You’ve Changed

a novel by Ian Williams

A HILARIOUS TRAFFIC JAM OF EMOTION ABOUT A MARRIAGE IN CRISIS COMPLICATED BY RACE AND GENDER THAT FEATURES HIGH COMEDY, DEEP HUMILIATION, AND EXCRUCIATING UNCERTAINTY AND MAKES YOU ASK WHAT THE HELL MARRIAGE IS ANYWAY

Beckett, a 43-year-old white contractor from Maine now living in Vancouver, has aspirations of landing a big contract and proving his worth. He’s married to Princess, a 44-year-old fitness instructor originally from Ivory Coast who strives to become more and more beautiful. In You’ve Changed, they attempt to save each other from parallel midlife crises.

When Beckett is fired from his job, he loses confidence and purpose. An inventory of his life reveals a man who has no friends and is estranged from his family; he could be the poster boy for the epidemic of male, middle-aged loneliness in North America.

Princess’s crisis has a less linear trajectory. The day before Beckett loses his job, Princess’s childhood friend visits them with her African-American husband and dredges up Princess’s difficult early years as minority. Princess’s pursuit of beauty seems linked to a life-long sense of displacement. And the marriage of their guests invites Beckett and Princess to inspect their own.

For money, Beckett and Princess start an Airbnb-type business, hosting guests in their house. Yet their brief marriage begins to deteriorate. Princess continues altering her body, which leaves Beckett uncertain about the quality of love and security he provides. Then a wild, erratic character, Gluten, appears and galvanizes Beckett’s life. Is this the friend he never had? Beckett’s transformation matches Princess’s. Are they even the same people anymore? Who have they married? The novel accelerates into chaos as all three characters desperately try to undo their pasts, to retaliate against perceived injustices.

 You’ve Changed asks which parts of identity are liquid and which solid. And what if the solid parts could be fluid? The transformations of characters in You’ve Changed are on a totally different order from the mild personal growth that we’re accustomed to in fiction. How much can we change internally and externally and still be the same person? How do changes to our present identities necessitate new interpretations of our past? 

(Photo: Justin Morris)

ABOUT IAN WILLIAMS

Ian Williams is the author of the novel Reproduction, which was the winner of the 2019 Scotiabank Giller Prize and was published in the U.S., U.K., and Italy; Personals which was shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize and the Robert Kroetsch Poetry Book Award; Not Anyone’s Anything, winner of the Danuta Gleed Literary Award for the best first collection of short fiction in Canada, and You Know Who You Are, a finalist for the ReLit Prize for poetry. In 2020 he published his latest poetry collection, Word Problems. In fall 2021 he released Disorientation: Being Black in the World, which was shortlisted for the Hilary Weston Writers Trust Prize for Non-Fiction and the BC Book Prize for Non-Fiction. He was the 2024 CBC Massey Lecturer.

Williams is Professor of English at the University of Toronto, where he is Director of the Creative Writing Program and Academic Advisor. He completed his doctorate in English there and spent four years teaching poetry in the Creative Writing Department at the University of British Columbia. In 2014-2015 he was the Writer-in-Residence for the University of Calgary's Distinguished Writers Program. He has held fellowships or residencies from Vermont Studio Center, the Banff Center, Cave Canem, the William Southam Journalism Fellowship, and the National Humanities Center. In the summer of 2022 he was a Visiting Fellow at the American Library in Paris. He is currently on the board of the Griffin Poetry Prize.

Williams writes book reviews for The Guardian and has written articles for The Globe and Mail, Maclean’s, The Toronto Star, Hazlitt, Sportsnet.ca, Publishers Weekly, The Walrus, Lithub, Granta, and the Italian journals Sotto Il Vulcano (Feltrinelli), and Civlità delle Macchine (Fondazione Leonardo). Born in Trinidad, Williams grew up in Brampton, Ontario, and has worked in Massachusetts and Ontario.

Ian Williams as jury chair at the 2023 Scotiabank Giller Prize Gala

Ian Williams at the 2013 Griffin Poetry Prize Readings, reading from his shortlisted collection, Personals

PRAISE FOR REPRODUCTION

“With so many hundreds of books, it’s hard even to scratch the surface, but one debut to look out for is Canadian prizewinner Reproduction by Ian Williams (Dialogue, September), an enjoyably offbeat family saga set in polyglot Toronto.”
 — THE GUARDIAN, UK

“…This work successfully examines major themes of empathy, responsibility, secrecy, race, multiculturalism, misogyny, and honesty.” — LIBRARY JOURNAL, starred review

“Williams’s unsparing view on the past’s repetition is heartrending. This ambitious experiment yields worthwhile results.” — PUBLISHERS WEEKLY

“An intergenerational novel…that examines how love can supersede blood ties. [Reproduction’s] complicated path mirrors how many families are built on experiences that don’t make the photo albums, and illuminates how dark and painful moments can share equal space with joy and laughter…. With Reproduction Williams joins authors like David Chariandy and Catherine Hernandez—whose recent novels are set in Scarborough—showcasing the bounty of stories of those who live beyond the CN Tower’s shadow.” — TORONTO STAR

“Driven as much by its relationships as its characters, and is intensified and enriched by an inventive style that borrows from Williams’s giant poet’s brain.”
 — THE GLOBE AND MAIL

“Virtuosic B.C. writer Ian Williams extends the linguistic playfulness and stylistic legerdemain from his poetry and short fiction in a debut novel that explodes the very notion of the conventional multigenerational family saga. Combining Joycean wordplay, formal innovation, and stylistic pyrotechnics, and mixing in pop cultural references that run the gamut from The Maury Povich Show to The Silence of the Lambs, Williams enthusiastically deconstructs a series of interconnected stories that find their genesis in a hospital room where two strangers meet while their respective mothers lie dying. What sounds lugubrious actually proves to be one of the most energetic, lively, funny, and sad novels of the year. — QUILL & QUIRE

“Reproduction’s genius is its weaponized empathy, the precision-etched intensity of Williams’ gritty, witty, wholly unsentimental exploration of the collision of human hearts and the messy aftermath. Love, and its lack, form a spectrum that the characters bounce between, searching for connections, redemption and meaning.”— EDEN ROBINSON, author of Son of a Trickster and Trickster Drift

“There is an entire modern Canadian literature that fortunately arrives in Italy and shows what is possible with words…. In this brainy structure, Williams puts all his ability to experiment by generating a novel that reproduces itself, in a complicated yet brilliant metaphor of the process of forming a family, the center of the analysis contained in "Reproduction": how it is formed, how it crumbles before it is even born, how it survives or reforms out of necessity.” — L'INDIEPENDENTE, Italy

Ian Williams at the 2023 Scotiabank Giller Prize Gala