Looking for Gordon

The Shape of Love

This is a beautifully written memoir of love and a lament that has a universal quality to it, a potent and loving gesture from the author to her deceased husband.

• Michael Redhill, winner of the 2017 Giller Prize for his novel Bellevue Square

A woman who meets and marries her husband in her older age finds that even after a ten-year honeymoon, after deep intimacy on all levels, her husband remains partly unknowable to her. After his sudden death, searing images of an empty corridor leading to an empty door draw her on a search to know more about him.

Their story begins with an accidental meeting, an unremarkable getting to know each other. A groundswell of love flames and soars. A wedding follows and the building of a domestic life in the manner of a young couple setting out in life. Throughout their brief years together, each wonders if it is fate, chance, or destiny that they should meet in later years against unfathomable odds. Interspersed with joy in their day-to-day life are distant travels, each one a continuing discovery of other worlds, and of each other.

This is a letter written by the author to her husband in the year after his death. She highlights for him the story of their brief time together, and it’s with both joy and agony that she summons him in memory, beckons him to be with her in spirit as he was in life.