Free to a Good Home: With Room for Improvement - Softcover

Jules Torti

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1987915607 ISBN 13: 9781987915600

Publisher: Caitlin Press (CA), 2019

Synopsis

The German word zugunruhe translates as the stirring before moving. Its used to describe birds and herds of animals, like wildebeests, before the great migration. Though Jules Torti is neither German nor a wildebeest, she understands this marrow-deep anxiousness all too well; she is just someone looking for a home. This book is evidence of Tortis life-long commitment to feeling at home where it mattered most: within herself. At eighteen, with one thousand dollars in her bank account, she moved to the West Coast from Ontario to find her people. She headed specifically to Davie Street -- that is where all the gays were! Finding a girlfriend proved to be elusive, but she learned a lot of Pet Shop Boys lyrics and studied everything by Jane Rule and Chrystos for guidance. Torti continued searching. Whether prepping chimpanzees breakfast in the Congo, searching for her own breakfast in the dumpsters of Vancouvers back alleys or seeking a permanent address in Ontarios unforgiving real estate market -- with many other worldly adventures in between -- Torti found that homesickness took up its own residence in her identity. While she longed for a home of bricks and mortar (or log or stone), she knew her greatest sense of home was to be found in a person, the missing her. For many, the path to home is never linear. If Torti began her memoir in Amsterdam, you might not follow. If she began in Uganda, you might get it. If she started with her time spent in the soggy Costa Rican jungle, you would have a better understanding. But, if she scrolled back to her tomboy self at age six, then you would see. Logically, this is where she begins her memoir of emotional geography: on an unpaved countryside road in Southwestern Ontario, among the corn and tobacco-fringed fields of Mount Pleasant, where she grew up. At turns poignant, hilarious and uncannily familiar, Free to a Good Home explores what it means to call a place home when life oddly mirrors a choose-your-own-adventure storybook.

About this title

About the Author

Jules Torti writes about the best things in life: birds, beer, beaches, burgers and books (in no particular order). Her work has been published in the Vancouver Sun, the Globe and Mail, Mabuhay, Coast Mountain Culture Magazine, Matador Network, Massage Therapy Canada and Canadian Running. She contributes regularly to Realtors blog Living Room and is currently the editor in chief of Harrowsmith magazine. In other lives she has made breakfast for chimpanzees, illustrated colouring books for the Jane Goodall Institute, won a flight to Costa Rica in an essay contest and had short stories published in a dozen lesbian anthologies. Her first handsome paycheque was for a lesbian erotica story, published in The Mammoth Book of Erotica (Running Press, 2000). She now lives happily ever after with her partner on the 45th parallel north, exactly half way between the equator and the North Pole, in Lions Head, Ontario.

From the Back Cover

'I love this book.'' --Jann Arden ''Jules Torti takes you on a wild spin of a joy ride through her life as she looks for a place to call home.'' --Laurie Gough, author of KISS THE SUNSET PIG, KITE STRINGS OF THE SOUTHERN CROSS and STOLEN CHILD ''A walker, a talker and one helluva writer. An avid explorer of this flawed and fabulous world, a fearless and hilarious examiner of the heart's mysteries, Jules Torti is a brilliant dynamo who reminds us that the optimism of youth and the courage to be true to oneself are shining examples of how to live large, go big and find a forever home and true love. Unless you are a terminally timid wannabe writer with envy issues or a judgey prune with a pickle up your bum, you'll love this wonderful book!'' --Caroline Woodward, author of SINGING AWAY THE DARK and LIGHT YEARS: A MEMOIR OF A MODERN LIGHTHOUSE KEEPER

Edition details

• Publisher: Caitlin Press (CA)
• Publication date: 2019
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1987915607
• ISBN 13: 9781987915600
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 240