The bus route passed a company promising private investigator training and I felt like I’d missed my calling. Becoming a writer was second best. I was meant to be a fearless detective, like my childhood idol Nancy Drew. Growing up in bleak 1980s Parkdale, decades before gentrification swept through, I learned to slip my keys between my fingers, make eye contact, memorize faces and license plates.

I hoped my body language communicated that I was a fighter. It was the late 1980s and Paul Bernardo was disappearing teen girls my age, but I refused to stop going out alone at night. I spoke my mind
to the racist skinheads recruiting at my high school. I tried to live like Nancy, who ran toward danger rather than away. The intrepid detective never asked for permission and solved mysteries using her wits. She provided a semi-empowered but unattainably perfect prototype of girl. Since my parents were feminists who took me to protests, didn’t let me watch most television, and dressed me in the same clothes as my brother, I always felt out of step with other girls. Feminine social morays were strange and mystifying. So when I became a teen, I imitated Nancy.

At the age of 10, I’d been gifted an almost-complete set of Nancy Drew hardcovers by my uncle—a man I barely remembered—and devoured all of them. Twice. I hunted through used bookstores for copies of the missing books and bought them with allowance money.

The ones I owned were published as far back as the 1930s and 1940s, the era of Rosie the Riveter, when men were away at war and women were encouraged to get jobs. That Nancy was independent, had her own car, an obliging attorney father, and a housekeeper who handled all the cleaning and cooking. She preferred the company of her BFFs Bess and George, and only called in handsome Ned Nickerson when she needed backup and the girls were away. In the 1950s, Nancy developed lady-like decorum and hesitated more; by the 1970s, she was a shadow of her former self, a pretty upper-middle class girl who solved mysteries.