Open Arms by Marina Endicott
Available at Polar Peek Books & Treasures
– Reviewed by Angie Abdou for The Fernie Fix’s June 2011 Issue

It’s almost time for my very favourite Fernie event: The Fernie Writers’ Conference! This year, the week-long set of workshops and presentations promises to be better than ever. There are several new instructors and presenters coming this July, including Marina Endicott who won a 2009 Commonwealth Award for her second novel Good to a Fault. Good to a Fault was also a finalist for the 2008 Giller Prize and a contender in the 2010 Canada Reads’ debates. I wrote a Fernie Fix column recommending Good to a Fault in November 2009, so this month in anticipation of Marina’s visit to Fernie, I recommend her earlier novel Open Arms.

Like Good to a Fault, Open Arms is a novel that focuses on motherhood and the meaning of family. The narrator, Bessie Smith Connolly, was raised by her grandparents and has spent much of her life chasing her elusive mother and judging her even more elusive father. Though the absent father figure haunts the text, Bessie’s world is filled with mothers. In Bessie’s own words, it is "a world empty of men, just women making tea for each other and getting on with it." In a society in which divorce is more common than not, family can mean almost anything, and Bessie’s family is unconventional and heavy on the women.

Endicott does not, however, romanticize or idealize these women figures. Rather, the many mothers in Open Arms come, like real mothers, with imperfections. As Bessie’s own grandmother says: "No mother is ever there when you need her." Motherhood is a job that simply "can’t be done perfectly." These women try, and they fail. Despite their weakness and even their blatant flaws, Bessie and the reader learn to forgive them and love them again (and again). Bessie learns that life is filled with cold disappointments, and the necessary flames of warmth ultimately come from these complex but fundamentally loving female relationships.

Open Arms is an emotional ride. When I least expected it, I found myself in tears. As a theatre student, Bessie is often accused of being insincere, of acting her way through life. In a fit of anger and jealousy, the one boy she loves tells her: "Faking it, being able to fake it, lessens the real power of life. Pretending to love lessens love." What Bessie and those around her have to learn is how to step away from the script, drop expectations based on convention, and finally find the real power of the life and genuine love that they already possess. Open Arms is a quest narrative in which Bessie searches for her mother and for meaning and connections in a lonely life, but in the end what she finds was always already there, underneath all the costuming and theatrics.

Early in the novel, Bessie tells us that heartbreak feels like "a plate breaking in the middle of your chest." By the end of the novel, I know just what she means. Open Arms made me feel it. Marina Endicott is a fabulous writer. I strongly recommend that you take the opportunity to meet her when she comes to Fernie next month. I’m quite looking forward to it myself.

* * *

Angie Abdou is a local fiction writer. The recently-released novel The Canterbury Trail is her third book. More information on Angie’s books and speaking engagements can be found on this website.