Altar Ego is a monograph, and is essentially, Anne’s Creative Writing Master’s Thesis. Her thesis is organized in two parts. The first is an essay that lays out the critical theory and thought behind her creative writing project. The second is that creative writing project: a novel.
Altar Ego is a novel concerned with gender and property. In it, Calgary and its surrounding landscapes, east and west, provide the setting for this story of a journey made on the Bow River by a much-married daughter and her monogamous mother. Marlo Gilman is a content, self-employed woman in her late thirties and her mother, Bertha, is a volatile, recently widowed sixty-four year old.
Marriage frames this narrative, creating a sub-plot that wraps Marlo and Bertha in a cycle of connections that converge with their experiences of birth and death.
Although these women seem to stand in opposition to each other, their attitudes defined by generational beliefs in family and religion, the most vital form of connection between them, after love, is their shared and irrevocable sense of self-agency.