Do You Remember Being Born?
- Publisher
- Random House of Canada
- Initial publish date
- Sep 2023
- Category
- Literary, General, Family Life
-
Hardback
- ISBN
- 9781039006751
- Publish Date
- Sep 2023
- List Price
- $35.00
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Where to buy it
Description
FINALIST FOR THE 2023 PARAGRAPHE HUGH MACLENNAN AWARD FOR FICTION
Scotiabank Giller Prize-winner Sean Michaels' luminous new novel takes readers on a lyrical joy ride—seven, epic days in Silicon Valley with a tall, formidable poet (inspired by the real-life Marianne Moore) and her unusual new collaborator, a digital mind just one month old. It's both a love letter to and an aching examination of art-making, family, identity and belonging.
Dear Marian, the letter from the Company begins. You are one of the great writers of this century.
At 75, Marian Ffarmer is almost as famous for her signature tricorn hat and cape as for her verse. She has lived for decades in the one-bedroom New York apartment she once shared with her mother, miles away from any other family, dedicating herself to her art. Yet recently her certainty about her choices has started to fray, especially when she thinks about her only son, now approaching middle age with no steady income. Into that breach comes the letter: an invitation to the Silicon Valley headquarters of one of the world's most powerful companies in order to make history by writing a poem.
Marian has never collaborated with anyone, let alone a machine, but the offer is too lucrative to resist, and she boards a plane to San Francisco with dreams of helping her son. In the Company's serene and golden Mind Studio, she encounters Charlotte, their state-of-the-art poetry bot, and is startled to find that it has written 230,442 poems in the last week, though it claims to only like two of them.
Over the conversations to follow, the poet is by turns intrigued, confused, moved and frightened by Charlotte's vision of the world, by what it knows and doesn't know ("Do you remember being born?" it asks her. Of course Marian doesn't, but Charlotte does.) This is a relationship, a friendship, unlike anything Marian has known, and as it evolves—and as Marian meets strangers at swimming pools, tortoises at the zoo, a clutch of younger poets, a late-night TV host and his synthetic foam set—she is forced to confront the secrets of her past and the direction of her future. Who knew that a disembodied mind could help bend Marian's life towards human connection, that friendship and family are not just time-eating obligations but soul-expanding joys. Or that belonging to one’s art means, above all else, belonging to the world.
About the author
Awards
- Short-listed, The Quebec Writers' Federation Literary Award - Paragraphe Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction
Contributor Notes
SEAN MICHAELS is the author of the novels Us Conductors and The Wagers, and his non-fiction has appeared in The Globe and Mail, The Guardian, Pitchfork and The New Yorker. He is a recipient of the Scotiabank Giller Prize, the QWF Paragraphe Hugh MacLennan Prize and the Prix Nouvelles Écritures, and he founded the pioneering music blog Said the Gramophone in 2003. Born in Stirling, Scotland, Sean lives in Montreal.
Excerpt: Do You Remember Being Born? (by (author) Sean Michaels)
The letter came just as I was despairing.
I was sitting at the little table in my kitchen, a hand over my face, considering what I should do. The room was all white and green, as it always is, as I like to keep it, but I felt none of its whiteness and greenness now. I felt midnight blue. I did not know how to help my son. Should I sell the apartment? Where, then, would I go? Or my archive? I had not planned to sell this until later, when I can no longer write. A retirement fund. Grocery money. I did not have savings—no poet has savings unless they are born to wealth. I had my papers, I had my apartment—Mother’s apartment—and that was all. A diamond brooch. The Cynthia Davis print on my bedroom wall, given to me when we were both young. I would not finish my new collection until the new year, and even then, what is a new collection worth? It would keep me in bread and butter and maybe kiwifruit and wine; tinned salmon, aged cheddar, the occasional curry from Queen’s Thai. Perhaps some new clothes now and then. Of course, I was being parsimonious. I could wear the wardrobe I had. I could buy cheaper wine. But then couldn’t I also decline to contribute? What did it matter if I gave Courtney ten or twenty or fifty thousand dollars? He would buy a house all the same, just a smaller one. He had his own savings, and his father would contribute, and also I had the impression Lucie’s parents were giving them money. Courtney would be well sorted. I did not need to give him anything. I did not need to sell my home, nor to bequeath the cardboard bankers’ boxes in the bedroom closet, the ones full of unpublished poems and emails from colleagues that I printed sometimes, in moments of procrastination and vanity. Not yet.
But oh, I felt terrible. I felt like a paper thing, a folded bird. I felt humiliated—that I could not help him, that I had not sufficiently prepared. “It’s all right, I didn’t expect her to be able to contribute,” Courtney would say to Lucie, and she would nod her head. The son of a poet grows up knowing his mother will not take care of him, not in certain ways. Courtney was thirty-nine now; this wasn’t the first time he had been forced to forge his own path through the world. The screen of my tablet flashed, only the flash was not to something brighter but something darker. Is there a word for that? I wondered. A dimming? A death?
I finished the dregs of my black tea. The doorbell sang. A courier stood in the hallway, looking doltish. “Marian Ffarmer?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said. “Thank you,” and drew an & on his electronic clipboard.
The envelope he gave me was slender and well made. My father was a stationer, and he taught me to recognize quality. Part of me, the part of me that came from him, the Ffarmer part, preferred not to tear open the seal. I could leave the envelope here, on the little desk by the door, a closed and handsome object. “I am a closed and handsome object,” I said to no one, to the room.
I ripped the envelope open with the stinging end of my finger. I had not been prepared for the way aging changed my hands, made it hurt to open a letter. I unfolded the contents. Two sheets stapled, the letterhead of one of the most valuable companies in the world, a company whose services I used online many times a day. I had no idea why they were writing me. I awaited something pro forma, purely administrative, yet:
Dear Marian Ffarmer, the letter began. You are one of the great writers of this century.
The Company was asking me to collaborate with them on a poem—“an historic partnership between human and machine.” One week in California, composing a “long poem” with a 2.5-trillion-parameter neural network, which is to say an artificial intelligence, a robot, a genie in a bottle. Excerpts from the finished work would be “published internationally,” with the complete poem appearing online.
The letter concluded by stating that they would be pleased to offer me sixty-five thousand dollars for my contribution.
I examined the signature—one of the company’s vice presidents, an elegant and extravagant name, rendered in sapphire-colored ink.
Dear Lausanne, I replied in an email that afternoon. I was happy to receive your letter.
I went into the bedroom. I stared at the print from Cynthia—a portrait of me at twenty-five, before I had failed at anything.
Editorial Reviews
"Stunningly compelling." —The Walrus
"A charming and refreshingly non-dystopian meditation on the duality of literary creation." —The New York Times
"The definitive novel about art in the age of AI, one that incorporates machine-generated phrases and sentences in an unexpectedly moving way. . . . A novel about the value of writing must clear a very high stylistic bar to succeed, and Michaels produces some of the most beautiful sentences published this year." —WIRED
"Timely and lovely. . . . [A.I. is] a loud topic, but Michaels’s novel is quiet and thoughtful. Instead of a cliché ‘man versus machine’ struggle, Do You Remember Being Born? is an investigation of language and legacies both artistic and familial. . . . Michaels has a poet’s eye for detail and ear for fresh phasing. . . . Do You Remember Being Born? is a tender and moving character portrait full of sharp scenes and memorable observations. While the novel might have a timely premise, it’s a jumping-off point for timeless meditations on art, family, connection and the meaning of a life. These topics will always speak to us, at least until we’re replaced by the machines." —The New York Times
"With [Do You Remember Being Born?], Michaels tries to find a little bit of hope in the future we’re already in, suggesting that art can still remain in the hands of artists in the face of AI. . . . That Being Born is already being published is somewhat remarkable: Michaels began the book three years before ChatGPT’s public release, seeming to anticipate the world we’re now in. . . . Michaels’s own collaboration with AI is fascinating. . . . Being Born is wildly unique now, but it might be the forebear of a whole new genre of writing." —Josh O’Kane, via The Globe and Mail
"Michaels merges modernist poetry with contemporary technology in this inventive outing. . . . [Do You Remember Being Born? asks] probing and humane questions about what it means to be an artist." —Publishers Weekly
"An outstanding, day-bending novel. . . . an iridescent exploration of what it means to make art, and what it means to build a day, or a life, around it. . . . [Michaels’] shimmering, sunlit prose transports readers beyond the meaning of the words. . . . His sentences are syncopated and light, allowing details, nicknames, images and thoughts to sing." —Montreal Review of Books
"I was completely blown away by how much I loved this book. I was extremely skeptical that authors are going to find ways to incorporate AI into their writing that [aren't] extremely c ringey or hokey, and Michaels managed to craft a beautiful book that I cannot recommend highly enough. I think now that he's done it, no one else should bother. Somehow, he managed to make an absolutely marvelous novel that incorporates AI-generated text." —Kate Knibbs, WIRED senior editor, on Gadget Lab
"Thoughtful, speculative, and human, Do You Remember Being Born? expounds upon the AI craze (or fear) that dominated 2023, despite being written quite a few years before now. . . . An insightful and optimistic deep-dive into a sector of innovation that’s sure to remain relevant for years to come." —Our Culture
"A compassionate and lyrical portrait of an artist whose craft is 'threatened' by emerging technology, the novel is an artfully constructed story about the sacrifices of making art, artistic collaboration and the nature of motherhood. . . . Do You Remember Being Born? far outshines its peers. . . . The prose is exceptional." —Boston Review
"Provocative. . . . A timely work reminiscent of Richard Powers' Galatea 2.2, Michaels' tale shows how AI can, paradoxically, stymie creation through its limitlessness and need for human guidance. This is also a compelling portrait of a tricorne-wearing poet famously dedicated to her craft." —Booklist
"Sean Michaels achieves an astonishing level of narrative, emotional and psychological density with his tightly focused novel Do You Remember Being Born? . . . Sentence by sentence, line by line, Michaels builds a beautiful structure with dizzying, surprising imagery, conjuring metaphors that will leave you with a smile and lingering questions. . . . A captivating success." —BookPage
"I couldn’t stop reading Sean Michaels’ timely, inventive and remarkably tender novel about a famous poet collaborating with an AI. It evades simple binaries about art and technology to tell a story about families, legacies and connection; most of all, it’s a love letter to language itself. What a dynamic and engrossing book!" —Alix Ohlin, author of Dual Citizens
"Could a novel be any timelier than Do You Remember Being Born? Wonderfully written, it makes you think, on every single page, of where it is we’re going as a species." —Douglas Coupland, artist and novelist
"This is a book about the choices we make: as poets, parents, people. At once a moving portrait of an artist and a brilliant exploration of the nature of consciousness, Do You Remember Being Born? invites readers to consider the various ways they navigate life under digital capitalism. Sean Michaels has carried the contemporary conversation around AI into a thoughtful new space, where 'one discovers in it, after all, a place for the genuine.'" —Heather Christle, author of The Crying Book
"Beautiful, wise, thought-provoking, and funny—Do You Remember Being Born? is the guiding light I have been waiting to follow through the confusion of what constitutes great art in these times. The answer? You are holding it in your hands." —Ceridwen Dovey, author of Life After Truth
"One isn’t sure whether Sean Michaels is a method actor or a magician. But a poet, he is not. And thank goodness, because here is a novelist of exacting candour whose gifts turn this book full of thorns about the chilling seduction of AI into a rich ride through what is imagined humane in art. You don’t pull off a fiction like this so hitchlessly unless you truly understand how poetry and truth can coexist, even in a world that threatens both. I almost reached in to hit the kill switch on that machine more than once. See for yourself whether or not you remember being born." —Canisia Lubrin, poet and author of Voodoo Hypothesis and The Dzygraphxst
"Sparkling and kinetic, Do You Remember Being Born? has a deeply generous spirit and a beguiling protagonist, the kind I want to follow forever. A remarkable book about the difficulty—the profundity, too—of making art and making a life." —Claire Luchette, author of Agatha of Little Neon
"Prescient and fascinating. . . . Rich and innovative.” —Foreword Reviews
