I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK: JANN ARDEN-“Could I Be Your Girl” (1994).

It’s fascinating to watch the video for this song now, since all I really know about what Jann Arden looks like is the author photo and her TV appearances since the 2000s.

She’s got long dark hair!

The song is pretty and I guess lyrically it’s pretty dark and poetic.  This lyrics is pretty surprising for a pop song

And I am ashes
I am Jesus
I am precious
Could I be your girl?

I don’t really care for the “oh my lord” backing vocals, for the sound, not the words.

Indeed, the whole song feels kind of bland.  For a song that seems pretty dramatic, I want a little more from the song.  Maybe the production is too smooth?

It’s catchy though and I suppose in the 90s it was pretty remarkable.  But really it’s just not my style.

At the bottom of this post, you can see Jann Arden talking about this song and basically telling me that I’m an idiot.

[READ: February 2024] The Bittlemores

I’ve known about Jann Arden pretty exclusively from her appearances on Canadian TV (she has her own sitcom too which is pretty funny in the parts I’ve watched).  She was a perennial guest on the Rick Mercer Report which I loved.  She was always funny and game for something.

Her music, on the other hand, is serious and poppy.

I didn’t know what to expect from this novel, but I knew I wanted to support her first foray into fiction (I won’t be reading her memoirs which sound very sad).

And I have to say that this story shocked me from the start because the home life she conveys in this story is so horrible, so miserable, that I was fairly shocked at the things I read.  And yet, her tone is never heavy, so even the most unpleasant things (an old man drowning kittens) are delivered in a tone that makes you not want to throw the book across the room and say “I thought you loved animals, Jann!”

But she pulls no punches as the story starts: “Harp Bittlemore is a horrible man.”  The Bittlemore farm was once a thriving farm but it is now mostly dried up and useless.  It is in the middle of nowhere, miles from anything and even more miles from the nearest city.  There’s a couple of sad cows and pigs.  And there’s a young girl.

Margaret is the Bittlemore child.  She hates living with the Bittlemores.  They are mean and unloving.  And she wants to get even with them.  What does a girl with no agency do to get back at the adults around her?  She gets pregnant.  At 14.

This didn’t punish the adults as much as it punished her, of course.   And as soon as The Bittlemores found out she was pregnant, they locked her in the house–for five months.  Margaret had been going to school but the adults told everyone that she had been accepted to a school in France and that she would no longer be in the area for a while.

When Margaret has the baby–at home, with Mrs Bittlemore stitching her up, Margaret makes a bold decision.  She runs away.  She climbs out the window of her room (while in a ton of pain) leaving behind her baby, and flees up the road with no destination.  She meets a truck driver (female, thankfully) named Tizzy who has a soft spot for this poor girl in trouble and she takes her as far as her route is going.

Margaret begins sending letters to her daughter promising to come back for her and telling how sorry she is.  She has Tizzy post them from wherever her route takes her so that the Bittlemores have no idea where she is.

Then we get some backstory on the Bittlemores.

They both grew up fairly normal.  But when Harp’s parents died, he was taken from his brother and forced to live with his Uncle, a minister who had no time for children.

When Harp met his future wife, they had potential.  But after a series of miscarriages, which Harp blamed his suffering wife for, she began eating her sorrows.  Harp became more and more bitter.  And soon he was drinking and taking out all of his misery on the animals around the farm.

Sounds pretty grim.  But it’s actually not.  As I said, Arden’s tone is light and she is, from everything I’ve seen, naturally very funny.  And one way that this story is lightened is with the animals.

All cows, you see, can read and write English.  They can also understand people, they just don’t speak to people (for obvious reasons).  The three cows on the Bittlemore farm, Berle, Crilla, and Dally  are very smart and love to mess with Harp (who is really terrible to them) by writing messages about him in the dirt.

Then the story jumps to the future.

Fourteen years later, Margaret’s daughter, Willa, is about as miserable as her mother was.  But she doesn’t know that her mother is her mother. Because Mrs B., as she told Willa to call her, tells everyone that Willa is her daughter.  That Margaret is Willa’s sister and is still in France.  It’s crazy.  But nobody questions it because why would she lie?

Turns out she has a very good reason to lie, although he lies are so terrible that if anyone questioned them for a second they would fall apart–which is why they kept Margaret from talking to anyone and why they keep Willa on a really tight (metaphorical) leash.

Willa, however, is a great character, very funny and fiesty.  She fights off the popular girls in school to protect her best (and only) friend Carol.  There’s a sequence involving a basketball that is hilarious and a scene later on involving paint which is rather touching.

A parallel story is new policeman Bev Oldman has just moved to a regional police station.  She is going through cold cases and she comes across a story of a stolen baby. The case was never solved but it appears that there’s a piece of evidence that was overlooked–a very old coin was placed in the baby’s diaper before she was taken.  It was considered a good luck token, but clearly wasn’t.

Oldman travels to the area and puts out flyers to see if anyone might be familiar with it.

At the same time, Willa and her friend Carol are doing research for a project at school.  As they scan through the microfiche files of old papers, they see a woman who looks a lot like Willa.

The characters are starting to put some pieces together and the question only remains if things can get straightened out before Mrs B decides that Mr B and Willa are better off out of her life permanently (yes, the Bittlemores are crazy).

This was a good, enjoyable story with great pacing.  As it neared the end I couldn’t put it down until I was done.