The Strange Truth About Us

by M.A.C. Farrant

Overview

“Anthropologist of the absurd” and “brave iconoclast,” M.A.C. Farrant positively bristles in this three-part novel-length work of prose fragments, snippets, questions, speculations, and meditations, by turns philosophical, dark, comedic, and lyrical in its attempts to imagine a multitude of possible futures for our accelerated age. It offers her readers nothing less than The Strange Truth About Us.

M.A.C. Farrant is the acclaimed author of nine previous collections of satirical and humourous short fiction, and two works of non-fiction. Her work is infused with acerbic wit and innovation, and her surrealistic visions of everyday life are startlingly precise.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780889227347
Publisher:	Talonbooks, Limited
Publication date:	10/11/2011
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	208
File size:	401 KB

About the Author

Born in Sydney, Australia and raised in Victoria, British Columbia, M.A.C. Farrant is the acclaimed author of nine previous collections of satirical and humourous short fiction, and two works of non-fiction. Her writing has been widely anthologized in North America and has been dramatized for television; Farrant is also a frequent contributor to leading magazines such as Adbusters and Geist. Her 2004 memoir, My Turquoise Years, is being adapted into a stage play in conjunction with the Arts Club Theatre of Vancouver; production is slated for the 2011/12 season.

Farrant has taught fiction workshops in Canada and Australia. She was a visiting writer-in-residence at Macquarie University in Sydney. A full-time writer currently residing in North Saanich, B.C., she has also taught part-time at the creative writing department in the University of Victoria and reviews books for the Vancouver Sun and the Globe & Mail.

Farrant’s work is infused with acerbic wit and iconoclastic innovation. As the Globe & Mail has noted, “Farrant is better at startling us with unnerving, often misanthropic visions of everyday life than perhaps any other Canadian writer”.

BC Bookworld has called her “Canada’s most acerbic and intelligent humourist.”

M.A.C. Farrant has been writing and publishing since the 1980s: Nineteen works of fiction, non-fiction and memoir; two produced plays, countless book reviews for the Vancouver Sun and Toronto Globe & Mail; and over a dozen chapbooks. Along with Pauline Holdstock, she ran the Sidney Reading Series from 1994–2009.

Her books have been finalists for many awards, among them the Commonwealth Writer’s Prize, the Ethel Wilson fiction prize, two Jessie Richardson theatre awards, The Van City Book Prize, the National Magazine Awards, the ReLit Award, the Gemini Awards for the Bravo short film adaptation of her story, Rob’s Guns & Ammo, and the Victoria Book Prize (three times), the last of which she won in 2014 for her collection of miniature fiction, The World Afloat. The Strange Truth About Us was one of the Globe & Mail’s Best Fiction books of 2012.

Her 2021 non-fiction book, One Good Thing, was a BC Bestseller. Jigsaw: A Puzzle in Ninety-Three Pieces, another non-fiction book, was released in 2023. In 2024, Talon Books will issue the expanded 20th Anniversary Edition of her memoir, My Turquoise Years.

Her most recent chapbooks are Some of the Puzzles (2021) and The Literary Cow Festival (2024) both from above/ground press in Ottawa. Talonbooks is the publisher of her last ten books.

Farrant is well-known for her acerbic wit and laugh-out-loud humour. BC Bookworld has called her “Canada’s most acerbic and intelligent humourist”. Bill Richardson has called her “a master of the Zen-like art of delivering weight in a way that is featherlight” further noting that she’s “the most accomplished and unapologetic miniaturist in Canadian letters.” Archived material is in the “Special Collections Branch” at the University of Victoria.

Table of Contents

This novel-length prose work is by turns philosophical, dark, comedic, and lyrical in approach as it attempts to imagine a multitude of possible futures. It is comprised of three parts and approaches the subject from three different angles, as follows:
1. Annotations About an Absence
2. Woman Records Brief Notes Regarding Absence
3. Other Prose Surrounding Absence

Part 1 is written as a series of numbered annotations (1-115) about the day-long conversation/meditations between a couple who are living in a gated community and who are attempting to create an imaginary novel in which they express their fears about the future:

Annotation #5:
We concoct a make-believe novel and a set of annotations in which...
We attempt to express the universal confusion of mind that is the main feature of contemporary life.
Which is?
We are afraid.

Part 2 is written as notes to the above annotations revealing (in the spirit of transparency) the author’s sources/ideas/questions and provides a running and somewhat satiric narrative on the subject. For example:

Note #4.
Images found in works by Cormac McCarthy, JG Ballard, HG Wells, PD James; Matrix and Mad Max films; PBS Nature segment on rise of poisonous jelly fish in world’s oceans; and content of wet Jehovah Witness pamphlet left on woman’s doorstep take hold in woman’s mind.

Each “note” is written as if it were a description of a late-night TV movie; definite articles have been removed as much as possible.


Part 3 is comprised of twenty-one prose pieces which are complimentary to Parts 1&2 and range in length from one page to twenty pages. Among other things, they take aim at the individual’s existence in a globalized world wherein human existence is bludgeoned by the threat of “end times” – climate change, species extinction, pandemics, and really bad politics – insofar as we are able to retain our status as “individuals”.


This book is an attempt by this writer - along with other writers, thinkers, and observers - to prick the bubble of Western complacency in the face of the “awful atrocity” which is the current world. I would hope that the book, while unique in style and approach, is, nonetheless, readable, engaging, enigmatic, worthy of discourse, and could even be considered, in parts, delightful.

Editorial Reviews

“The Strange Truth About Us is impossible to summarize, save to say that it is both an acknowledgment of and an antidote to all the uncertainty we must shoulder in this, our age of anxiety and absence. Delightful and disturbing in all the best ways, this book addresses that which mostly remains unspoken in ways that have seldom been spoken before.”
– Globe and Mail

“One thing is sure: the format invites – if not demands – us to dip into the book again and again for insights that are funny, timely, provocative and unsettling.”
– Prairie Fire Review of Books

“The Strange Truth About Us is shot through with Farrant’s subversive wit, her acute sense of irony, As well as being poetic and thought-provoking, it is quite funny.”
– Victoria Times Colonist

“Farrant pulls you into the absence, scrapes you around the side of it, and spits you back out, confused and satisfied. … her prose tends to be acerbic and funny, a little jarring, and her stories are constructed to resonate with the reader long after the book is done. The Strange Truth About Us left me feeling unsettled and slightly anxious, but in a way that felt necessary. It is well worth the read.”
– Herizons

“a novel, a memoir, a prose poem, a reading list, a note book, a book of quotations, a manifesto. It’s a work of intellectual speculation on what the world is going to look like in a few years. … experimental, brave, daring, unusual, brilliant.”
– J.S. Porter

From the Publisher