Fawn Parker
R e v i e w s
What We Both Know
“Writing out Baby’s storied life (Parker features a few chapters of the memoir-in-the-making) and summoning hazy, distressing memories of the past, Hillary captivates as an individual with a poignant vulnerability and a sure capability that’s eroded by self-doubt and an overwhelming past. She’s Parker’s terrific invention, of course, and her agonies—as well as her wit and her wild missteps — offer testimony to Toronto’s Parker (author, previously, of Dumb-Show), whose stylish and expressive writing anatomizes complex familial relationships and the sheer difficulty of finding correct courses of action.”—Toronto Star
​
“A master of indirection, Parker wants to demonstrate how language expresses trauma, but also the ways words are used to avoid or disguise pain. Parker is a poet, and her precision of language yields visceral, difficult insights.”—Winnipeg Free Press
Dumb-Show
"But Dumb-Show – on its own, and especially in combination with What We Both Know – succeeds as an excoriating critique of a culture deformed by the veneration of a particular kind of grandiose masculinity. Jonathan Franzen and David Foster Wallace are easy targets, and Parker takes aim at both, but she also provides a more nuanced, unexpected examination of thorny social issues that are ripe for this kind of provocative and confrontational approach."—Steven Beattie, That Shakespearean Rag
​
Set-Point
"Fawn Parker's recent novel, Set-Point blew me away. Parker's sensibility is contemporary, smart and funny; fans of auto-fiction by international writers like Ben Lerner or Elif Batuman will love her"—Joan Thomas, winner of the 2019 Governor General's Award for Fiction for Five Wives
​
"Parker’s talent makes writing a novel look easy – Lucy’s daily drags around Montreal are an elaborate, entertaining, ironic simulation on par with Seingård or the sexual labour she’s selling – but Set-Point aspires to more than effortless neutrality. In risking sentiment, it succeeds."—Paige Cooper, Author of Zolitude