My husband, whose family has been in this country for hundreds of years, has a teeny, tiny WASP nose and his mask kept sliding down his face. of course it is worse to be the guy who is trying to kick people in front of Tim Hor- tons, it is not that great if someone tries to kick you, either. I get so tired of being patient and grateful for my lot in life.” How much of the pressure to be grateful do you think comes from social media, or Facebook specifically, as a medium? To acknowledge privilege, but also to avoid being too candid about one’s own difficul- ties in a way that puts people off? RR: Yeah, or just me being a very online person and exposed to thinking in that way. There always needs to be a kind of contextual-
ization. I think it’s good to be aware of where I fall on the privilege spectrum but I don’t know if I always need to be announcing it. It’s for me to work with and not for other people to hear about. I don’t know if I fully reckoned with that question. I’m working on it. PMB: What was so interesting is the way you get at how different the lockdown era was—not just for people in various socio- economic situations, but also for different personality types. Because there were certain people who found it a relief to not have to be out in the world, but that was certainly not universal sentiment. But class was, clearly, central, and your apartment complex—a cluster towers just east of the centre of Toronto, with many low-income residents—does sound like it was unusually hard-hit by lockdown condi- tions. Are you still living in St. James Town? RR: Two days after the publication of this book, I moved to North York [a more sub- urban Toronto neighbourhood, further from the centre]. Which is very weird, because I
sit next to me; sit over there. It’s useful in so many ways going forward to know that whatever I think today—give it a year. PMB: You record a lot of early-pandemic details that felt bizarre at the time, like the realization that smiling is invisible through a mask. Which aspect of daily life surprises you the most in retrospect? RR: Just the iciness of interacting at the grocery store or the dentist. Any normal interaction where you’d make chit-chat, just stonewalling everybody so that they wouldn’t come near you. It was so antithetical to how I am in the world. I hated it. I still hate those memories. But it was something we were supposed to do. PMB: Your book gets at the ways class inequality manifested itself during the pandemic especially. You make regular mentions of realizing how much better you have it than some, even when you’re struggling in one way or another. But at one point you write, “Even though
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