You are likely sick of me mentioning my darn book Window Shopping for God, but it took me so darn long to write I thought I’d keep talking about it.

  1. I am coming to Novel Idea in Kingston on July 24th, 2024. 7 pm to 9 pm. A couple of readings from my book, a relaxed chat with my friend Len about writing and laughs we have had along the way. You can buy books and get them signed. As well there is cheese. You heard me. Cheese. Crackers. From two hambones. ( RSVP here so we can get a sense of how many books.)
  2. Got some new reviews from The Winnipeg Free Press and the United Church of Canada’s magazine, Broadview. See Excerpts below.
  3. I am going to be going to the Sunshine Coast Literary Festival, ( August) Toronto Word on the Street  ( Sept)and Edmonton Lit Fest. (October). Plus my book is on Amazon, Indigo online and in the stores.
  4. Am doing a new comedy tour called Smoke Show starting in October. Stay tuned for the dates and cities.

Winnipeg Free Press Review of Window Shopping for God:

A higher calling
Comedian’s memoir offers candid, funny reflections on family, faith and her career

Canadian comedian, playwright and educator Deborah Kimmett’s amusing new memoir expands her earlier successful writing and performing, living up to its subtitle.

Kimmett appears on shows such as CBC’s The Debaters. Her books include Reality is Overrated and That Which Doesn’t Kill You Makes You Funnier, and the novel Outrunning Crazy. She is also a podcaster.

Deborah Kimmett’s memoir revolves around her brother’s terminal cancer diagnosis. She begins with and often circles back to scenarios from family and her past, as well as religious instances. Kimmett “had bowed down to them all. Jesus, Buddha, Kali, Krishna. The real gods and the false. Booze, men, self-help and Facebook,” she writes.

Her Catholic mother and Protestant father contributed to her confusion, but she recounts episodes of their reactions to her developing a personality with a wry perspective and real affection.

A near-fatal brain injury from a bicycle accident accentuated her high school feelings of alienation. Wearing a wig while her wounds healed brought her closer to her wig-wearing grandmother. She also gained experience which most teenagers don’t: “I knew life and death walked side by side.”

Kimmett doesn’t seem to hold grudges. One-night stands, drunken drummers and her fraught relationship with her family all provide thoughtful, positive reflections.

Experiences with a professed witch named Ruth and “The Crones of Casa Loma” find Kimmett listening to the coven’s stories, “the first time in my life I ever considered that there was a feminine side of the divine… These women taught me that my sense of humour was a gift from the goddesses that could be used to heal.”

She went on to become part of the Second City improv troupe and other comedic enterprises. After giving up alcohol, she still searched for more meaning; in one passage detailing this search, she recalls a hilarious misunderstanding at a Buddhist session with her sponsor, Sue.

She also regularly checks in with Kevin, who had been given a year to live. He wonders if her recorded listing of gratitude should instead be called “appreciation.” That worked for her.

“Appreciating what each day was bringing forth, good and bad, was hard work. But it forced me to stay present in a way I had never been before,” she writes.

Marriage and an unexpected child also helped Kimmett “stay present,” and soon after their son was born she became pregnant again; their daughter was born very premature (Kimmett’s play Miracle Mother, about having a premature baby, was shortlisted for the Governor-General’s Literary Award for drama in 1984).

Focusing on that difficulty and people’s attempts at sympathy led her to decide “I would not be the object of anyone’s pity.”

Kimmett chronicles many steps along her road to finding meaning. An encounter with a terminal patient sitting in a graveyard “practicing” for his burial, and a “confessional” episode with some of her parents’ acquaintances, continue to push her toward more balanced, healthy ways of looking at life.

The section The Goldman Sessions recounts breakthroughs from two years of successful therapy and leads into the dramatic, touching phone calls with Kevin during the last two years of his life.

Kimmett would go on to raise money for Hospice, and address her comedy toward appreciation of regular people. “Without kindness from my fellow travellers,” she notes, “the wisest words would have fallen on hollow ground… For me, God needed skin.”

Window Shopping for God is a humorous set of musings from a “fellow traveller” whose wisdom has something for everyone to appreciate.

Written by
Bill Rambo is a retired teacher who lives in Landmark. 

A REVIEW of Window Shopping for God-FROM THE UNITED CHURCH’S MAGAZINE Broadview Magazine.
Deborah Kimmett’s new memoir navigates her rocky spiritual journey with humour.
In “Window Shopping for God,” the Second City comedian shares her decades-long search for meaning
With her trademark sass, stand-up comic Deborah Kimmett sets up her book’s central tension in the first chapter, “Losing my Religion.” A young Kimmett is drunk and in bed, refusing to get up for mass, when her mother opens her bedroom door to snap, “You can’t stop being Catholic. You were born Catholic. You will die Catholic.”
“There it was: the curse,” Kimmett writes in Window Shopping for God: A Comedian’s Search for Meaning. “The curse I would try to outrun for the next 30 years, because you don’t quit that religion. Catholicism is like the Hotel California — you can check out, but you can never leave.”
Like Forrest Gump, Kimmett travels through decades in her book, encountering virtually every major phenomenon and health crisis of the late 20th century: the end of Christendom, sexual liberation, misogyny as women enter the non-traditional workforce, gig work, mental illness, divorce, culture and alcoholism. Through it all, she fitfully grasps at Toronto’s spiritual trends from the 1960s onward, from self-help books to transcendental meditation, gratitude journalling and therapy. So much therapy.
To the reader, Kimmett’s spiritual journey seems less like a light afternoon of window shopping and more like piloting a pirate ship through stormy seas, with waves of social issues crashing over her boat and krackens of trendy spirituality slithering their tentacles around her hull. Kimmett is armed with a razor-sharp cutlass of wit but little else. Like the rest of us, she’s just trying to financially and emotionally survive and still find meaning in life. Through her keen observation skills and humour, she lays out what a bizarre era this truly is — and how difficult it is to find a spiritual practice that can contain it all.
From her years with the comedy troupe Second City and CBC Radio’s The Debaters, she is quick and quippy. Many paragraphs end with a joke. But there’s enough depth to balance the hee-haws. Between the laughs, Kimmett reveals how closely she listens to and watches other people — her family, therapists and strangers — attuned to any wisdom they might share. When a street preacher had the word “repent” tattooed on the back of his head, she took that message to heart and tried to make amends for a childhood wrong.
I was troubled as the book neared the end with Kimmett still flitting around and no resolution in sight. Although she does land on valuing self-acceptance and human connection, they don’t fully replace the collective, familial Catholicism she left behind.
Kimmett’s most compelling spiritual descriptions are about flow: what it feels like to step onto the stage as a comic. “When it worked you were a goddess,” she writes. “Making people laugh is an elixir like no other.” Now that’s an ecstatic moment I envy.
Window Shopping for God is available at @Novel Idea Book Store all major bookstores both in person and online.
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