Do You Remember Being Born?

By: Sean Michaels

Narrated by: Lisa Bunting, Alex Paxton-Beesley

FINALIST FOR THE 2023 PARAGRAPHE HUGH MACLENNAN AWARD FOR FICTION

Scotiabank Giller Prize-winner Sean Michaels' luminous new novel takes readers on a lyrical joy ride—seven, epic days in Silicon Valley with a tall, formidable poet (inspired by the real-life Marianne Moore) and her unusual new collaborator, a digital mind just one month old. It's both a love letter to and an aching examination of art-making, family, identity and belonging.

Dear Marian, the letter from the Company begins. You are one of the great writers of this century.

At 75, Marian Ffarmer is almost as famous for her signature tricorn hat and cape as for her verse. She has lived for decades in the one-bedroom New York apartment she once shared with her mother, miles away from any other family, dedicating herself to her art. Yet recently her certainty about her choices has started to fray, especially when she thinks about her only son, now approaching middle age with no steady income. Into that breach comes the letter: an invitation to the Silicon Valley headquarters of one of the world's most powerful companies in order to make history by writing a poem.

Marian has never collaborated with anyone, let alone a machine, but the offer is too lucrative to resist, and she boards a plane to San Francisco with dreams of helping her son. In the Company's serene and golden Mind Studio, she encounters Charlotte, their state-of-the-art poetry bot, and is startled to find that it has written 230,442 poems in the last week, though it claims to only like two of them.

Over the conversations to follow, the poet is by turns intrigued, confused, moved and frightened by Charlotte's vision of the world, by what it knows and doesn't know ("Do you remember being born?" it asks her. Of course Marian doesn't, but Charlotte does.) This is a relationship, a friendship, unlike anything Marian has known, and as it evolves—and as Marian meets strangers at swimming pools, tortoises at the zoo, a clutch of younger poets, a late-night TV host and his synthetic foam set—she is forced to confront the secrets of her past and the direction of her future. Who knew that a disembodied mind could help bend Marian's life towards human connection, that friendship and family are not just time-eating obligations but soul-expanding joys. Or that belonging to one’s art means, above all else, belonging to the world.

©2023 Sean Michaels (P)2023 Random House Canada

Critic reviews

“Stunningly compelling.” —The Walrus

“Timely and lovely. . . . [A.I. is] a loud topic, but Michaels’s novel is quiet and thoughtful. Instead of a cliché ‘man versus machine’ struggle, Do You Remember Being Born? is an investigation of language and legacies both artistic and familial. . . . Michaels has a poet’s eye for detail and ear for fresh phasing. . . . Do You Remember Being Born? is a tender and moving character portrait full of sharp scenes and memorable observations. While the novel might have a timely premise, it’s a jumping-off point for timeless meditations on art, family, connection and the meaning of a life. These topics will always speak to us, at least until we’re replaced by the machines.” —The New York Times

“With [Do You Remember Being Born?], Michaels tries to find a little bit of hope in the future we’re already in, suggesting that art can still remain in the hands of artists in the face of AI. . . . That Being Born is already being published is somewhat remarkable: Michaels began the book three years before ChatGPT’s public release, seeming to anticipate the world we’re now in. . . . Michaels’s own collaboration with AI is fascinating. . . . Being Born is wildly unique now, but it might be the forebear of a whole new genre of writing.” —Josh O’Kane, via The Globe and Mail