandemic, 2020, by Eric Klinenberg. The reviewer started the review by asking how soon is too soon to write history. As I’ve said, neither Rosenblum or Strout is writing history, yet in a way they’re providing raw material for future historians Then the anonymous Economist reviewer asked another question that may be more apposite. How soon is too soon to read about the pandemic?

I suppose sales figures will give peoples’ ultimate and brutal answer to that. Yet I enjoyed both These Days Are Numbered and Lucy by the Sea. I had hoped to understand a little more of what happened, and is still happening, and I did. I was also glad to connect with others after an isolating experience. Oh, you felt that, too. (Oh, you felt that?) Good job, both of them. Pick up the books, see what you think, and let me know. 

The novel I wrote during the lockdown, Far Creek Road, was published by ECW Press in October, 2023, and is available here. It has nothing whatsoever to do with the pandemic.