Don't I Know You?

Description:

What if some of the artists we feel as if we know―Meryl Streep, Neil Young, Bill Murray―turned up in the course of our daily lives?

This is what happens to Rose McEwan, an ordinary woman who keeps having strange encounters with famous people. In this engrossing, original novel-in-stories, we follow her life from age seventeen, when she takes a summer writing course led by a young John Updike, through her first heartbreak (witnessed by Joni Mitchell) on the island of Crete, through her marriage, divorce, and a canoe trip with Taylor Swift, Leonard Cohen, and Karl Ove Knausgaard. (Yes, read on.)

With wit and insight, Marni Jackson takes a world obsessed with celebrity and turns it on its head. In Don't I Know You?, she shows us how fame is just another form of fiction, and how, in the end, the daily dramas of an ordinary woman's life can be as captivating and poignant as any luminary tell-all.

Brief description:

Marni Jackson is a journalist, broadcaster, and author. Formerly the Rogers Chair for Creative Writing at Banff and senior editor at the Walrus, Jackson has a wide range of experience in the Canadian media. She is the author of The Mother Zone: Love, Sex, and Laundry in the Modern Family, a bestseller, as well as Pain: The Fifth Vital Sign. She lives in Toronto.

Review Quotes:

"Jackson's prose is quicker than a mongoose, sharper than a scalpel―and full of read-aloud sentences. She takes the familiar and makes it fantastical and then makes it familiar again."