"I remember being on a frigid Canadian ski trip with my family and going to dinner at a rollicking fondue restaurant that had Michael Ritchie’s great-looking 1969 Robert Redford vehicle, Downhill Racer, showing silently on an endless loop. We must have eaten there a couple of times because I remember this flick much more than the miserable week spent skiing icy Mont-Tremblant."

""Ernest Thompson Seton was a ranger on the Canadian Prairie and a very competent artist. He drew lots of illustrations of these animals that he knew and there were also – along the outer margins of the text – there were footprints, so you could imagine yourself tracking these things. And the animals were personified to the extent that I could give you their names now.""

"No one today can fathom not being able to just click on their phones for a bit of debauchery. Way back when, there was nothing! National Geographic had the odd nude shot. As a red-blooded Canadian teenager I remember stumbling upon this book on the cottage book shelf. Everything about it was steamy. I loved it. Too much info, I know I know."

"It starred Reb Brown. They tried to make him into an action hero and failed. This Canadian crew came down and shot on the set of Battlestar Galactica while they were dark. And one of these crew members in the movie finds out about something she shouldn’t and she gets killed and the next day she’s at her desk in the background and it’s never mentioned. She’s just there, it’s wonderful."

"Well, of course you probably read it when you were a girl. Read it again. In Canada, it’s almost an object of worship since the author is Canadian, but the truth is it’s an absolutely wonderful book that will start you crying about halfway through, and you won’t stop. I particularly love rereading children’s books when I’m sick because I want guaranteed rapture; I want the book equivalent of mashed potatoes"

"Brian DePalma’s breakthrough thriller pays homage to several Hitchcock classics—Rear Window and Psycho, mostly—in a genuinely innovative manner, with jittery, counter-culture-ish New York wiseass humor rather than Hitch’s British wryness, an interesting set of mirror image antagonists in peculiar twins played by Margot Kidder (with a seductively odd French-Canadian accent), and nosy reporter Jennifer Salt. It has graphic shocks but also stretches of hallucinatory strangeness."