True tales
Real people’s stories are the best
Unusually the five nominees for last year’s Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for non-fiction were all memoirs. Thomson Highway, who visited here last fall for Devour!, won the $60,000 prize for his memoir Permanent Astonishment. In their citation, the jury called the book “a mesmerizing story rich in detail about growing up in a Cree-speaking family in northern Manitoba and later in a residential school.”
It was interesting that every member of the 2021 Weston Prize
Memoirs jury had written a memoir. are hugely popular these days. As a reporter, I get it. I always thought real people’s stories were the best. Memoirs tell those tales.
An early favourite of mine has to be Joan Didion’s 2005 book
The Year of Magical Thinking.
Didion, who passed on back in December, dealt with husband John Gregory Dunne’s death in 2003 by writing through her grief. Their daughter was also seriously ill and hospitalized at the time.
classic Her memoir has become a because Didion could write so well.
On the local front, I was a fan of Ami McKay’s fiction already, but her most recent book, a national best-seller, proved to be an award-winning memoir. Before My Time, previously called Daughter of Family G, scooped up two notable regional awards.
I was glad Before My Time won the Evelyn Richardson Nonfiction Award because Richardson remains an Atlantic heroine. Her outstanding writing about life as a lighthouse keeper’s wife allowed her to capture the Governor General’s Award in non-fiction with her 1945 memoir, We Keep a Light.
McKay was inspired by her great-great aunt Pauline Gross, who told a medical professor in 1895 that she expected to die young because so many in her family had before her. The doctor, with Pauline’s help, began a study
of the family that over time resulted in the naming of a genetic mutation, known as Lynch syndrome, which often results in the development of cancer.
Over the years I’ve enjoyed several of food writer Ruth Reichl’s books. The last editor of Gourmet Magazine, she wrote a terrific memoir, Garlic and Sapphires: The Secret Life of a Critic in Disguise. In it, Reichl details her experience as the restaurant critic for The New York Times, wearing a variety of hilarious costumes in order to remain anonymous.
Another of her eight books is Save Me the Plums, which outlines the final months of Gourmet after 68 years in publication. Despite the recession that hit in 2008 and advertisers disappearing, Reichl never figured Condé Nast would shut Gourmet down. “I’d fortified myself against the pain of being fired, but this was worse: They had murdered the magazine,” she wrote.
Isabel Huggan’s 2004 memoir Belonging about living in an old house in the French countryside is another fine memoir I can recommend because it’s almost as good as travel. She ponders what makes a home while bringing to life the people she met on her journey.
But the memoir that has captivated me lately is Donna Morrisey’s
new book called Pluck: A Memoir of a Newfoundland Childhood and the Raucous, Terrible, Amazing Journey to Becoming a Novelist. The noun pluck is defined as spirited and determined courage and the word describes Morrisey’s life journey perfectly.
Born in an isolated outport in Newfoundland in 1956, Morrisey grew up with family trauma and death and conquered both by dint of much effort. Her childhood was without television or telephones, but she had a tight-knit family and community supporting her. That closeness supported her after the accidental loss of her teenage brother and through her mother’s battle with cancer.
There are elements of both spirituality and humour that
survival were central to her personal and helped balance out the despair. I think that balance is what makes Pluck so appealing. Morrisey’s glimpses into a Newfoundland way of life that has disappeared were well documented.
The cast of characters Morrisey, who is now in her 60s, encountered as a young woman loomed large in her later fiction. There was her indominable mother, the neighbourhood cat lady Mae and the Halifax-based woman who encouraged her to believe in herself as a writer. Doing repetitive jobs like grocery clerk and fish plant worker to support her two young children, she also cultivated a passion for writing. Her insight into a working-class life marked by spells of poverty is important as well.
“Just to get up some mornings and face that day takes pluck,” Morrisey related to the Globe and Mail. “And not just in the sense of getting through the hardship, but in facing down the odds and going for more than what you think you can achieve.”
Writing the truth of your life can be therapeutic, but for Morrisey it is just as much about telling good stories that readers will appreciate. She delivers a fascinating read about a woman who put herself back together after difficult days. We all need to read about that kind of validation.