Scotiabank Giller Prize winner Sean Michaels's moving, innovative and
deeply felt novel about an aging poet who agrees to collaborate with a
Big Tech company's poetry AI, named Charlotte
Marian Ffarmer is a world-renowned poet and 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, and 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, and 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 and a skeptic, for an encounter that will unsettle her
life, her work and even her understanding of kinship.
Both a love letter to and interrogation of the nature of language, art,
labor, capital, family, and 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 and joyful
recognition that if we're to survive meaningfully at all, creative
legacy is to be reimagined and belonging to one's art must mean, above
all else, belonging to the world.
