The Staircase Letters: An Extraordinary Friendship at the End of Life (review)

This brief and touching memoir is woven through three voices. The framing account is that of Motyer, a retired and distinguished university professor in his eighties with an interesting life of his own that he reveals, unobtrusively but tellingly, in the course of narrating the story of his connections with two women dying of cancer: Elma Gerwin, a Winnipegger known for her decades of literacy work, and a friend of Carol Shields’s while Carol lived in Winnipeg (1980–2000); and Carol herself. The voices and the lives of the women, like Motyer’s, emerge in two registers: Motyer’s narration, and the emails that the three of them exchange during the last years of the women’s lives.

I think that Carol might have quietly approved of one of this hybrid’s most striking qualities: the two lives and voices that emerge most clearly – in themselves and in relation to each other – are Motyer’s and Elma’s. Approved, because Carol had made it clear, as Motyer explains early, that she did not want her illness or her fame used as advertisements for a very public campaign; and true to Carol’s wishes, Motyer succeeds in presenting her, mostly through her emails to him and to Elma, as a benign, humble, and quiet presence, encouraging and supporting Elma, suffering through the progress of her illness in Winnipeg, and at the same time alluding to the course of her own decline, but always as a backdrop to her daily routines.

The memoir takes its title from Carol’s long-time strategy to combat insomnia: she would imagine herself at the top of a staircase, variously ornate, baroque, stately – and descending each step she would remember her life in reverse, never failing to fall asleep before reaching childhood. Inevitably, this descent echoes across the women’s declines, although never in an overt way.

Trickier, and potentially more a threat to the memoir’s effectiveness, is Motyer’s own voice, his intentions, and the narration of his own life, and I admit to an opening queasiness with the project on this account, but one that was quickly dispelled. In the hands (and voice) of a less talented writer, this book might have turned mawkish or worse. That it doesn’t is testament to Motyer’s narrative skills, which have nothing to do with his raw materials, interesting as these might be. Motyer relates the course of his own transformation from an apparently happily married family man to his coming out of the closet, divorcing, and beginning a new life with a younger male partner; this account is carefully managed so as not to overwhelm or interfere with the interplay among the three voices in the emails.

My only reservation with the (difficult and intriguing) structure of this text is that I would have liked to have seen (heard) more emails, and less of Motyer’s own narration. But this is a cavil. Motyer must provide the frame, or the memoir would dissolve into fragments; and when he quotes an email, or an exchange of emails, he must also provide a context and a chronology. This he does very well, for the most part.

The most direct voice – the ‘loudest,’ and unrelentingly cheeriest of these three – is Elma’s, while Carol’s provides an even mid-register counterpoint. Meanwhile, Motyer’s reflections on his own mortality balance both women’s more immediate apprehensions.

Motyer’s never having met Carol provides another interesting asymmetry to the texture of the exchanges: and throughout, these exchanges call continuing attention to the status of emails as texts – a subject that, increasingly, warrants careful attention, and promises, here as elsewhere, unlooked-for results.

Elma died in April 2002, and Carol fifteen months later. This affecting memoir gives us a vivid sense of three remarkable people, and Motyer should take no small satisfaction in the ample and enduring measures of joy...