When I Rises Up, I Gets Confused!: The Best of Sondra Gotlieb

Pauline Carey is an actor, playwright, and fiction writer. She is the
author of Magic and What’s in a Name?

This collection of short newspaper articles, and a few from Saturday
Night, roams in non-chronological order over the last 30 years in the
author’s life. As the wife of a diplomat, Sondra Gotlieb travelled
widely but the stories refer mostly to her time in the United
States—where her husband, Allan Gotlieb, was Canadian ambassador in
the 1980s and she was part of the clique she refers to as “wife
of”—and to her more recent disturbances back in her native Canada.

Gotlieb covers a wide array of subjects grouped loosely under the
headings of Provocations, Vanities, and Obsessions, and manages to be
caustic, funny, and informative on all three platforms. Her targets
under Provocations include SUV women, shopping at the Bay (which, back
in 2000, she was convinced was owned by Kafka), the erratic behaviour of
garbage men, and her short stint at a New York cooking school (“The
Joy of Cooking Without Joy”). Vanities takes aim at embassy parties,
trophy wives, fat farms, and wedding gifts, and facelifts. Obsessions,
which are always with her, include such simple passions as dogs,
gardens, and eating.

Much of this is well-travelled territory, but the fun of Gotlieb’s
writing is that she does and says the unexpected, as when she
masterfully and proudly rescues a lamb chop from her dog’s mouth and
puts it back on the plate of the Soviet ambassador.

Maybe it’s her Manitoba background, but there is a goodly streak of
social critic in Gotlieb and a sound basis of common sense in her most
fantastic flights.

No pictures, no index—just Sondra.