Before I talk about the contents of this book (Pacifique, by Sarah L. Taggart), I need to talk about the physical book itself. I’d heard about the beauty of a Coach House book, but I think this was my first time experiencing it. With its thick, ridged, cream-coloured paper and elegant font, this book was a joy to hold and to look at, but also to read. We begin by finding out that Tia has been in a bike accident and that she’s looking for her lover, Pacifique. We then find out Tia is in the psych ward of a hospital, both telling the story of her short affair with this mysterious woman, Pacifique, to anyone who will listen and having the validity of the story, and of Pacifique’s existence, questioned by her listeners. The book is told from the alternating perspectives of Tia and Andrew, a fellow patient in the psych ward who has fallen for Tia. What unfolds is a struggle between Tia’s heart, mind and memory. As Taggart describes it, life in the psychiatric hospital seems like being trapped in a daycare from which a loving parent is never coming to pick you up and your sanity, your truth is constantly in question. Are the diagnoses that doctors define their patients by truths or “guesswork”? Does truth exist on its own or do we all only live by the truths acceptable to its gatekeepers? This book is unique and surprising, told with raw emotion and intelligence. Sarah L. Taggart treats all of her characters with such compassion you will root for all of them, even while they’re hurting each other.

Why I wrote Pacifique

by Sarah L. Taggart

The idea for Pacifique stemmed from a real-life bike accident I had in Victoria in April 2004. I broke my collarbone and shredded much of the skin on my right side on the asphalt. I don’t remember any of this. One of the first things I did was ask for my friend, and a moment later he answered from the front seat of the ambulance. But what if, he asked me later, he hadn’t been there? And with that the seed was planted for Pacifique: what if your lover disappeared? And worse, what if, according to the rest of the world, she had never existed in the first place?

I began writing Pacifique in 2004. I signed the publication contract for it in early 2022. I took the novel through NaNoWriMo a couple or few times, starting from scratch each time. The novel in its current form began in 2012, when I started the MFA in Writing at the University of Saskatchewan. Upon submission of my master’s thesis in 2014, I began sending out the novel to agents. Thus began my season of rejection, which lasted until Amanda Leduc acquired the novel for Coach House Books in late 2021. Each rejection stung, and usually slowed me down. I wouldn’t touch the manuscript for months, sometimes years at a time. The email from Amanda caught me so off-guard I honestly didn’t believe it was real. In my email back to Amanda, I wrote, somewhat in line with the overall tone of Pacifique, “I am in complete shock and if you wrote me back immediately to say this was all a fantasy, I would believe it.”

Sarah L. Taggart is a queer writer with lived experience of madness and forced psychiatrization. She has published short fiction in The Malahat Review, The Fiddlehead, and Journey Prize Stories. Her short fiction won the Jack Hodgins Founders’ Award for Fiction and was an honourable mention in The Fiddlehead’s annual fiction contest. She lives in Pito-one, near Te Whanganui-a-Tara, Aotearoa New Zealand with her partner and their dog, Bagel, and is pursuing a PhD at the International Institute of Modern Letters, Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington.