Freed from the expectations imposed upon her by herself and a youth-centered society, Prim embraces carpe diem at the world's end.
Michelle Tocher turns the narrative of the midlife crisis on its head in this rollicking journey that follows a woman's metamorphosis from an isolated, “prim and proper” self into someone who is audaciously part of the greater whole.
With lively illustrations by Shelagh Armstrong-Hodgson, The End of Prim reminds us we don’t need to be confronted by the specter of mortality to step boldly into our brightest possibilities.
Though a little apocalypse doesn’t hurt to get the ball rolling!
Freed from the expectations imposed upon her by herself and a youth-centered society, Prim embraces carpe diem at the world's end.
Michelle Tocher turns the narrative of the midlife crisis on its head in this rollicking journey that follows a woman's metamorphosis from an isolated, “prim and proper” self into someone who is audaciously part of the greater whole.
With lively illustrations by Shelagh Armstrong-Hodgson, The End of Prim reminds us we don’t need to be confronted by the specter of mortality to step boldly into our brightest possibilities.
Though a little apocalypse doesn’t hurt to get the ball rolling!
Part One, 1
9 a.m., the 18th of December, 2012
According to the Mayans, the world is coming to an end in just a few days. Well, I don’t know about the world out there, but I can speak for my own end, and I have most certainly come to it.
I had coffee with my friend Eva the other day, and she asked me, “What’s come over you, Prim? You seem unsteady somehow.” Her eyes were all squished, like dried fruit.
Words came to mind. Inexpressible words. Rather like the problem itself.
Constipation. Weeks and months and years of same.
A few days ago, I went in for a colonoscopy, and to the astonishment of my kindly gastroenterologist, I would not poo. After three liters of Bi-Peglyte, chased by six litres of water, nada. I was sent home with a prescription for laxatives and told to shoot three of those bullets into my guts every other night.
I am not winning the war.
“I don’t have many words today, Eva, dear,” I said, swirling my puddle of coffee grounds.
“That’s okay. As long as I’m not boring you.” She slurped her chai latte and went on to tell me about a little fellow named Buck in her kindergarten class.
I was enthralled by her flow of words. Soon, I suspect, I will have no words at all, only letters scattering like leaves to the wind. Pages will flutter back to the trees, and I’ll be left speechless, in my own skin, standing in some field where there’s nothing but sky and wheat between me and my unspeakable reality.
“Are you okay?” Eva’s eyes were pins of light trying to burrow through. If only they were laxatives.
I love Eva, but even with her, I cannot doff my hat. I met her fifteen years ago at the end of my days with the Catholic Church. I was in my forties, and she was a sprightly young woman ten years my junior. I was busy watching angry Christians honking at one another in the parking lot when she launched herself at me. She wore a yellow dress with white polka dots, as I recall. Everything about her was so fresh, she made me feel like a tired old dog.
“I find you so interesting,” she chirped. “You always wear a flat-brimmed hat. I think it takes a lot of confidence to wear that kind of hat.”
“Actually, I wear it to hide,” I said.
She poked her head under the brim. “Well, I just found you out!” She spoke to me as if I were a three-year-old, and I liked it, I have to say. Now we get together a couple of times a month, usually for coffee or a glass of wine. One half-litre between us, that’s our limit. Do I tell her I go home and have another? No, I wouldn’t. Eva’s a devout Roman Catholic who likes me for the sole reason that I’m Prim.
And Proper.
But now, standing in front of the bathroom mirror, I am confronting my Prim and Proper identity. The mirror is inadequate. It only reflects me to the breastbone, and that won’t do.
I march myself downstairs to the foyer where my ex-husband installed a full-length mirror. I need to take in the person I have become before I give her the heave-ho. I gaze at myself, from the top of my flat-brimmed hat, down the length of my navy coat, over the seams of my gray trousers to the tops of my shiny black boots. Meet Prim in her winter wear.
I’ve left several things out. My hair. It’s short. It has always been short. It now doubles for steel wool. The hairdresser told me I should color it. I would look so much younger. “I don’t mind my age,” I declared, which was just another lie stacked on top of a falling down house of cards of lies. Of course, I mind my age. I’m nearly sixty. I always thought I’d die at sixty. I might still. My birthday arrives on the 22nd of December, the day after the supposed end of the world.
I’m not sure, exactly, how I acquired the Uniform. I always looked good in hats, or so people told me, starting with my mother who was anything but Prim and Proper. At my age, she did nothing but sprawl on the Chesterfield with her dressing gown flapped open and parts sticking out like a tulip at the end of her days.
She died in a diabetic coma at the age of seventy-one, after turning herself inside out for a bloodsucking second husband who made sure that her kids got virtually nothing from the sale of her real estate.
My mother admired me in a hat; that’s how I remember it. She admired me in a flat-topped, brimmed hat. In fact, you might say that my image in the mirror is the image of me in my mother’s eyes.
I have no idea who I am under my hat.
“Before anyone names me, I want to name myself.”
Embodying this proclamation by its titular character, Michelle Tocher’s novel ‘The End of Prim’ breathes life into not just a story, but a meditation on identity and what it means to live constrained by roles, labels and masks.
Prim is approaching sixty and convinced that this might be her end. It’s 2012 and if most people, virtual and not, are to be believed, the world is going to kick its proverbial bucket as well. Tocher uses this looming date as an intimate metaphor for personal reckoning. Instead of a worldly catastrophe, it is Prim’s own microcosm that falls apart, an unraveling that is tender and funny and painfully human.
“I have come to the end of Prim, and that includes her hat.” It includes, also, the emotional veil the protagonist has hid behind since her childhood in the bid to disappear by way of coping.
What makes the story come alive further is the witty prose and tender language used to voice Prim’s thoughts. “I was enthralled by her flow of words,” she says early on in the book and I felt much the same. Tocher’s metaphors shine without feeling overbearing, especially when referring to how words swallowed and withheld become a form of emotional constipation, paving the way for a lifetime of politeness that costs Prim her honesty and sense of identity.
Moving in tandem with these revelations are Shelagh Armstrong’s illustrations that complement the prose with their delicate expression without ever overshadowing it. They catch the little flickers and visual echoes of Prim’s inner life and her slow unmasking, while also lending gentle pauses amid her rapid stream of introspection.
At its core, this is a story about discovery more than it is about rediscovery of the self. It follows a woman’s exploration through loneliness, memory, and a wildly imaginative mind in the bid to learn how to face herself as well as the world at large. Her relationship with her mother, once shadowed by judgement and silence, dons a new perspective as she realises, through her experience as well as that of her friend Eva’s, that they’re all, in their own ways, the products of failed attempts at self-expression.
“With all due respect to Prim, who has struggled valiantly under her hat, her story is over.”
Yet this ending remains so only in semantics. It unfolds, instead, as a quiet beginning and the miracle of finding oneself as one walks through the end of the world and comes out with no hat, but more words.