Scotiabank Giller Prize winner Sean Michaels's moving, innovative novel about an aging poet laureate who "sells out" by agreeing to collaborate with a Big Tech company's poetry AI.

Marian Farmer is a world-renowned poet and a legend in the making; only now that she’s getting on in years, in the tender half of her life, can she finally believe in the security of her hard-earned successes. But for a poet, these successes don’t necessarily translate to capital, and as her adult son struggles to purchase his first home, she’s left to ponder the impact of her choices. Marian’s pristine life of mind—for which she’s sacrificed nearly all personal relationships, from romance to friendship to motherhood—has come at no insignificant 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 highly intelligent 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. But as unexpectedly welcome to Marian as suddenly being a financially reliable parent is her generative, growing fascination with the strange, inquisitive, and artificially intelligent Charlotte.

Both a love letter to and interrogation of the nature of language, art, labor, money, family, and community, Do You Remember Being Born? is Scotiabank Giller Prize winner Sean Michaels’s empathetic response to some of the most unsettling questions of our time. As AI increasingly encroaches on our work, creative, and personal lives, this novel is a defiant and joyful recognition that if we’re to survive meaningfully at all, finitude is to be embraced, creative legacy to be reimagined, and belonging to one’s art must mean, above all else, belonging to the world.

Story Locale:San Francisco, CA
Contributor Bio(s)
 
Sean Michaels is a novelist, short story writer and critic. He is the founder of pioneering music blog Said the Gramophone. His debut novel, Us Conductors, received the Scotiabank Giller Prize. His second novel, The Wagers, appeared in 2019. His non-fiction has also appeared in the Guardian, McSweeney’s, Pitchfork and the New Yorker.