My guest on this episode is Tamara Faith Berger. Tamara is an author and screenwriter whose books include Lie With Me, which she helped adapt into a feature film, The Way of the Whore (later republished by Coach House Books as Little Cat), Maidenhead, Kuntalini and Queen Solomon. She has been nominated for the Trillium Book Award and won the Believer Book Award. Two films for which she wrote the screenplays will be premiering in 2025. Tamara’s most recent book is the novel Yara, published in 2023 by Coach House Books. The Toronto Star and the Globe & Mail selected it as one of the best books of that year. Publishers Weekly said that “this provocative coming-of-age story … raises questions about sexuality, power, and the intersection of the personal and the political."

Tamara and I talk about mainstream Canadian literary culture’s discomfort with her work’s signature combination of deep ideas and frank sexuality, about the complicated experience of publishing a novel that explores Jewish identity and its relationship to Israel in the fall of 2023, and the total coincidence that led to her having two films appearing in one year.

This podcast is produced and hosted by Nathan Whitlock, in partnership with The Walrus.

Music: "simple-hearted thing" by Alex Lukashevsky. Used with permission.