Scotiabank Giller Prize winner Sean Michaels’s moving, innovative and deeply felt novel about an aging poet who agrees to collaborate with a Big Tech company’s poetry AI, named Charlotte Marian Ffarmer is a world-renowned poet and a legend in the making—but only now, at 75 years old, is she beginning to believe in the security of her successes. Unfortunately, a poet’s accomplishments don’t necessarily translate to capital, and as her adult son struggles to buy his first home, her confidence in her choices begins to fray. Marian’s pristine life of mind—for which she’s sacrificed nearly all personal relationships, from romance to friendship to motherhood—has come at a cost. Then comes a cryptic invitation from the Tech Company. Come to California, the invitation beckons, and write with a machine. The Company’s lucrative offer—for Marian to co-author a poem in a ‘historic partnership’ with their cutting-edge poetry bot, named Charlotte—chafes at everything she believes about artmaking as an individual pursuit . . . yet, it’s a second chance she can’t resist. And so to California she goes, a sell-out and a skeptic, for an encounter that will unsettle her life, her work and even her understanding of kinship. Both a love letter to and interrogation of the nature of language, art, labor, capital, family, and community, Do You Remember Being Born? is Scotiabank Giller Prize winner Sean Michaels’s empathetic response to some of the most disquieting questions of our time—a defiant and joyful recognition that if we’re to survive meaningfully at all, creative legacy is to be reimagined and belonging to one’s art must mean, above all else, belonging to the world.

The core of Do You Remember Being Born? is the challenge given to the renowned poet Marian Ffarmer to write a poem with a cutting-edge poetry artificial intelligence created by a tech conglomerate and the struggle she goes through as she attempts to accomplish this task. We felt like this plot gave Michaels a lot of great material to work with and it opened up all sorts of interesting questions about poetry and AI. We especially liked the choice of poetry as the form. As Marian herself points out, it's hard in the moment to read AI-generated poetry and know if it's good or crap, and with enough time working with AI, all poetry becomes hard to evaluate. Marian's journey as she converses and composes with the AI leads her through a number of interesting ponderings about her own work, and that leads her into an analysis of her own life and choices. Through flashbacks, we learn that Marian has lived a very closed and private life where she isolated herself from almost everyone, including her ex-lover and son. Over the course of the novel, Marian meets another poet and decides to collaborate, thus creating an arc where Marian's experience with the AI (which has been primarily trained on her own work) causes her to realize she needs other people to make great art and feel whole. All of that was clever and we thought Michaels executed his ideas well. Where a lot of felt the book was less successful was in exploring the personal relationships between the characters. We recognized Marian's antisociality and theorized that was a reason that her family was never deeply described, but Marian lived alone with her mother for years and we only get the barest sketch of her. Many of us felt that was a missed opportunity. Other characters suffered from the same impoverishment and lack of consistency. Morel, the poet Marian befriends, is a great character and the poetry event where they meet is one of the best scenes of the novel, but that's basically the only other interesting character. There's a long subplot with Marian's driver and the CEO of the tech company, but it's honestly just dumb and it feels tacked on to the story just to add some class consciousness. Different members of NUBClub put different weight on these issues -- some of us weren't bothered by it and really liked the novel, but others felt that Marian's arc would have been much stronger if we just more to empathize with in her relationships and choices. That said, no one thought the novel was bad. It's a well written book that's extremely prescient for today and a number of us thought Michaels's scenario captured the current moment of AI succinctly. If you're interested in questions of automation and art, it's an interesting meditation on them -- just don't look for a rich character study in it.