Everything you’ve heard about Canadians is true. They’re all nice, and even with a population of over 32,000,000, they all seem to know each other.

We discovered this at Louisa McCormack’s party for her new book, Six Weeks To Toxic, last night. The Canadian author was the kind of nice you don’t find this side of the 44th parallel. She reminded us of a simpler country, where health care is free and Queen Elizabeth is on the twenty-dollar bill.

Chatting up the new writer, we wanted to mention the This American Life episode, “Who's Canadian?” every time she said "about." Friends had warned us that referring to obscure episodes of a radio program is not endearing with anyone, especially strangers. But we couldn’t stop ourselves when David Rakoff, a fellow Canuck who had contributed to that episode, walked in. It seems like all Canadians really do know each other. Even Malcolm Gladwell was supposed to make an appearance at the party.

A blurb on the book from Elle Canada says that “Louisa McCormack pushes chick lit in a new direction,” which is sort of like saying Mandy Moore pushes romantic comedy in a new direction. McCormack also took it as a weird compliment.

“If you’re a contemporary female writer, you just get labeled as chick lit,” she said. “I’m a chick, my characters are chicks, and they don’t read chick lit and neither do I.”

And she had a vocabulary that did not come from several readings of The Devil Wears Prada. On Richard Ford, she gets “sycophantic,” architects are “not remunerated [as well as you’d think]” and she’s “vitriolic” toward memoirs, though she says Infidel wasn’t bad.

She must have aced the SATs, or whatever they take in Canada.