By Sara Hailstone
“For reasons which will become clear soon enough, I cannot tell you my name. Nor can I tell you the name of the city in which I live.”
Thus is the reader ushered into the perimeters of a novel that will attempt to package an unbelievable story into something palpable, a story made believable through the craft of storytelling amongst the domestic. Our Lady of the Lost and Found, written by Diane Schoemperlen in 2001, is narrated by an unnamed successful writer who finds solace in the comfort of her home and single life.
“People often ask me how much of my fiction is autobiographical, how much of what I am writing is actually the real story of my own life. I freely admit that some parts of each book are true but I am not about to say which parts or how true.” The reader is enticed to learn if threads of this novel are true; yet, we cannot know the writer. And the writer carefully places the reader within the firm grip of a reliable narrator. “I cannot tell you the titles of my books because then you would be able to figure out who I am.” Strung through carefully laid facts, we are to believe the narrator: “I am telling you all this now because I want you to know from the outset that I am a normal, rational, well-educated, well-adjusted woman not given to delusions, hallucinations, or hysterical flights of fancy. I do not drink or do drugs. The only voice I hear in my head is my own. I want you to know from the outset that I am not a psychotic, an eccentric, a fanatic, or a mystic. I want you to know that I am not a lunatic.”
It is on an ordinary Monday morning in April that the writer enters her living room to water plants and finds a woman standing by her fig tree. Dressed in white Nikes and a blue trench coat and holding a suitcase, she quietly introduces herself as the Virgin Mary. The visitor is tired and explains that she needs a place to stay for a week to rest. Mary wants to rest in ordinary solace and the writer has established the perfect domestic oasis for this need. The encounter is mundane and human; Mary is not an apparition or a figment of imagination. She will stay under one condition: the writer must not reveal that Mary was there. “If people find out that I have been here, that I have talked to you, eaten with you, and slept in your house, they will descend upon you in droves.” Mary outlines the chaos that would rain down if the masses found out about this visit. “If you break this promise to keep my visit a secret, your life will never be the same. Do I make myself clear?” And so, under these conditions, Mary stays.
The two women find gentle reprieve in each other’s company without crossing boundaries. The writer navigates her understanding of one of our society’s most iconic cultural and religious figures. Chronicling Mary’s presence in civilization for the last two thousand years, Schoemperlen folds the narrative together with fact and fiction, propelling the reader to wonder at the extraordinary within the ordinary of daily life.
Diane Schoemperlen has established an impressive and solid portfolio of work of Canadian literature, having published three novels and seven collections of short stories. She began submitting poetry and prose to Canadian publications in the seventies, and completed a degree in English at Lakehead University in Thunder Bay. Her first novel, In the Language of Love, published in 1994, was composed of one hundred chapters, each one based on one of the one hundred words in the Standard Word Association Test, which was used to measure sanity. Schoemperlen’s 1998 book of short stories, Forms of Devotion, won the Governor General’s Award. Her second novel, Our Lady of the Lost and Found was published in 2001. Schoemperlen’s 2017 book, This is Not My Life, tells of her love for a prison inmate. The archives at Queen’s University house more than 150 short stories, essays, plays and manuscript drafts of novels. Diane Schoemperlen was born and raised in Thunder Bay, Ontario, Ontario and now resides in Kingston, Ontario.
Schoemperlen has been weighed heavily for the shifting of this novel between accounts of a monotonous life, and the lack of trauma of the middle-aged author; dialogue between two women—one human, another supernatural in essence—that shifts into confessional narration while encoding segments of Mary’s life with meditations; historical accounts; discussions of the Pythagorean theory; and the nature of truth and Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle. Past reviewers have noted that Mary is not allowed to speak among three hundred pages of narrative shifts and authorial balancing. Reviewers have also argued that the sublunary backstory of the narrator’s personal essence disrupts achievement attempted by weaving in historical and theoretical discussions that strive to contextualize the believability of Mary staying with a writer for a week. One reviewer noted that, “the supposed core of the story, meeting the mother of God, isn’t strong enough to balance the tangents.” These tangents, in my opinion, were intentional and serve a greater purpose in giving depth to the structure of the plot and narrative voice. The reader is intended to navigate the ledges of fact and fiction. The tangents are based on “actual documented accounts,” as stated by the author in the book’s acknowledgements. The writer-narrator contemplates that the opposite of fact might not be fiction, the opposite space is a place “where literature comes from.” She articulates that this place, a “threshold bridge at the border between the real world and the other world, still points where the barrier between the human and the divine is stretched thin as a membrane that may finally be permeated and transcended.” We are to wonder of these spaces between Schoemperlen’s tangents and the narration. That is the beauty of the text.
Perhaps the author wanted readers to locate Mary in either space. The miraculous accounts, relayed with a basis of documentation and a baseline of the writer-hostess, represent Mary as both passion and reason. I found, as a female reader, the life of the writer-hostess peaceful and her state of independence refreshing. She single-handedly created a space that Mary would want to take shelter in. Not bound by trauma or trigger, the writer created a home that could birth this story, that could house both the divine and the ordinary. I needed this story. I needed those tangents and those “mundane” bits. I recommend others to find peace there in their reading too.