Do You Remember Being Born?

Scotiabank Giller Prize winner Sean Michaels's moving, innovative and deeply felt novel about an aging poet who agrees to collaborate with a Big Tech company's poetry AI, named Charlotte

Marian Ffarmer is a world-renowned poet and a legend in the making--but only now, at 75 years old, is she beginning to believe in the security of her successes. Unfortunately, a poet's accomplishments don't necessarily translate to capital, and as her adult son struggles to buy his first home, her confidence in her choices begins to fray. Marian's pristine life of mind--for which she's sacrificed nearly all personal relationships, from romance to friendship to motherhood--has come at a cost.

Then comes a cryptic invitation from the Tech Company. Come to California, the invitation beckons, and write with a machine. The Company's lucrative offer--for Marian to co-author a poem in a 'historic partnership' with their cutting-edge poetry bot, named Charlotte--chafes at everything she believes about artmaking as an individual pursuit . . . yet, it's a second chance she can't resist. And so to California she goes, a sell-out and a skeptic, for an encounter that will unsettle her life, her work and even her understanding of kinship.

Both a love letter to and interrogation of the nature of language, art, labor, capital, family, and community, Do You Remember Being Born? is Scotiabank Giller Prize winner Sean Michaels's empathetic response to some of the most disquieting questions of our time--a defiant and joyful recognition that if we're to survive meaningfully at all, creative legacy is to be reimagined and belonging to one's art must mean, above all else, belonging to the world.

Author: Sean Michaels
Publisher: Astra House
Published: 09/05/2023
Pages: 288
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 1.15lbs
Size: 9.06h x 6.22w x 0.94d
ISBN: 9781662602320


Review Citation(s):
Library Journal Prepub Alert 04/01/2023 pg. 3
Booklist 08/01/2023 pg. 20
Publishers Weekly 08/21/2023

About the Author
Sean Michaels is a novelist, short story writer, and critic. Born in Stirling, Scotland, and raised in Ottawa, he eventually settled in Montreal, where he founded the pioneering music blog Said the Gramophone. His debut novel, Us Conductors, received the Scotiabank Giller Prize, and the QWF Paragraphe Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction, and was nominated for the Amazon.ca First Novel Award, the Kirkus Prize, the International Dublin Literary Award, and (in translation) the Prix des libraires du Québec. His second novel, The Wagers, appeared in 2019. Both books were published in the US by Tin House. Sean's award-winning writing has also appeared in The Observer, McSweeney's, The Guardian, Pitchfork, The Walrus, and The Globe and Mail.