![]() ![]() ![]() From the very first pages, it’s clear how deeply he’s felt his way into the character and into the mindset of an aged woman. The protagonist and narrator, Joyce, is a proud, brittle old bird, and Francis does an impeccable job of conjuring her interior life. It’s like a door being politely but firmly closed in my face, and I can’t help but feel alone on the other side.Toronto author Brian Francis ( Fruit), a gay man just out of his thirties, tackles this generational gap in his sophomore novel, Natural Order, about an 86-year-old woman lying in an old-age home in the town of Balsden, Ont., looking back on her rocky relationship with her deceased gay son. Still, when I visit the woman I call my grandmother (she’s not my grandmother by blood, but she fills that role in my life), it saddens me that she doesn’t want to hear about my boyfriend, that she changes the subject whenever his name comes up. In their day, even talking about such things was an offence against propriety, and the gay rights movement came along too late to have had much impact on them. ![]() ![]() Manage Print Subscription / Tax ReceiptĪs a gay man in my mid-thirties, I’ve always felt somewhat cut off from the current generation of straight seniors, many of whom view my kind with wariness or even outright dismay. ![]()
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