Everybody Has Everything
Katrina Onstad, 2012
Random House Canada
312 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780771068980
Summary
Combining a pitch-perfect, whip-smart dissection of contemporary urban life with a fresh and perceptive examination of our individual and collective ambivalence towards parenthood, Katrina Onstad's Everybody Has Everything balances tragedy and comedy with verve and flair, and is destined to be one of Canada's most talked-about novels of 2012.
What happens when the tidy, prosperous life of an urban couple is turned inside out by a tragedy with unexpected consequences? After a car crash leaves their friend Marcus dead and his wife Sarah in a coma, Ana and James are shocked to discover that they have become the legal guardians of a 2½-year-old, Finn. Finn's crash-landing in their lives throws into high relief deeply rooted, and sometimes long-hidden, truths about themselves, both individually and as a couple. Several chaotic, poignant, and life-changing weeks as a most unusual family give rise to an often unasked question: Can everyone be a parent? (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—N/A
• Where—Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
• Education—B.A., McGill University; M.A. University
of Toronto
• Currently—lives in Toronto, Ontario
Katrina Onstad’s second novel, Everybody Has Everything, came out in Canada in 2012 and in the U.S. in 2013. Her first novel, How Happy to Be, was met with critical acclaim in 2006.
Katrina is also a freelance writer whose work on culture high and low appears in publications including the New York Times Magazine, Guardian and Elle. Katrina has a column in the Saturday Style section of the national paper Globe and Mail and is a regular contributor to Toronto Life magazine. At CBC.ca, she was head film critic and an on-line arts producer.
Born and raised in Vancouver, B.C., Katrina has an English degree from McGill and a Master’s from University of Toronto. She lives in Toronto with her family.
Katrina is a National Magazine Award winner in Canada for Arts Writing, and has been nominated several times, including as Best Columnist for her work in Chatelaine. In 2008, Katrina was a finalist for an American National Magazine Award in the Essay category for an article about high school sex scandals and female desire that ran in Elle.
Other Media
Katrina’s work in non-print media includes reading and hosting at the Harbourfront International Festival of Authors; frequent appearances on CBC radio and television; TVO’s Saturday Night at the Movies and The Agenda; hosting events for the Toronto International Film Festival Group; and co-hosting the national film review show Reel to Real. She also does speaking and teaching engagements, and is a writer-for-hire. (From the author's website.)
Book Reviews
More ambitious and assured that Onstad’s debut, but just as gripping.... Onstad’s timely new novel examines how and why adults choose to be parents, and what happens when you don’t have that much choice in the matter.... Ana and James are thoroughly convincing and their agony and triumphs compelling in this impressive sophomore effort.
Globe and Mail
A literary excursion into the poignancy and murkiness of loss, parenting and marriage.... This is sharp, edgy writing.... Onstad mines the emotions of flawed and wounded characters.... Impressive...intelligent, ambitious and unsettling.... Most definitely memorable.
Winnipeg Free Press
Unsparingly honest.... Never sentimental but always compassionate, this compelling book is hard to put down.
Hello Magazine
Everyone will recognize the all too common yearnings and failings of two people trying to figure out what will make them happy.
Chatelaine
This new book is very good, to get that out of the way: Onstad’s writing is always vigorous, funny and mean-because-it’s-true.... Onstad perfectly gets at her characters, and their so-called “status life”...the rhythms of rich, white city parents, who used to be young and who have problems that are at once real and magical. Writing all of it like this, so cruel and right, makes it feel even worse than it is, but by its very telling, a little bit better.
National Post
Revelations are both joyous and heartbreaking, and Onstad handles both aspects well.... The characters’ motivations, self-revelations, and discoveries are carefully elucidated, such that the reader is able to form connections not just with Ana and James, but with the supporting characters as wel.... Onstad delicately builds up layers and peels them away.
Quill & Quire
Discussion Questions
1. How do you understand the meaning of the novel’s title?
2. Consider the epigraph the author has chosen. What do you think she hopes you to take from it? How does is relate to the novel?
3. There are many poetic and musical references in the novel, and one song in particular plays a key role in the narrative. What do the various quotations tell us about the different characters in the novel who recall or recognize them? What do you think the author wishes to say through the use of that one key song? About Ana’s life, about James’s life, about life more generally?
4. Is this a particularly “urban” novel? Why or why not?
5. “How did you know?” Ana asks Sarah on page 57, about wanting to have a child. Whose side of the ensuing exchange made the most sense to you? Why could Ana not be honest with Sarah about when, or if, she herself “knew”?
6. How does James’s behaviour upend (or conform to) conventional notions of masculinity? At work? At home? With Finn? In what ways does Ana challenge the concept of femininity? How do these shifting gender roles affect the story?
7. At certain points, both Ana and James find themselves acutely aware of their age. What triggers this awareness in each of them? What does this awareness mean to each of them?
8. Neither Ana’s nor James’s mother quite fits the picture of an “ordinary mother.” Can you see people you know in either of them? In what ways?
9. Is it still a social taboo for a woman to resist motherhood? How does Ana experience society’s attitudes toward women who aren’t mothers? Is it possible for a female character to be sympathetic if she rejects motherhood?
10. How does the sudden presence of a child in James and Ana’s relationship foment marital discord, and flirtations with infidelity – or does it? To what extent is their marriage affected by parenthood?
11. What do you make of Ana’s flirtation with Charlie? What attracts her to him?
12. The final scene of the novel involves James telling Finn (and Ana) a story. How does this closing story-within-a-story relate to the novel as a whole?
13. What do you think the next chapter in life will be for Ana, for James, for Finn, for Sarah?
(Questions issued by publisher.)