Imperfect remembrance of things past
Convivial but harrowing memoir too tidily resolved
The publishing industry has developed an almost insatiable taste for memoir, particularly ones in which the narrator has a troubling backstory. As readers, we want wild behaviour, we want impossible odds, we want grim details, we want that classic autobiographical journey “from wretchedness to redemption,” and we want it all to be true (thanks to James Frey).
Cea Sunrise Person’s book North of Normal is a recent entry in the genre. Warmly told with a strong, clear and funny voice, peppered with dramatic action, and full of quirky characters, it seems to hit all the right notes. The tone is equal parts harrowing and convivial, the era described in rich, nostalgiainducing detail, but if there is a lesson to glean from her messy childhood, the summation comes off a little too tidy for me.
Cea’s story begins with her grandparents, Papa Dick and Grandma Jeanne, who, in the late ’60s, disillusioned by corporate America, moved the whole family, including Cea’s young single mother Michelle, to northern Alberta. Michelle gives birth to Cea on the way, just over the border in B.C. More survivor culture than counterculture, the Persons reside in a teepee, grow pot and live off the grid in relative isolation, except for the endless parade of hangers-on, lovers and drifters that complicate the family drama. (Cea has very little contact with her birth father, though he makes an appearance now and then.)
The original moral compass guiding the Person clan into the wilderness is quickly mired by depression, poverty, sex, drugs and kids rife with physical, social and mental problems, so that by the mid’70s, the family’s excesses and indulgences take over.
The record of flops and scrapes within the Person family is entertaining and moves like a foolish rendition of (and reflection on) the Age of Aquarius, though set on the Canadian Shield, with a sprinkling of her grandfather’s obsession with poop. The beginning is the most dynamic and relatively happy period of the book, as nature has a way of buffering the family chaos. I wanted Cea to stay in the woods and keep adventuring with her crazy family. But when her mother Michelle hooks up with the first in a series of questionable boyfriends and takes Cea with her, things get predictable and sad.
The sense of survival in this book is multilayered, at times so thickly it’s as wamp: there’s survival of the wilderness, of child abuse, of incest, of addiction, of rape, of divorce, of mental illness, of mental handicaps and of abandonment. The author even does a quick tour through the fashion industry and Internet dating. Mostly though, Cea has to endure the plain old stupidity and bad choices of her elders, who are either too doped-up, too confused or-too-single-minded-to-know better. She tells of survivors within survivors within survivors, generations of her family who simultaneously witness and torment each other, sometimes with their foolhardy intentions, and sometimes with their absence. Dysfunction and folly run deep, but she also conveys the sense of humour and openness that is key to the family resilience. As readers, we’re left shaking our heads.
North of Normal traverses the familiar terrain of the domestic misery tale. While reading, many other titles popped into my head, from Augusten Burroughs’ Running with Scissors, Mary Karr’s The Liar’s Club, or Wild by Cheryl Strayed, but none more so than Jeanette Walls’ bestselling memoir The Glass Castle, and the author is wise to acknowledge her debt to Walls.
It’s not that as a memoir it isn’t interesting; it just feels so “on point,” bringing little in the way of surprises to the genre.
When Cea leaves the woods, and those complex family characters drop off one by one, you realize the author, while the central character, is also the least compelling. She doesn’t do her own complexities justice. She glazes over her early marriages, her model life is predictably toxic and her one desire — for happy normalcy — doesn’t have much oomph on the page. She seems focused on resolution; that despite her wild and unusual life, she turned out all right.
Unlike Burroughs or Walls, who hint at their escape, we’re dragged along with Cea, right into the therapist’s office, to neatly tie up, rationalize and forgive it all away. By the end of the first chapter, heck, by the end of the title, you are aware of this narrative arc, and with Cea’s easygoing writing style, you just settle in for the ride.