A Life in Pieces

“Completely absorbing and affecting, A Life in Pieces follows the arc of a lifespan to an unwaveringly clear-eyed completion. Understated yet luminous, conversational but penetrating, these essays bring back a generation’s hunger for self-definition, and attest to Wallace’s own realization of a life in letters.” – Judith Kalman, author of Called to Testify: The Big Story in My Small Life
“These short essays are whimsical in the best sense of the word. They chart a life filled with a wry acceptance of things, from the possibility that our dogs may all be there to greet us after death, to the fact that her mother never really liked her. This memoir … will make you want to buy Melmac, watch Elvira Madigan, and go to Mars.” – Ted Bishop, author of The Social Life of Ink and Riding with Rilke

Jo-Ann Wallace was an Emeritus Professor in the Department of English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta. In her younger years, her poetry appeared in several now defunct periodicals, including The Canadian Forum. Her scholarly work focused on little known progressive movements and women writers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. More recently, her literary nonfiction appeared in venues like the London Review of Books, the Literary Review of Canada, and Prairie Schooner. At the time of her death in June 2024, she was living in Victoria with her husband Stephen Slemon and their rambunctious dog Bodhi.

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