Abstract

I’ll Take Care of You is a collection of stories set in (or near) Toronto and unified by the common theme of caretaking -- the tentative/ambiguous attempts of friends, counsellors, siblings, and parents to understand and act upon what is best for those in their charge. Using a number of first person voices (and one third person voice), I explore the fine line between helping and hurting an individual, the flexible dichotomies of childhood/ adulthood and childishness/maturity, and the nature of success and failure. The collection’s themes are best represented in a trilogy of stories about the Gillis family siblings: Madison, a freewheeling songwriter who has alienated her parents through her single-minded pursuit of her musical vision; Jill, the scientific child prodigy who loves her older sister and longs to restore harmony to her family; and James, a meticulous jazz guitarist who is jealous of Madison’s career, and eventually holds the power to facilitate or thwart his sister’s desire to make peace with the family.

Stylistically, I’ll Take Care of You is realist psychological fiction, influenced by Justin Cronin’s Mary and O’Neil -- a PEN/Hemingway Award-winning collection in the tradition of John Cheever and John Updike, but without the male-centric tone of those authors. Although it is not often explicitly evident, I’ll Take Care of You was also influenced by the domestic sequences of War and Peace, in which Tolstoy juxtaposes scenes of pain and happiness without either emotional tenor dominating or negating the other.