The Guardian has reviewed Martha Baillie’s THERE IS NO BLUE calling it a “tough and tender family memoir.”
They also said: “The book is a trilogy of essays about an ordinarily dysfunctional middle-class family, “a dog chasing its own tail”. Death is its starting point and the source of its best aphorisms.”
Read the full review here: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2024/jan/10/there-is-no-blue-martha-baillie-review-a-tough-and-tender-family-memoir
About THERE IS NO BLUE:
Martha Baillie’s richly layered response to her mother’s passing, her father’s life, and her sister’s suicide is an exploration of how the body, the rooms we inhabit, and our languages offer the psyche a home, if only for a time.
Three essays, three deaths. The first is the death of the author’s mother, a protracted disappearance, leaving space for thoughtfulness and ritual: the washing of her body, the making of a death mask. The second considers the author’s father, his remoteness, his charm, a lacuna at the centre of the family even before his death, earlier than her mother’s. And then, the shocking death of the author’s sister, a visual artist and writer living with a diagnosis of schizophrenia, who writes three reasons to die on her bedroom wall and then takes her life.
About the Author:
Martha Baillie lives and works in Toronto. Her novel The Incident Report was longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize and is being made into a feature film to be released in 2023. The Search for Heinrich Schlögel was an Oprah editors’ pick. Sister Language, co-written with her late sister, Christina Baillie, was a 2020 Trillium Award finalist. Martha’s non-fiction can be found in Brick: A Literary Journal. Her poetry has appeared in the Iowa Review.
Martha is represented by Samantha Haywood.