ORPHEA AND EURYDICUS

Before Veronica Rockford became an editor, critic, and formidable reader of other people’s stories, she was a bookish girl trying to understand why people so rarely behaved as neatly as characters did on the page. From childhood in British Columbia through university, Oxford, and the beginnings of adult life, she learns that knowing something about another person does not make it yours, understanding someone does not give you authority over them, and the stories we tell about others can reveal as much about the teller as the person described.

Across friendships, scholarship, love affairs, artistic circles, and the literary world of San Francisco, Veronica builds both a life and a philosophy of reading. She encounters writers and artists whose work unsettles what she thinks she knows, relationships in which incompatible truths can remain true at once, and moments when explanation clarifies experience only by making it smaller. As her judgment sharpens, the line between interpretation and possession becomes increasingly difficult to hold.
 

Orphea and Eurydicus is about a woman becoming the person capable of making those distinctions—and discovering that becoming never really ends. Moving across decades, it explores identity, friendship, desire, grief, authorship, and the ethics of speaking for others. At its centre is a deceptively simple question: when another person’s life, work, or meaning comes into our hands, what are we entitled to do with it—and what must we leave for them, or for the reader, to decide?

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FORTHCOMING 10 NOVEMBER 2026