By Meredith Grace Thompson
Lisa Bird-Wilson’s Probably Ruby is a radiating constellation of people, places, moments, dreams, and memories, all moving together in order to weave together the web that is a life—a created self—in the protagonist of Ruby Valentine.
Robbed of her Indigeneity by being labeled “French” rather than “Métis” on her adoption paperwork in order to be kept out of Saskatchewan’s 1960–70s AIM (Adopt Indian Métis) program, Ruby spends her life feeling outside of those around her. She is pushed to the periphery, unwanted and yet specifically chosen. Bird-Wilson uses the formulation of her protagonist’s existence to ask the decidedly philosophical question: What is freedom? Can freedom be an option if there are no choices available?
Structurally, Bird-Wilson creates a web of intersecting vignettes. Each scene casts a new and different light on the protagonist, showing the intricate and often unknowable ways in which lives intersect with and echo through one another, even after individuals are gone. Some relationships are clear, some less so, but all are necessary.
The question of choosing and being chosen is repeated throughout the novel, asking its reader if it is possible for family to be something chosen, or if family must be tied to biological lineage. Ruby, born to a teenaged mother never given the option to keep her despite desperately trying, does not take her adopted mother’s word that to be chosen is somehow better than to simply belong. Rather, she searches for faces and names that tie her to her birth family, needing and at times creating stories and images that anchor her to a shared history.
Bird-Wilson’s narrator is not tied to Ruby but rather wanders poignantly throughout the novel’s landscape, dropping into the consciousness of Ruby’s teenage mother, fighting as best she can to keep the baby that is being torn from her by the state, by the church, and by her own family. This narrative viewpoint gifts the reader with the knowledge that Ruby can never have—what her mother and her father are feeling and thinking. The book’s opening pages contain a drawing entitled “Ruby’s Relationship Web” which shows hand-drawn names and criss-crossing, doubling-back lines that envelope, share, and amplify. Ruby is an amalgamation of these lines.
But Ruby also becomes a user and disposer of people. Her agency seems to have been warped, as if the only real power she can maintain is that of running away. She was a thing sought to be forgotten from the onset. She was life created in a way deemed wrong by the colonial Catholic authorities.
Imagery of spiders repeats throughout the novel, as Ruby allows a daddy-long-legs to crawl through her hair as she sits, diametrically opposed as an unwanted and yet also chosen child, in the backyard of her adoptive mother. Choice has been removed from the lives of Ruby’s family, layer by layer. Her mother, white, poor, and young, was never given the choice to keep her child, shamed for the fact that the boy she loved was Indigenous, and for her Indigenous baby—light enough that “she could be passed” (p. 126), but still born out of wedlock.
Ruby’s running is reflected and refracted by the women in her family web, who are constantly running. Running towards and yet constantly away in the same splitting instant. Ruby Valentine is a woman created of moments of interiority. She exists, so fully formed a human, with such a radiating web of connection, it is impossible not to wonder how your own web may intersect with hers and to admire Lisa Bird-Wilson’s craftsmanship in creating it.
Thank you to Penguin Random House Canada for the complimentary copy in exchange for an honest review.