Big Reader is a collection of essays about memory, identity, loss, and reading from one of Canada's finest essayists. Through every life experience -- from the dissolution of her marriage to the forging of a tentative relationship with her new partner's daughter, to discovering Toronto as an undergrad to, years later, watching her mother slowly go blind -- Olding crafts exquisite, searingly honest essays about what it means to be a person, to be a woman, and to be a reader.