When I think of Victoria, I picture a place where senior citizens take afternoon strolls through Beacon Hill Park and soccer moms pick apart the malls while their kids are at school. But through M.A.C. Farrant’s essays in The Secret Lives of Litterbugs (Key Porter), people do a lot more than that: going out on a condom run (two hundred, to be exact) for your son who’s just about to move out, throwing wild parties in waterfront homes in S̶i̶d̶n̶e̶y Skidney, dating older boys from Victoria even though you’re from the boonies (Cordova Bay).

These stories from her youth are like a sitcom set in Victoria that makes me feel like I live there too, and after reading them, I felt connected to her as if she was an old friend who has told me dozens of amusing stories through the years.

I went to the library to get her previous books and ordered the first M.A.C. Farrant title available—Girls Around the House. Some of the essays in Litterbugs were published there first, so once more it was like being with an old friend and hearing some of the familiar stories over and over again.