Don't You Know Anybody Else?

Joan McGrath is a Toronto Board of Education library consultant.

Ted Allan undoubtedly knows plenty of other people, of all sorts and conditions, but the people he knows best, understands to the heart, and loves most, are his own family. Don’t You Know Anybody Else? includes his most famous story, “Lies My Father Told Me,” as well as other tales that have been featured on CBC’s “Anthology” or have appeared in The New Yorker or elsewhere — short, poignant stories of a childhood poor in material goods but rich in character, affection, and incident. One such story, “Looking for Bessie,” is in itself a comment on the storyteller’s eye and ear. It tells of the writer’s half-impatient search for an old friend of his mother’s, complicated by her hopelessly confused directions, but which miraculously achieves the impossible when the friends are re-united. The day after this exhausting odyssey, he commits the events to paper, in an unbelievable, engrossing saga of misadventure. His mother, reading the account, says blankly, “But why did you write it down? It’s just what we did yesterday!” Then, learning that he plans to sell the story, she prepares to sit down and tell him what she did the day before yesterday. She didn’t recognize the story; most of the rest of us would have seen no story. The reader may be grateful that Ted Allan was there and did see the story. In an (overworked) word, heartwarming.