Do You Remember Being Born?

Marian Ffarmer is a world-renowned poet & 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, & 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, & 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 & a skeptic, for an encounter that will unsettle her life, her work & even her understanding of kinship.

Both a love letter to & interrogation of the nature of language, art, labor, capital, family, & 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 & joyful recognition that if we’re to survive meaningfully at all, creative legacy is to be reimagined & belonging to one’s art must mean, above all else, belonging to the world.

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Sean Michaels is a novelist, short-story writer & critic. Born in Stirling, Scotland, & raised in Ottawa, he eventually settled in Montreal, where he founded the pioneering music blog Said the Gramophone. His award-winning writing has also appeared in the Observer, McSweeney’s,...&n