Pataphysics is the science of the laws governing the particular. I didn’t have to look that up; I have it by heart, that and other definitions and illustrations. It is one of my favourite subjects. I actually wanted to write a book about it, but no one got it.

When Carol Shields and Marjorie Anderson decided to edit a book by a selection of writers they invited to tell stories that they had been unable to sell to an editor, for whatever reason, I knew immediately what I wanted to write: my theories about pataphysics. They had to accept my piece because they had invited me to write it, but they cut about eight pages of it giving the space to abortion and coming out stories, still pretty out there for an anthology like that, but predictable and hardly news.

News enough, though, and very successful. The book, Dropped Threads (pub details to come) was a surprising best-seller and in fact topped the list every week for some 30 or so weeks but one, the week that Mordecai Richler’s newest book was published. Instead of the modest honorarium each writer had agreed to accept, according to a newly drawn-up contract a percentage of the royalties was paid to each one, including the cover illustrator and I’m sure a larger mount to the two editors. Anyway, for three audit periods (every six months) I received about $3000 for my piece, “The Imaginary Woman”. Imagine what I would have received had the entire book been mine! (3000 X 35 = 105,000 dollars!—mind-boggllng!) That’s the closest I ever came to best-seller income.

I keep coming across articles about pataphysics every once in a while in my favourite literary journal, The Times Literary Supplement (TLS), all of them written by men. And they don’t get it. It is deeply, deeply funny with incredible and surprising facts about women, and they don’t get it.

I looked up pataphysics online and found a review of my Dropped Threads piece, copied from Good Reads. The reviewer didn’t get it either, but spent the greater part of the review writing about it. Maybe I will have to write a book about it. But who would read it?