Ernest Hekkanen’s large body of work – he is the author of more than a dozen books including novels, poetry, and non-fiction – has been largely overlooked by the literary mainstream. This is partly because the majority of Hekkanen’s works have been self-published, and partly because his style defies categorization – it lies somewhere in the hodgepodge of secondhand bookstore shelves where Erica Jong paperbacks, romans à clefs, and really good novels meet.

Hekkanen’s 15th book, The Last Thing My Father Gave Me, continues in the same hard-to-categorize vein. Pamela Dresdahl, once the youngest tenured professor in Canada, teaches Literature and Women’s Studies courses at the University of Vancouver (a thinly disguised University of British Columbia). On the surface Dresdahl appears the cliché of the modern über woman. She is working on an academic treatise entitled The Dark Father Figure in Canadian Literature. Her tall, good-looking, and trust- fund-wealthy husband is an art history lecturer at the other university, “the Mountain” (Simon Fraser University). Together, they live in a tony West Vancouver house, and Pamela rides in her Range Rover to and from campus, lecturing on topics such as whether Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale is a women’s masturbation fantasy.

But despite the seemingly perfect veneer of Pamela’s life, she is having a mental, physical, and sexual breakdown. And it is her journey to discover the source of her deep unhappiness that fuels the story.

Without giving away the page-turning plot, it’s fair to say that after a number of rather unusual coincidences and bizarre experiences Pamela finds herself, good sex, and true love through (mostly Canadian) literature.

Although many of the characters come across as overprivileged prats, the writing sustains the story and the tale of Pamela’s journey to self-discovery is strangely endearing.

That Hekkanen gets so accurately inside a woman’s head and her physical being is commendable. Added bonuses are the authentic West Coast setting and the quirky (albeit slightly schlocky) Freudian ending.