The Girl Who Grew A Galaxy by Cherie Dimaline

It’s hard reading about the fragility of human psyche – it’s hard reading about anxiety and apprehension and fear when you are someone who could easily, fall into those behaviours and ways of thinking.

The main character, Ruby Bloom, is a young woman who has lived her entire life with guilt and feelings of inadequacy. This evolves into a galaxy of planets being spun around her head, hindering her from interacting with society, with friends, with life. The story follows her life from when she is a young girl with roots in the First Nation culture – her father speaks in a half French, half Indian drawl, and her Great Aunt Harriet is First Nations, – although I think she identifies as Metis. Her Grandfather passes away the day he gives her a red bike. Ruby proceeds to take off on a joy ride, unintentionally getting lost, and in the hours that pass, she is finally found but told that her grandfather has died. She feels as if he died from the stress of looking for her.

And her galaxy is born.

Guilt. Fear. Anxiety. Isolation. Small planets of Fantasy and Longing. She is the centre of the universe, and these planets form a barrier of experience between her and the world.

Things that stood out me:

1) Her positive sex experience at the end of the book. Blew some of her planets away. What is this saying? That positive sexual identity can alter worlds? Love that.

2) How this novel is about a girl who happens to be of Indigenous background, not about an Indigenous Girl. Does that make sense? It feels more open, more connected to experience than it does to cultural awareness. The emphasis is on her individual feelings and how it disconnects her from the world around her, as opposed to focusing on her community and how she is part of a larger picture.

3) Her strength. She has all the hang-ups about life, but still – she moves forward. She faces her fears and confronts them and moves around them, but sh keep moving. She refuses to end up like her mother, she refuses to let fear rule her. She moves ahead, determined to beat her fears. It’s beautiful.

4) How she claims her story at the end of the novel. Fuck it all, follow your heart. Love that. It finally feels like she is bursting free of her galaxy and choosing her own path. It feels like a very positive and affirmative shift in thinking for her, and I am so damn thankful that it happened that way. Follow the heart, follow the dream, and honestly, embrace the fear.

Cherie’s style of writing is poetic, and the form reminds me of Tomson Highway’s Kiss of the Fur Queen. An innovation of the otherworldly – not literary magical realism, or whatever it is called – but rather an awareness that the power of belief and inner dreams can cause in reality. That our reality and perception of reality are often different, and that this isn’t “not normal.” That this is okay, accepted, experienced by all of us on different levels.

Book: The Girl Who Grew A Galaxy by Cherie Dimaline