Zoe Whittall is a championing voice of outsiders and outcasts, of
surviving your 20s and all their hangovers, in a polyamorous-leaning
generation unencumbered by traditional gender labels. Whereas her first
novel Bottle Rocket Hearts updated Mordecai’s Montreal,
Holding Still stars contemporary Toronto: first kisses on
Now newspaper boxes, gentrifying Parkdale, parties at the
Gladstone. Mortality looms, as a love triangle unfolds between two
women, filmmaker Amy and former teen-rocker Billy, and Josh, a
paramedic slowly crumbling under the pressures of his job. In a
less-talented writer’s hands, this story, with its smoking, boozing,
anxiety-ridden cast, could have been as meaningful as the back pages of
Vice, but Whittall, who is also a poet, obviously cares for her
characters too much to let them become flatlining hipsters.
This article appears in Oct 15-21, 2009.