I’ve heard people say life is getting back to normal, but I’m not sure that’s true, even a year and a half into the pandemic. We all have to cope with big losses, family and friends gone or disabled. We also face so many small daily changes that it’s disorienting. I’ve taken my spavined right hip to the same lovely massage therapist for years. (Old car accident.) But on my first visit back to the clinic in a year and a half, I asked the therapist, “Are the people who come here vaccinated?” A pause, and the therapist said, “Some are, some aren’t.” “Are you vaccinated?” A longer pause. “Lesley, I don’t give out personal medical information.” 

In other words, no. So I don’t have a massage therapist anymore, and in one of my hockey leagues, where they asked for proof of vaccination before it was required, we lost a goalie. My family practitioner has retired in her forties, I suspect a victim of burn-out. Inflation is growing, and my publisher at ECW Press, David Caron, has warned writers that although they have our fall books in stock, supply chain problems mean that if there’s a flurry of orders before Christmas, new printings likely won’t make it into the bookstores. Push e-books and audiobooks, he told us. 

On the other hand, we had ten family members around the table at Thanksgiving, even though we all asked each other, as one does these days, “Do you do hugs?” I also held an in-person launch of my new novel, Time Squared, and people were so very glad to get out to a launch—a bar—that I think we all had a wonderful time. (And no one got sick afterwards, thank heavens.) Meanwhile the publicity for the novel gets underway, although much of it is done remotely these days. 

Check out this zoom interview I did with Crystal Fletcher on All About Canadian Books—where Crystal asked about hockey as well as the novel, and posted a short reading I did.

“Times have changed,” writes Rebecca Eckler in a lovely review in her newsletter. “We hear this a lot—and for the most part it’s true, but what if you lived the exact same storyline in different lifetimes? How much would really change? Time Squared (ECW Press) has a clever and original answer. A love story that stays the same over different eras, this book by Lesley Krueger is a unique concept that ties in historical events, world wars, and women’s roles in society…leading to a surprising ending.”

“Part sci-fi adventure, and part romantic mystery,” says OpenBook.ca, “Time Squared draws from multiple genres with Krueger’s sure hand to create a story that shimmers with the best of each form. Smart, moving, and richly rendered, it examines two people’s connection…The mystery of why—and who might be behind it all—will keep readers guessing.”

Yet is life back to normal? I’ve always been observant—nosy—as writers are. Lately I’ve watched myself become hyper-vigilant. When I get on the subway in Toronto, I look around the car for people with their masks pulled down to their chins then move as far away from them as possible. Afterward, I watch them as if they’re a movie in a language I don’t speak, trying to figure out the story. 

Recently, one unmasked woman at the end of the car sat methodically eating cut-up pieces of food out of an open backpack, first what looked like pieces of a patty or frittata, one after the other without pause. Still without pausing, she moved on to bite-sized vegetables, then small slices of fruit, then individual potato chips delicately transported to her mouth until the bag was empty, after which she took the crinkly silver bag out of her backpack, folded it neatly and put it on the seat beside her. I wondered if the woman was an exhausted essential services worker eating a meal when she could or somebody with problems; maybe both. When she reached her stop and got out, the woman left the chip bag behind. She still wasn’t wearing a mask, and I wondered what the TTC does about masks aside from putting up signs saying that it’s illegal not to wear them.

After the woman left, I looked around self-consciously. I felt as if I’d entered a cartoon I once saw where a crowd of birders with big cameras all face in the same direction shooting pictures of a couple of undistinguished ducks. As they do, a dinosaur dances unobserved down the path behind them. I had sat there obsessed by the methodical woman for something like twenty minutes. Absolutely rivetted. What else in the subway did I miss? And how is any of this normal? 

By the way, I also recommended eight historical fiction and social history books on the 49^th Shelf website, which they’ve headlined “Eavesdropping on Other lives.”

I don’t find doing publicity normal. Writers spend most of our time sitting alone in a room typing while periodically cackling to ourselves. When we go outside, our job is to observe, to steal details from the world, not to be observed. Of course, it’s entirely possible someone behind me in the subway car was watching me watch the methodical woman. Or watching me another time watch a large jolly family of at least three generations push onto the subway, all of them with their masks around their chins, laughing, infectiously happy, the sort of group who would ordinarily make me smile. Infectious, I thought instead, shrinking away. Maybe somewhat saw that and thought, She’s been changed by this, hasn’t she?

I would prefer that no one else saw that. I would prefer to be the person who described my new hesitancy to do the things I once found normal, rather than having it anatomized. (“Do you do hugs?” I ask. “Do you do restaurants? Patios, I mean.” “I’ve been wondering when I might go on vacation. What’s it like to fly these days?”) I would also prefer to do these things off-camera and off-mike. 

So while life is returning to normal in some ways, I’m not there yet, and having a book out isn’t going to make it any easier. It will be flattering at times to get good reviews, horrifying (bad reviews) but also unsettling, since none of us have any idea what’s coming next. I don’t think I’d feel back to pre-pandemic normal if there was no new book, and I’m not sure I ever will or that any of us will. Too much has happened, and is happening, and will happen. Uncertainty changes things, and people, and me. I hope some of it is for the better. But I’m not there yet, and I don’t know.