Books
If It’s Shreveport, It Must Be Tuesday
Despite her artsy background, Marilyn Carr accidently ended up in a tech career. When the telecom startup where she’d worked for only a few months becomes a statistic in the dot-com meltdown, she finds herself unemployed with a huge mortgage and massive renovation bills. But nobody’s hiring. As a last resort, she signs a three-month contract for a research project where she’ll be flying to the U.S. every week.
As a mild-mannered Canadian, she thought the risk of going freelance would be her biggest challenge, but nothing prepared her for the real perils: dubious rental cars, surly border guards, harrowing aviation incidents, and unexpected culture shock. But when problems beyond her control put the project in jeopardy, she must find a way to get things back on the rails, or face losing everything.
How I Invented the Internet
Published: September 30, 2022 Publisher: Iguana Books .
Despite growing up in Deep River, Ontario, the company town for Chalk River Nuclear Laboratories that only exists because of science, Marilyn Carr was firmly neither a science, technology, engineering, nor mathematics person. When How I Invented the Internet begins, she has just wrapped up a master’s degree in library science, which at least involved the word “science.” So how did she accidentally end up in a tech career? It’s complicated.
How I Invented the Internet is a coming-of-work-age memoir set in 1980s and ’90s Toronto. Along the way, our heroine muddles through a series of baffling jobs, patronizes questionable social venues, cobbles together a dating life with more downs than ups, and makes dubious housing choices. It’s a romp through the era of aspirational yuppies, outrageous shoulder pads, and the wonders of office automation. You will never look at your computer the same way again.
Reviews
“How I Invented the Internet picks up where Nowhere Like This Place left off, following Marilyn Carr as a newly minted library sciences graduate sprung from the confines of the scientifically-cultured-yet-culturally-cloistered town of Deep River and relocated to the Yuppiedom of Toronto in the 1980s. The tongue-in-cheek title belies the author’s deft ability to convey her experience of the bourgeoning influence of automation on the corporate world of the era, when both women and computers were rarities. Carr makes the terrain of working woman circa 1980s seem appealing and disheartening in equal measure as she recounts navigating mostly-male workplaces, stalker ex-boyfriends, and home-invading vermin with fly-by-the-seat-of-her-pants gumption and ingenuity. I can’t wait for the third instalment to discover what happens after the internet is invented!”
Nowhere Like This Place
Published: November 3, 2020 Publisher: Iguana Books .
Marilyn Carr’s family arrived in Deep River, Ontario in 1960 because her dad got a job at a mysterious place called “the plant.” The quirky, isolated, residence for the employees of Chalk River Nuclear Laboratories was impeccably designed by a guy named John Bland. It’s a test-tube baby of a town that sprang, fully formed, from the bush north of Algonquin Park, on the shore of the Ottawa river. Everything has already been decided, including the colours of the houses, inside and out. What could possibly go wrong? Nowhere like This Place is a coming-of-age memoir set against the backdrop of the weirdness of an enclave with more PhDs per capita than anywhere else on earth. It’s steeped in thinly veiled sexism and the searing angst of an artsy child trapped in a terrarium full of white-bread nuclear scientists and their nuclear families. Everything happens, and nothing happens, and it all works out in the end. Maybe.
Reviews
“The judges were impressed with the grace and quality of your writing, and remarked as well on your ability to convey humour on the page, comparing it favourably to Terry Fallis.”
“What do you get when you transplant a young girl from Quebec into what could arguably be called the most unique community in all of Canada in the 1960s and watch her grow up there? You get the makings of a very funny and perspective book.”
“A coming-of-age book like no other. How could life be normal in a town that wasn’t? Carr manages to make you feel like you are there with her, wending her way through a ‘manufactured’ town, where much like Alice in Wonderland, nothing is quite as it seems. Carr’s comfort with words is obvious as she helps us laugh along with her descriptions of a childhood and adolescence that we can all relate to. A funny and thoroughly enjoyable read.”
