Jenna James
Kate Cayley, HOW YOU WERE BORN. Tenth Anniversary Edition
Toronto: Book*hug, 2024. $23.00
In the preface of this tenth-anniversary edition of her debut story collection, Kate Cayley discusses writing not as a business, but as an act of “love and folly”—the thrusting of some crafted history into untethered space by handing it to readers who will take it and feel however they will. Put this way, writing is transformed into a collaboratively electric (and slightly frightening!) medium. Unsurprisingly, this also characterizes all that Cayley has captured within these stories: the love—difficult and deeply woven—and the folly of finding ourselves in spaces and situations we can only grasp at understanding as we measure and weigh our relationships with each other.
How You Were Born makes a stunning decennial return to bookshelves with three new stories added to a repertoire already brimming with grit and humanity. The collection is framed by a single story split in two, beginning with “Resemblance” and wrapping up with the titular “How You Were Born.” These stories follow Emma and her two attentive mothers, Molly, and Robin, as they visit her biological grandmother, Elise, after the death of Jake: Emma’s biological father, Molly and Robin’s friend and donor, and Elise’s son. Between the bookends of these visits, the bursts of colour and jagged edges of the remaining twelve stories are contained within the mess and warmth of one young family. Looking closer, though, we see that every character is packed with just as many multitudes as the collection itself, the lives within the stories all overlapping and shining outward from their strange corners of vibrant domesticity.
There is a delicacy to Cayley’s characters, which has cemented this book’s poignancy over the years. Their desires, mistakes, and missed opportunities build a rich palette of living that is both joyously queer and wonderfully mundane in a single breath. Intimacy and relationships are presented as intangibly living things, and the reading experience exists in the spaces Cayley draws between each character. In “Acrobat,” a story to which I return again and again for its deceptive simplicity, a distant mother and her crush-stricken young daughter navigate the abstractions of their relationship; and while there is no way to fully grasp the complexity of the connection between the characters, I still smell the mother chain-smoking while she paints the baseboards, and feel the bare heels of an acrobat pressing against me as she lifts away from me, every time I read it.
Cayley’s prose strikes with a startling clarity, then soothes with a nostalgia that breaks your heart while mending it. The feelings the stories evoke are expansive and overlapping, but contained all the while by the suburban streets and fenced backyards of Toronto. At the intersection of that yawning sense of memory is the strength of individual moments on their own: the image of a grass stain on yellow shorts, or the clink in your ear of dirty dishes at a family gathering. Whatever familiarity these moments evoke, though, is also shrouded in the thrilling intimacy of eavesdropping on the secrets of strangers. This tension keeps a gentle hold on the reader through its refusal to let us be fully flush with any one character’s life or perspective; instead, these stories craft a plain-spoken distance that continues to invite us in while keeping us, eagerly, at arm’s length, straining to hear more about the family—about ourselves.
This new edition of Cayley’s collection will resonate as a reminder that, as speakers and listeners, subjects and objects, we are all split in half and filled—with joy, with resentment, with sorrow—and only held together by the connections and spaces we hold between us. How You Were Born is a romp and a tumble through what comes with knowing people well, and it can feel dangerously intimate. Don’t worry though: these stories catch and hold the reader with steady and compassionate hands.
Jenna James
is a third-year student in the Honours BA of Creative Writing & Publishing at Sheridan College, and has previously been published in B222. She is a joyful dancer and a bad (but enthusiastic) plant mom with a passion for fiction, songwriting, and essays. Jenna is originally from Ktaqmkuk (Newfoundland), but is currently an interim mainlander.