Jowita bydlowska biography sample

  • My name is Jowita Bydlowska and I was born in Warsaw, Poland.
  • Jowita was born in Warsaw, Poland and moved to Canada as a teenager.
  • Jowita Bydlowska is the author of Possessed (October ), the best-selling memoir Drunk Mom, and the best-selling novel GUY. She's also a prolific short-story.

    • •

    My name is Jowita Bydlowska and I was born in Warsaw, Poland. I moved to Canada as a teenager. Currently, I live in Toronto. I wrote a bestselling memoir called Drunk Mom  published by Doubleday Canada and HarperCollins Australia () & Penguin USA (). (The book is also self-published in the U.K.)

    My novel GUY (Buckrider Books) came out in October, to critical acclaim.

    I also publish short stories. Like here. Or here. Or here. Or here. (This one was picked for Best Canadian Short Stories )

    I teach creative writing at Ryerson University and I mentor clients individually. I&#;ve edited a number of book-length manuscripts, consulted on both non-fiction (memoir) and fiction.

    For fun, I read, ride my bike, make music mixes, wander around, and take pictures. 

    As a journalist, I mainly write about culture, social issues and mental health. I&#;ve been published in the National Post, the Globe and Mail, Salon magazine, The Times UK, Elle, FASHION, Chatelaine, Hazlitt

  • jowita bydlowska biography sample

    • •

    I’ve known the writer Jowita Bydlowska since the early s in Toronto. At the time she was being squired around town by my old friend, the novelist and fellow Globe and Mail style section columnist Russell Smith, with whom she now has a year-old son. They split up a few years back but remain friendly co-parents and even occasional colleagues. Russell worked as an editor her most recent novel, Posessed, for Dundurn Press.

    It’s dark and sexy and disorienting in a hypnotic, dream-logic kind of way that verges on terrifying. The novel is so scary, in fact, it was blurbed by the bestselling horror novelist Andrew Pyper who also happens to be an old friend of Smith’s and mine as well. Why am I turning poor Jowita’s author interview intro into a game of Toronto naughties literary scene connect-the-dots? Because it amuses me and I have no editor to tell me not to, but more importantly because it gives you some indication of just how hilariously incestuous the writers community i

    •

    At a party to celebrate the birth of her first child, Jowita Bydlowska did what a lot of relieved, new mothers might do: She drank a glass of champagne, after nine long months of sobriety.

    Oops. man that three and a half years of sobriety—gone in the space of a split-second and not to return anytime soon.

    Her frankly titled memoir—Drunk Mom (Viking Penguin, $16)—doesn’t begin on that day, but during a much later one, an evening when she’s at a museum and finds a baggie of coke in the women’s restroom. This baggie is perched on top of the toilet paper container, no less. Bydlowska sets the tone for her story that will underlie nearly every decision:

    “So what do inom do?” she asks, then answers: “I pour the powder down the toilet.” Pause. “No, no I don’t.” She gets out her makeup mirror, cuts “a slug of a line,” snorts it, and returns to a party. Immediately, she’s overcome bygd an appetite for more, “no ordinary wanting.”

    This wanting is more like a giant baby, “a wet hungry ba