Hi, It's Me: A Novel

Atwood Gibson Writers' Trust Fiction Prize, Finalist • One of Indigo’s Most Anticipated Canadian Books • One of the CBC’s Canadian Fiction Books to Read in Fall 2024

Women Talking meets Study for Obedience in this stunning depiction of fresh grief by Fawn Parker, the Giller Prize–longlisted author of What We Both Know.

Shortly after her mother’s death, Fawn arrives at the farmhouse. While there, she will stay in her mother’s bedroom in the house that is also occupied by four other women who live by an unusual set of beliefs.

Wrestling with longstanding compulsive and harmful behaviours, as well as severe self-doubt, Fawn is confronted with the reality of her mother’s death. It is her responsibility to catalogue the furniture and possessions in the room, then sell or dispose of them. Instead, Fawn becomes fixated on archiving her mother’s writing and documents, searching for signs, and drawing tenuous connections to help her understand more about the enigmatic woman in the pages.

I am surrounded by mocking evidence of her inhabitancy of this room. Quickly, it is expiring. Today she was alive. When the day runs out that will no longer be true. Tomorrow I will be able to say that yesterday she was alive, at least. The next day, nothing. She will just be dead. The fact seems to be at its smallest now, growing with time. For now she is many things, and there are many places left to find her.

In Hi, It’s Me, Fawn Parker is unafraid to explore the bewildering relationship between the living and the dead. Strikingly original, provocative, and engrossing Hi, It’s Me takes us into the furthest corners of grief, invoking the physicality and painful embodiment of terminal illness with astonishing precision and emotional force. This mesmerizing, devastating novel asks: Why must it be this way?

FAWN PARKER is the author of the novels What We Both Know, longlisted for the 2022 Scotiabank Giller Prize, Set-Point, and Dumb-Show, and the poetry collection Soft Inheritance, winner of the Fiddlehead Poetry Book Prize and the J. M. Abraham Atlantic Poetry Award. Her story “Feed Machine” was longlisted for the 2020 Writers’ Trust McClelland & Stewart Journey Prize, and her story “WunderHorse II” was anthologized in André Forget’s After Realism. Fawn is a Ph.D. student at the University of New Brunswick. She divides her time between Toronto and Fredericton.

ISBN: 9780771005152
Format: Paperback
Pages: 352
Publisher: McClelland & Stewart
Published: September 17, 2024

Atwood Gibson Writers' Trust Fiction Prize, Finalist • One of Indigo’s Most Anticipated Canadian Books • One of the CBC’s Canadian Fiction Books to Read in Fall 2024

"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)

"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

"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

“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