Gowdy's novel
Falling Angels (1989) was made into a
film of the same name by director Scott Smith, from an adaptation written by
Esta Spalding, in 2002. The novel focuses on a nuclear family in a 1960s Ontario suburb. The main characters are three sisters who come of age in a house run by their abusive and womanizing father and must constantly find ways to take care of their
depressed and
alcoholic mother. Gowdy says her inspiration for the book was the idea of a Canadian family living during the
Cold War and practicing using their bomb shelter in the back yard. In the novel and movie, the family spend two weeks trapped in the bomb shelter as an "exercise" rather than going on a family trip to
Disneyland. The narrator and main character of the title short story of her 1992 collection,
We So Seldom Look On Love is an assistant embalmer at a funeral home who has sex with the corpses of attractive young men before they are buried. The story was the inspiration for the 1996 Canadian
independent film Kissed, directed by
Lynne Stopkewich and starring
Molly Parker. The story's name is taken from a line in Frank O'Hara's poem "Ode on
Necrophilia", and was inspired by a newspaper article Gowdy read about
Karen Greenlee, a young
California woman who hijacked a hearse on its way to a funeral, took the corpse of the young man inside the coffin to a motel room and had sex with it for several days before being caught by the police. The story collection follows outsiders trying to find their place in the world. "The Two-Headed Man" features a man who removes his conjoined head and, therefore, either commits murder or suicide. "93 Million Miles Away" involves a woman who, in a desperate need to be seen and known, exposes herself through the window of her apartment to the doctor in an apartment across the lane. This story was made into the film
Arousal. Gowdy's novel
Mister Sandman revolves around the family of Joan, a young
autistic girl with a
savant talent for playing
classical music on the piano. Her novel
The White Bone is written from the perspective of
African elephants. Subsequent novels
The Romantic and
Helpless focus on characters driven to extreme action by the force of their desires. She wrote the short film screenplay
Green Door, which was directed by
Semi Chellas and released in 2008. She released a novel,
Little Sister, in 2017, about a woman who is able to inhabit the body of another woman and see life through the other woman's eyes. ==Recognition==