Book review: Flight Instructions For the Commitment Impaired a hopeful bout of self-examination
Brett Josef Grubisic, Special to The Sun 03.04.2016
Flight Instruc-tions For the Commit-ment Impaired By Nicola Harwood
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Flight Instructions For the Commitment Impaired
by Nicola Harwood
A memoir about trying — as well as loss, dubious choices, questionable motivations and love's demise — Flight Instructions For the Commitment Impaired is, first off, impressive for the literary approaches of its author, Kwantlen creative writing professor Nicola Harwood.
In terms of storytelling she makes consistent wise choices.
For example, in spite of sporadic confidences (like: "When I got clean and sober 11 years ago, a significant revelation was that my sole recreation had, for many years, been simply getting stoned,") the memoirist opts against dedicating many paragraphs to recounting a sadly familiar life trajectory. That one's become something of a crowded field — including but not limited to Lit, Dry, Parched, Drunk Mom, The Night of the Gun, Drinking: A Love Story, My Body is Yours, A Million Little Pieces, and Portrait of the Addict as a Young Man.
And while there are elements of dark-night-of-the-soul and hitting-rock-bottom here and there, Harwood has infused the entire recollection with warmly hopeful humour that transforms what could have been an exclusively sorrowful account into an honest view of human fallibility, strength, foolishness and resilience.
In her writing, Harwood can be self-deprecating and she's a confident occasional wielder of sarcasm. She's not averse to judgments, either. Rather than coming across as mean or bitter, though, her candid account of two self-defined "courageous trendsetters" who are "reduced to two lonely, middle-aged women in a tiny, overpriced apartment in a cold indifferent city" charms with its unexpected buoyancy.
Flight Instructions tells a story from two key chronological perspectives.
The first follows a move from Victoria to San Francisco inspired, as Harwood notes, by the destination city's magnetic reputation for love. (It's a false reputation — she discovers S.F. to be arrogant and competitive.) A kind of romance addict, Harwood is travelling with a smelly old dog and the Lover, a soft-spoken carpenter who's often mistaken for male. Living in a small overpriced apartment in the city's decaying Mission district, their love stumbles in steps and falls.
Set seven years later when Harwood is "deep in the Canadian woods in a small cabin, recently divorced from the Lover and quite alone," a narrative entwined with the first features stock-taking and inconsolable questions along the line of "Where have I been and where am I going?" Immersed in "muddle age," she recalls growing up in a northern B.C. town "where diversity was defined as ordering hard liquor instead of beer" and traces her path into adulthood with a mixture of critical self-regard and compassionate understanding.
There's ample meditation on romantic love (and its demise) in the memoir, and there's the maternal version, too. Inspired by a Bay Area foster home's 1998 newspaper ad seeking caregivers for "a wonderful African-American boy with gender-identity issues," Harwood recalls saying, "Come on, it'll be fun." As predictions go, it's far from accurate.
Though a tale of good intentions, it ends with "I don't think I can do it."
Their prospective ward is Antwan, the troubled child of a crack addict who's "big, loud and treacherously unstable" (as Harwood imagines her dog's point of view about the interloper). His history is fraught "with failure, backtalk, meltdowns, temper tantrums and long periods of isolation in a quiet room." Often preferring fantasy to reality, he's prone to "escalating" and even on a good day demands every ounce of an adult's attention.
While Harwood and the Lover are fiercely attentive to Antwan (who has redefined her gender and calls herself Tavia by the memoir's conclusion), they also have to acknowledge that the adolescent would test the patience of the most sainted person. As Harwood charts a relationship evolution that reflects a more feasible hands-off arrangement, she also provides fascinating and heartfelt glimpses into an individual beset by innumerable challenges and striving to find a place in the world.
A "delusional romantic," an "escape artist" who moved 39 times in 42 years, and a "bohemian writer chick," Harwood can label herself an impressive storyteller as well.
Interesting, provocative and self-assured, her Flight Instructions takes pain, mistakes, pluck, misguidedness and backbone, and transforms them into compelling art.
Brett Josef Grubisic teaches English literature at UBC. From Up River and For One Night Only, his third novel, comes out in April.
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