RUNAWAY’S MEMOIR REAL AND REFRESHING
On her 16th birthday, Tanya Marquardt runs away from a family situation most would find unbearable. Unlike the case with so, so many who pursue the same path, she’ll come out on top.
Not that her journey from the stray of the title to the multiple award-winning playwright, performer and author, who becomes a Hertog Fellow and graduate of Hunter College’s MFA in creative writing, is smooth.
In a concise, refreshingly honest few hundred pages, the artist details a challenging life with precise details free from the usual tedious armchair psychological babble that passes for insight. Her dad is a nasty “travelling salesman and cocaine addict.”
The post-divorce family she runs away from is ready-made for malfunction with her and her siblings relying on “punches acting like embraces as our fists landed, pummelling each others’ bodies with love.”
Jump ahead, and Marquardt, who splits her time between Vancouver and Brooklyn, moves from being/ hanging with Port Alberni low-lifes to trying to get a corset dress to stay on her very tall, very slender body at her first Bettie Page party at the Twilight Zone where she first falls in love. Not with a person. But with the scene.
Her description of first love is beautiful: “I danced in public for the fist time that night at the Twilight Zone, to The Cure’s Friday I’m in Love ... I swayed and reached my arms about my head ... And, just like that, I was in love.”
Anyone who recalls the pounding tracks by Batcave rules Bauhaus, industrial progenitors Skinny Puppy or the shimmering post-punk perfection of Siouxsie and the Banshees’ Christine in the club scene of the ’80s will recall her note-perfect descriptions of hanging out. But coming from a homeless teenager is a different point of origin than what college kids get up to. Everything she undergoes is part of the shaping of the artist to come.
Equally important to her life are a series of highly motivational school teachers. Marquardt dedicates the book to her high school English teacher, Mr. Walecki, and a few others who played a part in inspiring her to write, perform and produce. First in secondary school and then in the world.
By the time she has survived all the partying, misfit social situations, persistent family misfortunes and endlessly divisive warring between her parents, the author emerges as she is. An open book, full of questions and honest about what shortcomings she brings to the next phase of her life.
Sometimes, books of this sort leave you thinking you could have done well enough with the trailer jamming in the good parts and skipped making the effort to read the whole thing. Owing to her sharp details, lack of frivolous emotional whimpering and never begging for a sympathetic hearing, Marquardt’s Stray is refreshingly real.
Easily read and well worth it, this book is one of those onenight reads.
You won’t want to put it down until its finished because it flows so well.