Like Every Form of Love

A Memoir of Friendship and True Crime

By: Padma Viswanathan

Narrated by: Padma Viswanathan

From the Scotiabank Giller Prize finalist, a gripping exploration of class, race, friendship, sexuality, what an author owes her subject and what it means to be a good person—all wrapped up in a riveting Canadian true crime story.

Padma Viswanathan was staying on a houseboat on Vancouver Island when she struck up a friendship with a warm-hearted, working-class queer man named Phillip. Their lives were so different it seemed unlikely to Padma that their relationship would last after she returned to her usual life. But, that week, Phillip told her a story from his childhood that kept them connected for more than twenty years.

Phillip was the son of a severe, abusive man named Harvey, a miner, farmer and communist. After Phillip’s mother left the family, Harvey advertised for a housekeeper-with-benefits. And so Del, the most glamorous and loving of stepmothers, stepped into Phillip's life. Del had hung out with Fidel Castro and Che Guevara in Mexico City before the Cuban revolution; she was also a convicted bank robber who had violated her parole and was suspected in her ex-husband’s murder. Phillip had long since lost track of Del, but when Padma said she’d like to write about her and about his own young life, he eagerly agreed. Quickly, though, Padma’s research uncovered hidden truths about these larger-than-real-life characters. Watching the effects on Phillip as these secrets, evasions and traumas came to light, she increasingly feared that when it came to the book or the friendship, only one of them would get out of this process alive.

In this unforgettable memoir, Padma reflects on the joys and frictions of this strange journey with grace, humour and poetry, including original readings of Hans Christian Andersen fairytales and other stories that beautifully echo her characters’ adventures and her own. Like Every Form of Love is that rare thing: an irresistible literary thriller that twists and turns, delivering powerful revelations, right to the very end.

©2023 Padma Viswanathan (P)2023 Random House Canada

Critic reviews

“Padma Viswanathan . . . evokes an impressive mix of memory, friendship, true crime—and a detective story where her own skills play an important role. It’s her first foray into true crime, a genre that allows her to employ the breadth of her literary skills. . . . The resulting memoir is painstakingly honest, always complex, sometimes strange.” —Toronto Star

“Viswanathan’s struggle is fascinating and humanizing. . . . A thought-provoking and personal examination of a difficult friendship and what sometimes gets sacrificed when a writer is determined to see a project through to its conclusion.” —Winnipeg Free Press

“Like Every Form of Love is a rich hybrid of biography, autobiography, fairy tale and detective work. In moments of lyric intensity, Viswanathan searches others’ minds, others’ memories and discovers how fluid and fragmentary identity is. A potent meditation on what it means to turn others into story.” —Rosemary Sullivan, author of The Betrayal of Anne Frank: A Cold Case Investigation