Reviews
"Richly intertextual. Hi, It’s Me narrates the fraught and tender relationship between mother and daughter in prose that unfurls teasingly. Parker portrays friendship, beauty, eating disorder, sexuality, morbidity, and grief with measured humour, detailing a daughter’s reckoning with her mother’s death and a legacy she is conflicted about upholding. By turns philosophical and trenchant, readers are reminded that however transitory life is or fractured our relationships are, there is some vitality we can still salvage from what is left behind. This intricate, acutely rendered story is as much about loss as self-forgiveness and reconciliation with memories that insist we attend to them, that resist erasure.” —2024 Atwood Gibson WT Fiction Prize jury (Saeed Teebi, Joan Thomas, and Uchechukwu Peter Umezurike)
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"Exacting, prismatic, and brilliantly unafraid, Hi, It’s Me holds something of the soul in its pages. Mourning the death of her mother, Fawn Parker takes us into the hot and psychedelic center of her grief. Searching for clarity, for nearness, Parker must contend not only with the size of her unanswered love and wanting, but with how scarcely she knew her mother, and how scarcely she herself was known. Never sentimental, always true, Parker closes the distance between the reader and the word. A beautifully immersive and haunting novel produced by a sublime and original mind, Hi, It’s Me is a direct conversation with an everlasting absence, with the afterlife itself." —Claudia Dey, author of Daughter
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"This book accomplishes something truly rare: After you've read it, you feel like you've spent time with a real person. It's a devastating book on absence and grief, it's a deeply complicated and felt story about womanhood, it's so completely uninterested in bullshit. Fawn Parker is one of the smartest, most talented writers working right now. We're lucky she's around." —Casey Plett, author of A Dream of a Woman
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“Fawn Parker writes beautiful prose, with wit, clarity, and precision. Hi, It's Me packs so much into one single day, and leaves you with a lot to ponder about what makes a life.” —Zoe Whittall, author of Wild Failure
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“...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
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“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