Barbara Gowdy was born in Windsor, Ontario, Canada in 1950. In 1954 she and her family moved to Don Mills, a suburb of Toronto, Ontario, where she grew up, graduated from high school, and where, as she once stated in an interview, she led a safe, predictable life. Her childhood and adolescence gave her little fodder for the strange and unconventional lives that would later command her fictional worlds. Like many Canadian families, the Gowdy household appears to have been conventional or unextraordinary: white, middle-class, and settled in the suburban domesticity of the 1950s and 60s. Her father went to work, her mother stayed at home to raise the children (three girls, including Barbara, and one boy). The family never had a pet, but Gowdy became and remained, as she has often admitted,…
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Citation: Medoro, Dana. "Barbara Gowdy". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 24 July 2002 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=1824, accessed 25 November 2024.]
