Grace Flahive grew up and went to school in Leaside. Her family still lives in the area. She says that much of the winter nostalgia in her debut novel, Palm Meridian, is based on her memories of playing hockey at Leaside Gardens. Indeed, among other things, the father of the novel’s protagonist, Hannah Cardin, drives a Zamboni to help make ends meet as he and his family struggle to subsist in late 20th-century Montreal.
Grace studied English Literature at McGill before moving in 2014 to London, UK, where she now resides. There she attended University of the Arts and wrote a thesis on inventive digital marketing opportunities for authors. She then worked for eight years in book marketing while writing her own fiction on the side.
In a recent interview Grace said that her debut novel “is set at Palm Meridian Retirement Resort on the last day of 77-year-old Hannah Cardin’s life, as she celebrates her end-of-life party with her 200 closest friends. She has invited her long-long lost love, Sophie, whom she hasn’t seen since their devastating breakup 43 years ago, but has no idea whether Sophie will show up at the party before time runs out. The book explores a possible vision of our climate-changed future and imagines what millennial retirement…might be like. It’s full of hope and lots of queer yearning.”
This tragicomic novel about love and death is set in a futuristic 2067 where everything is “flavoured with apocalypse.” It depicts a fateful day in the life of a community of some 200 female residents whose ages range from 70 to 100, all of whom are attuned to the sinuous encroachments of death. Despite the omnipresence of disaster, already arrived and yet to come, it is clear that “nothing – no force of nature, no act of God – could stop these elderly women from attacking their days with a kind of energy that would make a working person quake.” Their existential energy is sustained by the intense linguistic energy of the novel itself. Even if a third of the U.S. has no reliable power grid, California is perpetually on fire, nearby Orlando is “left with the wreckage of a sprawling Disney empire” gone bankrupt, Florida is largely under water, and Hannah is slated to end her life in a palliative care ward the morning after her farewell party, the novel has an unrelenting exuberance – sometimes joyful, sometimes nihilistic, sometimes both.
This is an intricately plotted book with multiple characters evocatively drawn and divergent story lines ultimately convergent. Although the focus is on selected hours of a single day, narratives from Hannah’s past are juxtaposed to the continuous narrative of the party’s progress. The novel alternates between present-day Florida and earlier episodes in Hannah’s life, episodes that are mainly situated in Montreal from 1990 to 2067 but also New York City, Tokyo, Vermont, Lake Huron, Upstate New York, JFK airport, and Florida before the fictional now.
By 10 a.m. on the morning of the party, Luke, Hannah’s oldest friend from her childhood in Montreal, has arrived. The two have built a lucrative business empire, the profits of which enabled the creation of Palm Meridian. The only uncertainty is whether Sophie will arrive on time. The real cause of the breakup between Sophie and Hannah some 43 years ago is dramatically revealed through a transformative confessional moment – one I will leave readers to discover and experience for themselves.
Palm Meridian dances to the rhythms of a vibrant life force at once erotic and deathly, comic and tragic, utopian and dystopian. Apocalypse, after all, embraces both revelation and destruction. James Joyce was perturbed that his critics failed to notice how funny Ulysses was. Lest I be consigned to the ranks of the humourless, let me say emphatically that Palm Meridian is funny. Our reading experience is likened to “time travelling from a medieval castle into a gay IKEA.” Elderly attendees of a wedding are told to “please stand if you’re able.” And Hannah reminds us that “they don’t let you take perishable food where [she’s] going.”
Despite its black comedy, this novel is what old-fashioned critics used to call a rattling good read – quick-paced and verbally lush. As Terry Hong observes, Palm Meridian “vividly demonstrates that living loudly, vivaciously, and gloriously to the very last minute is an essential life lesson to embrace.” Grace Flahive explores the beauty and disquiet of queer relationships in old age – a perspective rarely seen in contemporary literature. In her novel, one thing is certain: Old age is not for cowards.
This article was guest contributed by Greig Henderson.
