Self-declared "anthropologist of the absurd";, M.A.C. Farrant is author of the award-winning What's True, Darling and co-producer of the Sidney Reading Series. Her alter-ego Marion in Girls Around the House (Polestar $18.95) is a fiction writer 'in a smallish town on a large-ish island'. In these stories she's a reluctant Mother Hubbard to a bingo-playing mother-in-law who lives in the basement like an ancient mysterious troll and three randy teenagers who have only one question in life: "Where's the party?"; Marion's husband forms a "Spouses of Writers Support Group"; and dreams of escape to a shed in the woods. When she's not writing haiku, former-hippie Marion embarks on monthly condom runs for her brood or cooks a book while composing supper. Domesticity wrestles creativity-and wins. 1-896095-93-3

[BCBW AUTUMN 1999]