Rather, “The Dead Ladies Project,” one of my favourite reads this year.

I’ve been telling everyone to read it, including CBC’s The Next Chapter. Listen to my review here.

Christa Couture is a singer-songwriter from Vancouver who recently moved to Toronto. She’s just finished reading The Dead Ladies Project: Exiles, Expats and Ex-Countries by Bookslut founder Jessa Crispin.

It’s a travelogue, it’s a memoir, it’s part literary criticism. Jessa is so smart, she’s the founder of Bookslut, which is a really good source for good reads. In this book, she’s also depressed. At the beginning of the book she’s suicidal, so she leaves her home in Chicago and travels to Europe with a single suitcase. She starts to trace the footsteps of dead artists, writers and composers.

…It’s so candid, and it’s raw. What I love about the book is that she’s looking in these cities, she’s looking to these writers and the work they made, and she’s looking in herself. It ends not really with any resolution, but with a sort of resolve that I felt comforted by. I felt companionship in getting to travel with her through this. And then at the end just that sense of having to keep trying. And that the pursuit of art might be the reason to keep going.