Gibb and take: Writer tackles family issues
Award-winning Toronto author Camilla Gibb has struggled through divorce, depression and a couple of suicide attempts.
She doesn’t know the whereabouts of her vagrant father, whom she hasn’t seen since 2002, and her brother battles addiction issues in Vancouver.
But the Scotiabank Giller Prize finalist has found solace in the unconventional new family that has formed in her household — one she writes about in her new memoir, This is Happy.
“I think we’re all forlorn souls in our own way and we kind of rehabilitated each other in that space and it endures,” says the author of four novels, including Sweetness in the Belly.
The family includes Gibb’s 4 1/2-year-old daughter and her resilient Filipina nanny/friend Tita, who lives in the basement with her husband and their young child.
Gibb hired Tita after her wife walked away from their marriage — just eight weeks into the writer’s pregnancy.
Grief-stricken, Gibb found support through Tita, whose husband was still in the Philippines, as well as her brother and a friend.
Gibb, 47, writes that she and her brother were born in England and moved with their parents to Canada when they were young.
When their parents divorced, her dad eventually settled in a rundown farm in eastern Ontario. He started displaying symptoms of a mental health issue and it took a toll on her brother.
The last time Gibb saw her dad was at a writers’ festival in Calgary and she doesn’t know his fate now.
Gibb’s depression started during her graduate work in England in her mid-to-late 20s. It led to a diagnosis of bipolar disorder, which she now feels was inaccurate.
After giving birth, Gibb went back on anti-depressants, which she still takes to this day. She also still sees a psychoanalyst.
Non-fiction is where her interest lies these days and Gibb says she’s writing about religion from the perspective of an atheist.
Asked if she’ll write fiction again, she says: “I can never say never. Not in the immediate future and that’s, I think, all right.”