Cake or Death

Book excerpt: A brilliant new book from one of Canada’s most popular columnists – a no-holds-barred riposte to the mess we’ve made of things. "Mrs. Tittlemouse is heaven in a sponge mop. I read Beatrix Potter’s books as a child and love her paintings, her stories, her home-boiling of squirrels so her watercolours could be anatomically exact. But most of all, Beatrix Potter made domesticity desirable. All right, she didn’t, but she domesticated me. Personal order has become my badge and it’s the only thing that really works with melancholy." Heather Mallick is sorely disappointed. The world has not turned out quite the way she had hoped it would. But rather than retreat from it, she takes the world head on, fearlessly and formidably on her own terms. In a new work of entirely original writing, we have Heather unplugged (some might even say unhinged), and uncensored from the restrictions of her Globe and Mail column writing. As her many fans have come to expect from her, she is incisive and outrageous, whether she’s cataloguing the many situations and items in our daily lives that we are told we should fear, teaching us how to cope with people we just can’t stand (ruthless mockery is the key, really, says Heather) or writing about the valuable life lesson to be learned from one of her childhood heroes: Mrs. Tittlemouse, the original domestic goddess. A candid reflection on the complicated state of our lives and our world today, viewed through the lens of Heather’s inimitable wit and outlook on life, Cake or Death: The Excruciating Choices of Everyday Life will provoke and delight readers.