Like Every Form of Love, Padma Viswanathan
Like Every Form of Love, Padma Viswanathan
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Like Every Form of Love
A Memoir of Friendship and True Crime

Author: Padma Viswanathan

Narrator: Padma Viswanathan

Unabridged: 9 hr 54 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 08/22/2023

Synopsis

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 page-turner that twists and turns, delivering powerful revelations, right to the very end.

About The Author

PADMA VISWANATHAN’s fiction has been published in eight countries and shortlisted for the PEN USA Prize and the Scotiabank Giller Prize. Her stories, essays and short translations have appeared in Granta, The Boston Review, BRICK, and elsewhere. Her translation of the novel São Bernardo, by the Brazilian novelist Graciliano Ramos, was published in 2020 by New York Review Books. Originally from Edmonton, Alberta, she now divides her time between Montreal, Quebec, and Fayetteville, Arkansas, where she is Professor of Fiction at the University of Arkansas. She has served as fiction faculty at the Banff Centre, the Vermont Studio Center, Kundiman Asian-American Writers Retreat, Bread Loaf Writers’ Conferences and the Low-Residency MFA of Fairleigh-Dickinson University. She is married to the poet and translator Geoffrey Brock.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Wendy on August 29, 2023

Author Padma Viswanathan began a friendship with a kind-hearted, working-class queer man named Phillip while staying on a houseboat off Vancouver Island. Their lives were so completely different yet the story Phillip told her about his childhood kept them connected for more than twenty years. His lif......more

Goodreads review by Justin on August 21, 2023

"There are things we can’t remember but whose truth we take for granted." Like Every Form of Love by Padma Viswanathan is an atypical, Canadian true crime memoir that could use a little less subjectivity. Padma strikes up an unlikely friendship w/ Phillip when she is visiting Vancouver Island. As the......more

Goodreads review by Lisa on October 01, 2023

I don't read much non-fiction but was interested in Like Every Form of Love because I had read and loved the author's debut novel, The Toss of a Lemon, fifteen years ago. In 1997, author Padma Viswanathan met a queer, working class man named Phillip while staying on a decommissioned tugboat on Vancou......more

Goodreads review by Shannon on September 04, 2023

This was an interesting read, but sometimes hard to keep track of everyone. Padma and Philip become friends even though from remarkably different backgrounds. Philip was raised by an abusive man, Harvey whose wife left him. He advertised for a housekeeper with benefits, and in comes Del. Quite the l......more

Goodreads review by Carolyn on August 22, 2023

Book 128 of 2023- Like Every Form of Love” by Padma Viswanathan, narrated by the author. While on Vancouver Island the author strikes up a friendship with Phillip. They were very different but their friendship endured. This is Phillip’s story as told to Padma - covering race, friend, gender and sexu......more

Quotes

“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
 
“Everyone knows that the teller tells the tale, but master tellers also know how the tale tells them, exacting a toll.  Padma Viswanathan is a born teller, a master reporter, a master senser, and indeed this may be her masterpiece. The tale she tells is a doozie, but so has been its toll, and her reader will experience the rare, sometimes heartrending privilege of partaking in both.” —Lawrence Weschler, Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Love and Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees

“As Padma Viswanathan’s unlikely friendship with a stranger develops over twenty years, the two uncover his perilous childhood, his loving and dangerous stepmother, an unsolved murder and a thousand shards from his mysterious past. Between them, they connect the dots but lose each other in the long painful process of reassembling his history. This is the searching story of how digging for the truth tests the boundaries of a passionate friendship.”  —Linda Spalding, author of Who Named the Knife and The Purchase

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