In 1999 Alistair MacLeod publishes his one novel, No Great Mischief. It was a very big deal at the time. The master’s masterwork. International acclaim. Class struggle was at its heart.

But I learned a lesson very early on from this book about how people read. That once a book is out of your hands, it’s gone, and it becomes whatever other people say it is. And if we are talking in terms of class, you could write the very soul of your experience on a page and someone could read it and still see something completely different because that was never their life.

You can’t control what people read even when the words are on the page in front of them.

I was still in high school when No Great Mischief came out. I remember my mother reading it, and that she could not put it down. “It’s just like my own rela­tives,” she said. She was seeing herself in this book in a real way, in a rare way to her. I know one thing that stood out to her was the way that the older brothers of the protagonist in the book lived.

They’re poor, they live alone, they’re rural, they play the card game Auction, they live very rough. They sleep in their clothes and use overcoats for makeshift extra blankets. A horse pulls someone’s rotten tooth out that was tied to a string. It was so cold in their house that they would wake up to frost on the inside of the walls. They never had cups where the handles weren’t broken, or they drank their tea from jam jars. And they were alcoholics.

My mother saw pieces of her uncles here, or people she knew, and the frost-covered nails in the farmhouse of her own life. As I grew older myself, there were some people in my own life who seemed to walk out of this book, but of course it was only because MacLeod had tapped into something like a pure vein of experiences common enough among people like me. In my own uncle’s Ontario apartment only months ago at the time of writing this, I remembered No Great Mischief.

Yet I remember another thing that happened that summer in high school when the book came out. I walked up to a tourist who was looking for directions. She had rolled down her car window. This was the year 2000, before GPS.

“And do you speak Gaelic?” she asked me.

“A little,” I said.

“Oh my god,” I recall her saying almost to herself, pull­ing her head back in the car. “I just got here and I already met one of them.”

With that, she drove off. I stood there stunned for a moment. But I knew one thing for sure, she had read No Great Mischief. I knew this because I worked at the museum in the village and I knew who came that summer because of that book. It had brought in tourists. And for her, and some others, it was like we had read two different books.

What was so real, and raw, to my mother, was roman­tic and selective to a different audience. The painfully sharp, specific working-class portrait carved by MacLeod for my mom was a soft thing seen from a distance for these others, and standing there I felt like something to be seen on a human safari. She didn’t read that book and remember the cold in the morning where you could see your breath in the house. She never felt that cold, it was a fantasy. Now I don’t know that woman. Maybe she comes from a family of hard-rock miners who know the violence of that job and social forces that put you there when other people would never do that work. But it did not feel like it.

You don’t have to be from the same class to under­stand a book. We ought to read books from people of all different backgrounds than ourselves; it will make us a better society. But that was where I learned that you can’t help what people see because we all read books in our own way, and we all make sense of what we take in based on who we are already.

You have to try, though. And maybe what I’m really talking about is just another way of saying that we need is more art from working-class artists so that things stop feeling like a fantasy, and are realities that we accept instead.

Kate Beaton is a cartoonist and graphic novelist. Her graphic memoir Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands, available in paperback in May, is the winner of the Jan Michalski Prize for Literature and an Eisner Award, and won Canada Reads in 2023. Her other works include Hark! A Vagrant, Step Aside, Pops!, and two children’s books. Beaton lives in Nova Scotia.

Excerpted from Bodies of Art, Bodies of Labour by Kate Beaton. Copyright © 2025 (Edmonton: University of Alberta Press). Reprinted with permission. All rights reserved.