#lee lai

I’m coming to GUELPH, ONTARIO TODAY (May 8) to deliver the Musagetes Lecture.

Lee Lai's Cannon is an extraordinary graphic novel that turns out a beautifully told, subtle and ambiguous tale about Lucy (Lucy -> "Loose" -> "Loose Cannon" -> "Cannon"), a queer Chinese-Canadian chef at a Montreal restaurant whose messy family, work, personal and sex life are all falling apart in ways that are powerfully engrossing:

https://drawnandquarterly.com/books/cannon/

This is the second outing from Lee Lai, whose debut, Stone Fruit, swept many of the field's awards and won major critical acclaim. When a debut comes out that strong, it's sometimes followed with the dread "second book syndrome" in which a creator who has poured everything they ever thought about putting in a book now has to write another book, from scratch. But Cannon avoids any hint of that second book malaise; rather, it is jammed with dense and densely connected ideas, character beats and graphic signifiers that are brilliant in so many ways:

https://www.fantagraphics.com/products/stone-fruit

Cannon is a thirtysomething chef in a Montreal restaurant run by Guy, an instantly recognizable hustler who praises Cannon for her culinary abilities and her pliability, talks over her, demands the impossible from her kitchen colleagues and periodically breaks out into soliloquies about his own martyrdom to the hardships of entrepreneurship.

Cannon cares for her grandfather, who has been abandoned by her mother, who has been traumatized by the abuse he meted out to her during her upbringing. Now in decline and unable to care for himself, Cannon's grandfather continues his abusive ways, scaring off all of his home help, which means Cannon must devote even more time to him (she can't bring herself to put him in a care facility that will inevitably be full of white people who don't speak Chinese).

These familial duties leave Cannon isolated, with only one important friendship: Trish, an up-and-coming novelist whom Cannon has known since their school days in Montreal's suburban Eastern Townships, where they were the only queer Chinese girls either of them knew. Trish owes her professional acclaim to her own neurotic social instincts, which she polishes on the page with the help of an old writing teacher who serves as her mentor. Trish may be Cannon's oldest and best friend, but she's not actually a very good friend, and now that they're both in their 30s, neither Cannon nor Trish is entirely sure where they'd make new friends.

Lee Lai

Gender: Transgender woman

Sexuality: Queer

DOB: Born 1993

Ethnicity: Chinese, white

Nationality: Australian