From the author of the blockbuster Mister Sandman comes a gathering of unusual characters captured in the outrageous and humorous situations for which Barbara Gowdy has become famous. Teasing the taboos, Gowdy creates a marriage dialogue between a woman and her transsexual fiancé, who she thought was a man, and litigation between Samuel and Simon who share the same two-headed body. She peoples her stories with Siamese twins, a necrophile, and a pathetically lonely exhibitionist. And she brilliantly illustrates how uncomfortably close a connection comedy has to human suffering. The title story has been adapted into a movie called "Kissed.


From Publishers Weekly
These eight short stories employ both satire and morbid humor to explore the lives of emotionally and physically abnormal characters. Among the protagonists: a pathetically goofy hyperactive child in foster care; Siamese twins equipped with two pairs of legs, two sets of female genitalia and one active libido; a little girl who creates chants to shrink the head of her hydrocephalic playmate; a young woman, unable to find satisfaction in her marriage, who poses nude in front of her living room window to excite the voyeur who lives across the way; and the two necrophiliacs of the title story, which takes its name from a Frank O'Hara poem. While their behavior is sometimes macabre, these people show extraordinary gutsiness, refusing to allow their abnormalities to diminish their capacities for life and love in whatever form it takes. Canadian novelist Gowdy ( Falling Angels ) writes with a bite that grants her characters earthy courage without allowing them to lapse into self-pity. Her daring high-wire act may not appeal to everyone, but her stories are not easily forgotten. Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Kirkus Reviews
A debut collection from Canadian novelist Gowdy (Through the Green Valley, 1988) limns--with dark humor and wry compassion--the lives of those on the margins of normality. The stories here all share a common theme, echoed in the title--which comes from a poem, ``Necrophilia,'' by Frank O'Hara, that suggests ``it is better that someone loves them'': ``them'' being the dead, the physically and psychologically impaired. The title piece, narrated by a female necrophiliac and hearse driver who's been obsessed with the dead since childhood, makes her obsession no less palatable but, in the context, understandable: ``I have found no replacement for the torrid serenity of a cadaver, absorbing their energy, blazing it back out. Since that energy came from the act of life alchemizing into death, there's a possibility it was alchemical itself.'' In ``Body and Soul''--about Aunt Bea, a religious, elderly widow who provides a loving home for a brain- damaged little girl, abandoned by her mother--Gowdy accomplishes the rare feat of making goodness a compelling reality that is neither mawkish nor dull. In ``Sylvie,'' a young woman born with a set of extra hips and limbs is taken from the freak show where she works by a wealthy young doctor who's fallen in love with her--but she fears that after the surgery he suggests, she'll ``become somebody else.'' Other tales detail the anguish of a ``Two-headed Man''; the reactions of a woman who finds she's married a transsexual (``Flesh of My Flesh''); and the experience of a young mother who's lost her child in a grotesque accident (``Lizards''). Gowdy skillfully walks a fine line between sensationalism and sentimentality to give life and love to the feared and forgotten. An impressive accomplishment. -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.


From the Inside Flap
NOW IN PAPERBACK, this masterfully crafted story collection by the author of the internationally best-selling novel Mister Sandman is a haunting book that is certain to both disturb and entertain. With a particular focus on obsession and the abnormal, We So Seldom Look On Love explores life at its quirky extremes, pushing past limits of convention into lives that are fantastic and heartbreakingly real. Whether writing about the dilemma of a two-headed man who attempts to expunge his own pain, the shock of a woman who discovers she has married a transsexual, the erotic delusions of a woman who repeatedly exposes her body to an unknown voyeur, or the bizarre predilections of a female necrophile (a story made into the acclaimed motion picture, "Kissed"), Gowdy convinces us with incisive detail, only to disarm us with black humor. In reviewing the book in the Boston Globe, the novelist Carol Shields wrote, "Barbara Gowdy invites herself, and us, into taboo territory where love and disgust mingle freely. Nothing seems to hold back the narrative flow, not propriety, not politics, not even that ambiguity we once called good taste . . . Gowdy writes about the macabre, but she writes like an angel."


About the Author
BARBARA GOWDY is also the author of the critically acclaimed novel Falling Angels. She lives in Toronto where she is presently at work on a new book.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Acclaimed throughout the world, and a best-selling writer in her native Canada, Barbara Gowdy now follows her breakthrough novel, Fallen Angels, with this remarkable collection of fiction - fiction that pushes us past the limits of convention into lives that are fantastic and heartbreakingly real. The subjects of We So Seldom Look on Love are people whose interests (and sometimes their very anatomy) make them total outsiders in human society; yet every story is written with such tenderness and empathy that there is never a moment of freak-show voyeurism. Through these remarkable pieces you are allowed fully to know another human being - a human being the likes of whom you may never be allowed to meet in real life. The author's talent is so sure and her insight so strong that she makes even the most unusual (or previously unimaginable) person become familiar, even intimate. Barbara Gowdy's stories make you feel in the presence of a staggering, wholly original talent who is writing something completely unlike any thing you've ever read before. If We So Seldom Look on Love is your first experience with Ms. Gowdy's work, you will utterly enjoy that wonderful feeling that so rarely happens: The discovery of a new voice and an extraordinary writer.

FROM THE CRITICS

Carol Shields

Barbara Gowdy invites herself, and us, into taboo territory where love and disgust mingle freely. Nothing seems to hold back the narrative flow, not propriety, not politics, not even the ambiguity we once called good taste ... Gowdy writes about the macabre, but she writes like an angel. -- The Boston Globe

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