There Is No Blue by Martha Baillie

Martha Baillie’s richly layered response to her mother’s passing, her father's life, and her sister’s suicide is an exploration of how the body, the rooms we inhabit, and our languages offer the psyche a home, if only for a time.

Three essays, three deaths. The first is the death of the author’s mother, a protracted disappearance, leaving space for thoughtfulness and ritual: the washing of her body, the making of a death mask. The second considers Baillie's father, his remoteness, his charm, a lacuna at the center of the family even before his death, earlier than her mother's. And then, third, shockingly, the author’s sister, a visual artist and writer living with a diagnosis of schizophrenia, who writes three reasons to die on her bedroom wall and then takes her life, just before the book the sisters co-authored is due to come out.

In this close observation of a family, few absolutes hold, as experiences of reality diverge. A memoir of cascading grief and survival from the author of The Incident Report.

Martha Baillie lives and works in Toronto. Her novel The Incident Report was longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize and is being made into a feature film to be released in 2023. The Search for Heinrich Schlogel was an Oprah editors' pick. Sister Language, co-written with her late sister, Christina Baillie, was a 2020 Trillium Award finalist. Martha's non-fiction can be found in Brick: A Literary Journal . Her poetry has appeared in the Iowa Review . Her multimedia project based on The Search for Heinrich Schlogel is archived at www.schlogel.ca.