Author Aga Maksimowska examines adult children’s relationships with parents

By JULIA SAWICKI

More than a decade after publishing her first novel, Beach author Aga Maksimowska has returned with Becalming, a story that explores grief, family and the often complicated relationships between parents and their adult children.

Drawing on her own experiences while remaining firmly rooted in fiction, the novel asks what happens when we begin to understand our parents only after we’ve grown up.

Becalming was released in April, and follows Gosia, a high school chemistry teacher who returns to Poland to reconnect with her estranged father. Back in Canada, her boyfriend’s father, who has become her stand-in parent, is dying of terminal cancer.

The novel explores Gosia coming to terms with young adulthood away from her routine, sparking questions in her mind about her life, and the personal relationships that make it.

Becalming follows Maksimowska’s first book, Giant, which was released in 2012 and was shortlisted for the Toronto Book Award. When her daughter was born after its publication, she turned her focus to her family. 

In those 14 years, she explored other writing avenues in literary journals, essays and short stories that appeared in a number of publications, including Polish[ed]: Poland Rooted in Canadian fiction, Brick and the Globe and Mail. Becalming has been a challenging and emotional return to long form fiction.

After Maksimowska’s own father-in-law passed away from lung cancer, she wrote an essay for the Globe and Mail in 2008 about her grief and experience. It wasn’t until years later, that she decided to turn her lived understanding about such a complex issue into a novel.

“I was thinking about the relationship between adult children and their fathers and just how little we know about our parents until it’s too late,” she said.

Rather than writing a memoir, or something about her own life, Maksimowska created Becalming in order to examine the contrasts between two father-child relationships; one devoted and loving, and one estranged and fractured.

“I put that side by side, and figure out how our knowledge of our parents, especially our fathers, shaped who we are as we grow into adults,” she said.

Maksimowska emigrated as a child, and finds that her own previously strained relationship with her father is a reflection of cultural, political and historical influences. 

“My grandparents lived through the (Second World) War, and my parents were born less than a decade after it ended,” she said. “I think if you contrast a European father against, quote-un-quote, Canadian fathers, it seemed to me like Canadian fathers were more emotional and chatty. They told their kids they loved them. They coached baseball and hockey teams.”

Her own father worked as a merchant marine, spending time away at sea and staying behind working in Poland, while she and her mother moved to Canada. 

“A lot of fathers in communist Poland or Eastern Europe had jobs that required them to work weird shifts or work away from home,” explained Machowska. “That certainly doesn’t make you an involved parent”

“Its certainly true from my experience,” she added. “I know it’s a bit of a stereotype.”

The book deals with themes of reconciliation between Gosia and her estranged father, finding a comfort in finally understanding and empathizing with her father’s perspective, and what decisions led them both to where they were. Maksimowska said she has similarly begun rebuilding her relationship with her father, paralleling Gosia’s journey.

Since the release of the book, Maksimowska has received messages from people reacting to the book, resonating with the emotional and often unspoken tragedy of becoming a caretaker for an aging or dying parent.

“I think it’s quite emotional for them,” she said. “It’s a very upsetting experience that nobody can be ready for. So I think people who have gone through that have found it triggering, but ultimately confirming, that their experience was really hard, but also really incredible.”

For more information on Becalming, please visit https://maksimowska.ca/becalming/

Becalming is now available for purchase on Indigo or through Dundurn press.