January Magazine
Best of Fiction 2006
Cease to Blush
(Random House Canada)
by Billie Livingston
The opening chapters of Cease to Blush are deceiving. While the writing is beautiful, you start out thinking that maybe you've been down this road before. A mother/daughter disconnect. An ugly death by cancer, the adult child left thinking that there was so much unsaid. Yada, yada, yada. To be honest, about three chapters in, when I encountered what felt like turf that has been gone over so well in CanLit that it's shredded, I was tempted to put Billie Livingston's second novel aside. It would have been my loss. Soon after I’d thought to stop reading, the daughter discovers that her beautiful, sometime lesbian, feminist professor mother has left her a trunk. When opened, the trunk reveals a secret life -- actually, several of them. It turns out that Vivian’s mother was, at various times, a peripheral member of the rat pack, a gangster's arm candy, a singer, a stripper, even a beatnik. Bringing these various stories to life -- the daughter's present day and the past lives of the 1960s the mother experiences -- is no easy thing. Livingston employs just about every technique available to her -- the mother's letters to a friend, the daughter's imaginings. Livingston occasionally skates so close to the edge of believability, she risks stretching our suspension of belief to the breaking point. But it does not break. Livingston writes beautifully, even soulfully and Cease to Blush is her best work to date. Billie Livingstone
-- Linda L. Richards
