It seems apt that one of the last long-form features that Anne Kingston wrote was a piece calling for an empathy revolution. Against a backdrop of migrant detentions and a new austerity, the piece, published last summer, traced a desire that is bubbling up in disparate institutions from government to the health care industry, to forge a kinder path: “How do we foster compassion within systems designed to reward those who aren’t compassionate?” it asked.
There are other writers who wrote passionately about women–the formidable Michele Landsberg comes to mind–but Anne did it over decades that spanned the transformation into the digital age, into viral, borderless media, into a new multiplatform, instantaneous, un-sleeping universe. She spoke to, and sometimes for, generations of women. She wrote with subtlety, humour, and a freshness of thought about marriage and motherhood ; she tackled feminist economics and MeToo.
She cared intensely about issues of social justice, but her pieces were nuanced and seldom merely confirmed what you already knew. She wrote wonderfully about food, and fashion, and design. There were “serious” reporters we both worked with at various publications who would find such subjects frivolous. No subject was frivolous for Anne.
She had an exceptionally high standard, for herself and for everyone else. And an equivalently low threshold for anyone who in any moment didn’t meet it. Want to know what courage in a journalist looks like? It’s going to a wine bar with Anne Kingston and ordering a chocolate martini. I’ve seen accomplished journalists cower perceptibly in her presence. She was an inveterate professional who gave it her all every minute, and thought you should too.
No one did. Anne was unstoppable. In a single week, she might produce a brilliant, long-form investigative feature on Health Canada policy over drug side effects—the kind that’s held up in the House of Commons the next day—and also sneak in a delightful culture piece on the biggest cookbook ever published, and a jewel of a fiction review, and a quick news hit about a new MS therapy—an abiding interest ever since a close relative was diagnosed with the condition years ago.
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