Your Body Was Made for This

Eating too much, eating not enough, having sex, not having sex, aging parents, grief, drugs, childhood trauma, and the last call of ovaries— a woman’ s body at mid-life can get messy.

Debbie Bateman’ s stories take a clear-eyed look at the largely unexplored private world of a pivotal stage in virtually every woman’ s life. These stories are linked not only by the characters, but also by the visceral themes of food, sex, exercise, beauty, and aging. The secret clenching of a fist, the unwinding of a silk scarf, the proud refusal to have breast reconstruction, the women in these stories want full authority over their bodies and their lives.

Debbie Bateman is a graduate of The Writer’ s Studio at Simon Fraser University. Her short stories "Sundowning" and "The Art of the Scarf" appeared in  You Look Good for Your Age  (2021); "The Point of Failure" appeared in  Qwerty  (winter 2019); and "Secret Workings" was published in  Phoebe  (winter 2020). Now a post-menopausal woman,  Debbie  is too young to be told what she cannot do, and  she's  old enough to know  that most of us  are  a beautiful mess. A proud mother of three sons,  she  lives in Quw'utsun (Cowichan) on Vancouver Island with her husband and soulmate.