Reading time: About 2 minutes
I like to share interesting pieces of figurative language I encounter in my reading. I write today about a series of similes from Canadian writer Ian Brown.
I don’t know Ian Brown personally. But I feel as if I do, from reading his writing. A journalist for the Globe and Mail newspaper and the author of four books, Brown (pictured adjacent) is also the father of a severely disabled child.
This child — named Walker — is the subject of Brown’s achingly beautiful memoir, The Boy in the Moon.
When I read the book, I used an army of stickies to mark the figurative language (mostly similes). By the time I reached the end, it appeared as though the colourful soldiers had exploded along the edge of the book. Here are my favourites:
Sometimes watching Walker is like looking at the moon: you see the face of the man in the moon, yet you know there’s actually no man there.
Raising Walker was like raising a question mark.
She did laundry the way pilgrims perform religious rituals, precisely and at least twice a day.
He was cranky and upset, rasping his fingers at the site of his G-tube as if it were an open-pit mine.
Like most kids, he had diaper rash—but because it was Walker, my compromised son, it was the Chernobyl of diaper blights, requiring a day in hospital.
The default noise level, for starters, is usually half a dozen children crying at once, each in a different key and scale. Rossini would have made an opera from it.
It was a little like trying to explain the plumbing of a large complicated house in five minutes before you flew out the door.
Gratitude springs out of me like crabgrass out of a lawn, riots of it.
The evidence of Walker’s demanding presence never changes, the household stigmata of a disabled kid: the mangled window blinds, in whose jalousies he plays his fingers for minutes on end; the endless piles of laundry that self-propagate like jungle plants; his toothbrush in the kitchen drawer; the avalanche of potions and lotions and syringes and bottles held back by a cupboard door; all of it.
He looked like a more urbane, less afflicted version of Walker — curly hair and glasses, but slimmer and taller, CFC’s Noel Coward.
The geneticists themselves bore the slightly startled air of soldiers who had just emerged from the deep jungle, only to be told that the war they had been fighting had been over for twenty years.
This was a new way of understanding Walker— instead of broken, he was simply slightly flawed, like a discounted but perfectly wearable pair of shoes at an outlet mall.
She was pinned on her wheelchair like a lepidopterist’s specimen, but like a butterfly she was never ungraceful.
It may seem overwhelming to read all at this figurative language at once but note that it never feels overwhelming in the book, where it acts like a series of carefully crafted grace notes, adding depth, interest and feeling.
