Book review: Moxie by Jennifer Mathieu

There is a kind of story we like to tell about girlhood and resistance (it's white middle class teenage girl resistance, but resistance nonetheless), and Moxie sits squarely inside it: small town, bad boys, worse adults, one girl who finally has enough and starts to fight back. Reading it, though, what surfaced for me was not a catalogue of harms I had to survive, but the strange parallel universe I survived (and maybe thrived in) in as a young girl punk in Calgary, Alberta, in a school that (almost accidentally...but I see now probably on purpose judging from where many of my fellow 1999 grads are now) made a different ending possible.

Punk girl in a not-so-moxie school

My high school did not have a dress code, and I was never sexually harassed in the hallways. That does not mean it was a feminist utopia; it means the constraints were quieter, tucked into tracking, expectations, and the usual sorting of who mattered and who did not. What Moxie made me remember was how improbable it felt, even then, to be a teenage girl with spiked rainbow hair, fuzzy slippers, sometimes combat boots, many many piercings, and short back skirts and fishnet stockings, who was not constantly being told to shrink, to cover up, to smooth the edges. Or maybe I was too assertive to notice? I'm not sure anymore. 

A zine, a photocopier, a possibility

When Vivian in Moxie sneaks into her bathroom to make that first zine, I could smell the warm toner and hear the slap of the photocopier lid from my own weekend trips to my dad's downtown office building to sneak making copies (and taking the Orange crush from the break room). I also wrote a zine back then, putting together ranty paragraphs and cut-up images, not because a football team was terrorizing the girls in my class, but because (I suppose) a riot grrrl and punk movement taught me that if the stories on offer did not fit, you could grab a sharpie, cut up your Sassy magazine, and make new ones. For Vivian, the zine is an emergency flare in hostile territory; for me, it was a way of naming a power I had already, tentatively, been granted.

The English teacher who held the door

The person who made that power feel legitimate was not a boy with a guitar or a cool older cousin; it was my grade 10 English teacher, Mrs. Payne. She quite obviously follow the curriculum, but also gave so much positive feedback to teenage me, existential crisis me. She took me seriously, asked questions that assumed I had ideas worth grappling with, and treated my weirdness like opportunity. In a different school, she might have been the lone adult ally in a Moxie-style uprising; in mine, she quietly expanded the space of what counted as “good student,” until there was room for a mouthy punk girl with a million safety pins in her backpack straps and opinions about everything.

Reading Moxie from the lucky side

This is why Moxie landed in my body the way it did: as a reminder that the fact I did not have to fight my school for the right to exist as I was is itself a kind of historical and geographic miracle of 1990s St. Mary's High School. What Jennifer Mathieu lays out in this books is that everyday sexism in schools is not a rite of passage but a policy choice, and it made me look back with sharper eyes at all the invisible decisions that kept my teenage self relatively empowering and not soul crushing: the absence of a dress code, the teachers who did not sexualize us, the adults who let girls be loud without punishing them, the people who did sports and were also in band and drama. Reading from that position is uncomfortable, because it exposes the gap between my own experience and that of so many girls for whom high school was exactly as dangerous and diminishing as Mathieu describes.

What we owe the next girls

The heartbreaking part of my reality is that I stopped being in high school in 1999 and Moxie takes place in 2017. If Moxie is, at its heart, a story about girls discovering that they do not have to suffer alone, then part of the work for those of us who were comparatively protected is to ask what we are going to do with that early safety. My zine is long gone (although also strangely old copies of it sit on my desk that I am typing this blog on), but the practice it represented, noticing, naming, refusing to let someone else narrate your life, is still the deepest through-line from that Calgary punk girl to the nurse, writer, and educator I am now. The invitation Moxie offers is not just to cheer for Vivian, but to look back at the teachers who quietly held the door open, the policies that did or did not constrain us, and then to step, deliberately, into the role of adult conspirator for the next generation of girls who are still trying to find a photocopier and a little courage.

Love,

Michelle D. 

What Will 2026 Bring? Cautious Optimism after a Strange 2025

This Christmas, instead of staging a Greatest Hits of Childhood Dinners in our kitchen, the six of us drove to Courtenay and aimed the holiday straight at the mountain. No turkey. No stuffing. No frantic oven checks. Just lift tickets, layers, and the kind of fatigue that comes from cold air and wipeouts instead of emotional labour. For a family used to the stress of recreating someone else’s nostalgic Christmas, it felt like a jailbreak.

Opting out of Christmas as usual

In our house, I’m not the one cooking; my partner is. For him, Christmas dinner has always been a high-stress process, a full-contact re-enactment of his childhood Christmases with the same dishes, the same flavours, and the same quiet, crushing need to get it “right.” The menu is not just food; it is memory, obligation, grief, and loyalty all layered into one roasting pan.

Every Christmas we can all feel the tension in the air: will the food turn out like it did last year, will the kids like the presents this year (they never do), will the mess be bigger than last year (it always it). It is glass half full in intention and glass almost empty in practice. Choosing snowboarding and Chinese food this year was more than a whimsical experiment (although it was that too) it was a deliberate step off a script that never truly belonged in this non-traditional family of six.

From tree-toppling chaos to one small meltdown

Christmas morning on the mountain felt radically different from Christmas around a high-pressure table. The kids were wrapped in snow gear instead of nice outfits, their excitement aimed at chairlifts instead of perfectly timed courses, and the memories from the day are mostly of falls, laughter, and moments of accomplishment at the bottom of each run (they miraculously did 9). Of course, I was not there for any of it because I do not snowboard and Mount Washington does not have a cozy lodge for the non-hill going guests to sit in while they live vicariously through others. While the kids and my partner carved up the mountain, I carved through a stack of books from the safety of a couch, wrapped in blankets instead of snow pants.

 Christmas dinner was Chinese food at the one Chinese restaurant open in Courtney on Christmas day. No synchronizing sides, no sink full of roasting pans, no gravy. Just a crowded table, chopsticks, noodles, and the relief of knowing the success of the day did not hinge on the internal temperature of a bird. I was surprised that we weren't the only ones in there. At least 4 other families in Courtney also opted the Chinese-food route. 

Phase 2: Parksville

After the Courtenay whirlwind, we shifted to an oceanside townhouse in Parksville and the whole holiday slipped into a different gear. The kids had space to sprawl in a two bedroom townhouse with 3 TVs. We had the ocean as a backdrop instead of an overflowing sink; and time softened, organized more by tide and daylight than by timers and cleaning. 

Was it expensive? Maybe. Was it worth it? Yes. Does it make me want to go on vacation forever? Also yes. There is a dangerous sort of clarity in noticing how much kinder everyone is (to themselves and to each other) when no one is quietly drowning in the pressure to make one single day carry the weight of an entire childhood.

The post-Christmas crash and what it reveals

Back in the Lower Mainland, the emotional whiplash is sharp. Tomorrow means alarms, school drop-offs, a full inbox, and the waiting demands of work and grad school that were gloriously on mute while Vancouver Island worked its magic. The post-Christmas blues hit differently when the break actually did what breaks are supposed to do: restore, soften, reconnect.

There is real grief in leaving that version of life behind, the one where no one is reliving old stress in the name of tradition, where the stakes are lower, and where “special” comes from experiences we chose rather than rituals we inherited. There is also a new, steady conviction that this version of Christmas, the one we consciously designed, is a better fit than the one built around someone else’s childhood script.

Hello 2026

Wanting to stay on vacation forever is not just escapism; it is information. It points directly at what works: experiences over performance, dumplings over martyrdom, oceans and mountains over spotless kitchens, and traditions crafted for the family that actually lives in this house right now.

So what will be different in Christmas 2026?

• Saying no to legacy holiday scripts that leave everyone exhausted, even when they come wrapped in nostalgia.
• Planning more small, manageable getaways that borrow from the Courtenay–Parksville rhythm instead of saving everything for one high-pressure week.
• Letting Chinese food be a legitimate tradition on big days, not a fallback option.
• Protecting my partner from having to recreate his childhood every December to capture some lost tradition. 
• Accepting that my role on the mountain may now be book-reading, snack-wrangling, and knee-preservation, and that this is still full participation in our family story.

The post-Christmas blues will probably still show up as work and school ramp back up, because re-entry is always a bit brutal. But this year, they sit beside something sturdier: the knowledge that we tried Christmas a different way, and it actually worked for us. Whatever 2026 brings, there is now proof that joy does not depend on resurrecting ghosts in the kitchen or on my knees surviving another run; it lives in the choices we make about how to spend our time, our money, and our energy as the family we are right now.

Love,

Michelle D.