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Poison? Paranoia?: this 2008 novel of love and fear is more relevant than ever
A girl faints in the Toronto subway. Her friends are taken to the hospital with unexplained rashes; they complain about a funny smell in the subway. Swarms of police arrive, and then the hazmat team. Panic ripples through the city, and words like poisoning and terrorism become airborne. Soon, people are collapsing all over the city in subways and streetcars and malls.
Alex was witness to this first episode. He’s a photographer: of injuries and deaths, for his job at the hospital, and of life, in his evening explorations of the city. Alex’s sight is failing, and as he rushes to capture his vision of Toronto on film, he encounters an old girlfriend – the one who shattered his heart in the eighties, while she was fighting for abortion rights and social justice and he was battling his body’s chemical demons. But now Susie-Paul is in the midst of her own crisis: her schizophrenic brother is missing, and the streets of Toronto are more hostile than ever.
Maggie Helwig, author of the critically lauded Encampment, has fashioned a novel not of bold actions but of small gestures, showing how easy and gentle is the slide into paranoia, and how enormous and terrifying is the slide into love.
Praise for Girls Fall Down:
‘[Girls Fall Down] stands as an unflinching examination of contemporary urban malaise and unease.’ – Quill and Quire
‘In prose of astonishing rhythm and precision, hazmat squads comb the streets of the city, waving delicate instruments in a fruitless hunt for the gas, while strangers exchange whispers about terrorists, and cops turn their clubs on a man in a turban. Toronto, with its multiculturalism, proves a useful setting for the crisis, and one Helwig embraces throughout. Among the novel’s chief virtues is its intimate geography: for all the uncertainty at the heart of this story, it remains anchored by its sheer specificity, by “the peaked and gabled Victorian houses” that run off “the downward slant of College,” by the “cheap bright flare of Yonge Street.” Yet the real success of Girls Fall Down lies in its thematic scope, which is as broad as its geography is narrow. Since 9/11, countless novels have examined the complicated role fear plays in our lives. What makes Helwig’s better than most is the depth and nuance of her dark vision – characters so accustomed to anxiety that the absence of worry is itself “extremely disturbing”; people inclined to weep outside a subway station because “there would be neither a single evildoer to cast out of the community nor a moment of realization to draw us together.” This is serious stuff, but it never reads like a polemic; instead, Helwig’s ability to manage tension lends her novel the feel of a controlled thriller. And the love story’s not bad either.’ – Danielle Groen, The Walrus
‘Stellar ... Girls Fall Down is a tale of paranoia and mob mentality rendered in faultless and precise prose.’ – Montréal Gazette
‘All hail Helwig. Her powerful and poetic novel, Girls Fall Down, riffs on themes of terrorism and disease in the city, and the result is soulful, disturbing and exhilarating at the same time.’ – NOW (naming her Best Toronto Author of 2008)
‘With pitch-perfect prose, Helwig shows huge compassion and an ability to make Toronto come alive.’ – NOW
‘[Helwig] has built a formidable thing in these pages, tracing the moments that connect 2.5 million people ... Girls Fall Down is a thoughtful articulation of life in contemporary Toronto.’ – Globe and Mail
‘Prose of astonishing rhythm and precision ... The real success of Girls Fall Down lies in its thematic scope ... This is serious stuff, but it never reads like a polemic; instead, Helwig's ability to manage tension lends her novel the feel of a controlled thriller.’ – The Walrus
Praise for the author:
‘The depth of her understanding ... fills this book with moving scenes and striking perceptions.’ – The Globe and Mail on Between Mountains
‘Striking, elegant.’ – Publishers Weekly on Encampment, ★ starred review
Maggie Helwig (she/they) is a white settler in Tkaronto/Toronto, and is the author of fifteen books and chapbooks, including Encampment: Resistance, Grace, and an Unhoused Community, which was awarded the 2025 Toronto Book Award, Instructions for the End of the World: Homilies of Comfort and Resistance, and Girls Fall Down, which was shortlisted for the Toronto Book Award and chosen as the One Book Toronto in 2012. Helwig is a long-time social justice activist, and also an Anglican priest, and has been the rector of the Church of St. Stephen-in-the-Fields since 2013.