Lena Marchand

Lena Marchand researches unreliable narration in literary divorce memoirs. She studies the way people tell stories about marriages that ended—the elisions, the imposed coherence, the difference between what happened and what gets said about what happened. She's good at this work. She's made a career of it. When she arrives in Montreal for a one-month sabbatical, she expects an apartment, a book project, and the particular quality of January light that only exists at this latitude. What she gets is Marcus Ward, her ex-husband, standing in the kitchen of their jointly-assigned housing, wearing a sweater she's never seen. The housing office made an error. There are two bedrooms. It will be sorted out in a day or two. In the meantime, they share an apartment on Rue Saint-Urbain in the Plateau, in January, in minus-seventeen-degree cold. *The Montreal Mistake* is literary fiction about the specific intimacy of shared space, the unreliability of retrospective narration, and the question of what you owe someone you used to be married to. It takes place over a single month in a city that has opinions about preservation, about what gets kept and what gets let go. The novel unfolds in alternating first person—Lena's chapters and Marcus's chapters, each narrated with the particular selective honesty of someone who has spent time thinking about how to tell this story. They are both academics. They are both very good at the kind of honesty that stops just short of the thing that would require action. They are both aware of what they're doing, and neither of them is willing to stop doing it. The apartment on Rue Saint-Urbain becomes a character in its own right: the radiator that clangs, the exterior staircase with its accumulated ice, the kitchen where Marcus cooks onions in butter the way he always has, the light through the tall windows that makes everything look like it's being remembered. They navigate the small logistics of cohabitation—who uses the desk when, whether to ea