Scotiabank Giller Prize winner Sean Michaels’s moving, innovative and deeply felt novel about an aging poet who agrees to collaborate with a Big Tech company’s poetry AI, named Charlotte
Marian Ffarmer is a world-renowned poet and a legend in the making—but only now, at 75 years old, is she beginning to believe in the security of her successes. Unfortunately, a poet’s accomplishments don’t necessarily translate to capital, and as her adult son struggles to buy his first home, her confidence in her choices begins to fray. Marian’s pristine life of mind—for which she’s sacrificed nearly all personal relationships, from romance to friendship to motherhood—has come at a cost.
Then comes a cryptic invitation from the Tech Company. Come to California, the invitation beckons, and write with a machine. The Company���s lucrative offer—for Marian to co-author a poem in a ‘historic partnership’ with their cutting-edge poetry bot, named Charlotte—chafes at everything she believes about artmaking as an individual pursuit . . . yet, it’s a second chance she can���t resist. And so to California she goes, a sell-out and a skeptic, for an encounter that will unsettle her life, her work and even her understanding of kinship.
Both a love letter to and interrogation of the nature of language, art, labor, capital, family, and community, Do You Remember Being Born? is Scotiabank Giller Prize winner Sean Michaels’s empathetic response to some of the most disquieting questions of our time—a defiant and joyful recognition that if we’re to survive meaningfully at all, creative legacy is to be reimagined and belonging to one’s art must mean, above all else, belonging to the world.
Genre: Literary Fiction
Marian Ffarmer is a world-renowned poet and a legend in the making—but only now, at 75 years old, is she beginning to believe in the security of her successes. Unfortunately, a poet’s accomplishments don’t necessarily translate to capital, and as her adult son struggles to buy his first home, her confidence in her choices begins to fray. Marian’s pristine life of mind—for which she’s sacrificed nearly all personal relationships, from romance to friendship to motherhood—has come at a cost.
Then comes a cryptic invitation from the Tech Company. Come to California, the invitation beckons, and write with a machine. The Company���s lucrative offer—for Marian to co-author a poem in a ‘historic partnership’ with their cutting-edge poetry bot, named Charlotte—chafes at everything she believes about artmaking as an individual pursuit . . . yet, it’s a second chance she can���t resist. And so to California she goes, a sell-out and a skeptic, for an encounter that will unsettle her life, her work and even her understanding of kinship.
Both a love letter to and interrogation of the nature of language, art, labor, capital, family, and community, Do You Remember Being Born? is Scotiabank Giller Prize winner Sean Michaels’s empathetic response to some of the most disquieting questions of our time—a defiant and joyful recognition that if we’re to survive meaningfully at all, creative legacy is to be reimagined and belonging to one’s art must mean, above all else, belonging to the world.
Genre: Literary Fiction
Praise for this book
"Could a novel be any timelier than Do You Remember Being Born? Wonderfully written, it makes you think, on every single page, of where it is we're going as a species." - Douglas Coupland
"Beautiful, wise, thought-provoking, and funny - Do You Remember Being Born? is the guiding light I have been waiting to follow through the confusion of what constitutes great art in these times. The answer? You are holding it in your hands." - Ceridwen Dovey
"One isn't sure whether Sean Michaels is a method actor or a magician. But a poet, he is not. And thank goodness, because here is a novelist of exacting candor whose gifts turn this book full of thorns about the chilling seduction of AI into a rich ride through what is imagined humane in art. You don't pull off a fiction like this so hitchlessly unless you truly understand how poetry and truth can coexist, even in a world that threatens both." - Canisia Lubrin
"Sparkling and kinetic, Do You Remember Being Born? has a deeply generous spirit and a beguiling protagonist, the kind I want to follow forever. A remarkable book about the difficulty - the profundity, too - of making art and making a life." - Claire Luchette
"I couldn't stop reading Sean Michaels' timely, inventive, and remarkably tender novel. It evades simple binaries about art and technology to tell a story about families, legacies, and connection; most of all, it's a love letter to language itself." - Alix Ohlin
"Beautiful, wise, thought-provoking, and funny - Do You Remember Being Born? is the guiding light I have been waiting to follow through the confusion of what constitutes great art in these times. The answer? You are holding it in your hands." - Ceridwen Dovey
"One isn't sure whether Sean Michaels is a method actor or a magician. But a poet, he is not. And thank goodness, because here is a novelist of exacting candor whose gifts turn this book full of thorns about the chilling seduction of AI into a rich ride through what is imagined humane in art. You don't pull off a fiction like this so hitchlessly unless you truly understand how poetry and truth can coexist, even in a world that threatens both." - Canisia Lubrin
"Sparkling and kinetic, Do You Remember Being Born? has a deeply generous spirit and a beguiling protagonist, the kind I want to follow forever. A remarkable book about the difficulty - the profundity, too - of making art and making a life." - Claire Luchette
"I couldn't stop reading Sean Michaels' timely, inventive, and remarkably tender novel. It evades simple binaries about art and technology to tell a story about families, legacies, and connection; most of all, it's a love letter to language itself." - Alix Ohlin
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