Autofiction, a genre that blends memoir and fiction, prioritizes emotional truth. As Ms. Mootoo explained at the Picton Library launch of her new novel, Starry Starry Night, some of what the story narrates is straightforwardly from experience, while other moments are transformed in order to convey an inner truth. The novel tells the story of a girl named Anju, growing up in Trinidad in the 1960s, at the moment of independence. Her father runs for office, bringing politics home. But history is not so important to Anju.

Throughout, Anju narrates in present tense: we hear about the events in the four-year-old Anju’s life in a style that conveys the perceptions of a child of that age. Her voice is naïve — and honest. She speaks of events without wholly understanding them, leaving it to the reader to glean between the lines. Some of the experiences involve sexual abuse the young narrator does not understand.

Young Anju pays particular attention to smells and tactile sensations. She describes her grandmother, “She smells like paratha roti and then, when I turn my head into her neck, like cream of wheat.” 

A description of a bath given by her grandmother is especially poignant: “The warm water trickles from the ladle onto my head, then down my face, like a long slow waterfall. I stick out my tongue and lap the warm water. And it rolls down my neck, onto my shoulders, and down my back. I open my eyes and, through the beads of water on my lashes, I see her—she is blurred, but it is her, it is her—and she takes the bar of pink soap that smells like roses from the edge of the nearby sink and rubs it into the white washcloth that sits in her open palm. She takes her time. The bathroom fills up with roses.”

There is poetry in such perceptions. This is no ordinary child.

And, unbeknownst to her, this is no ordinary family. The people she calls Ma and Pa are not her parents, but her grandparents. When her parents return to Trinidad from several years abroad, her father pursuing a medical education, young Anju is taken by surprise by a mother, a father and siblings. She will refer to them as “these people” for years.

Her family moves to various homes, at addresses that are increasingly ambitious. A persistent yearning for the familiar comforts of life with her grandparents defines Anju as an outsider. She is never quite at home. This displacement gives her a vantage point as she grows. She is an observer.

As years pass, the voice develops. Both the diction and the thought become more complex. The maturing narrator becomes increasingly aware of social codes, large and small. Body language and tone of voice, especially between her parents, comes to replace the earlier emphasis on the senses. Through frank observation she learns about Trinidad’s social stratification, which is constructed around race.

And she becomes an observer of her own emotions. “Things are changing. I am getting used to living here,” she says, now a twelve-year-old who has lived with her family for five years. Hearing her mother say out loud, “please stop acting like a stranger in the house,” she articulates the paradox of her feelings: “It was so odd. I felt embarrassed, and yet I wanted to laugh, but I also wanted to cry with—with something. Can you cry with happiness? Laugh and cry?”

There is an admirable discipline in Anju’s narrative voice, so carefully calibrated to represent the different ages of the speaker. And although Ms. Mootoo insists that there is “no arc”—no traditional beginning, middle and end—to this story, it is so carefully centred on Anju’s consciousness that the ebb and flow of the plotline is subordinate to the consistency of character and her intricate perceptions. 

In its concern with fiction and truth, perception and reality, inside and out, this novel moves and glimmers, shifts and shimmers with life, revealing new forms everywhere. It is a delight to read.