In essays, Polley sorts out personal stories
Title based on doctor’s advice, but accident wasn’t inspiration
It’s been more than six years since Sarah Polley was struck on the head by a fire extinguisher, one that was unwisely hung over a lost-and-found box at her local community center, leaving her with a debilitating concussion.
When its symptoms were at their worst, Polley, the preternaturally poised actor (“The Sweet Hereafter”) and filmmaker of probing dramas (“Away From Her,” “Take This Waltz”), could not concentrate on her family or her screenwriting. She suffered headaches and nausea, brought on by everyday levels of light and sound.
But over a period of nearly four years, she recuperated, emerging with restored focus — and with an upgraded philosophical outlook that has infused nearly every aspect of her life.
“When people say, ‘Are you better?,’ I’m like, I’m better than I was before the concussion,” she said recently, almost in disbelief at her own words.
Her newfound perspective arises from her work with a doctor who instructed her not to retreat from the activities that triggered her symptoms but to seek them out and embrace the discomfort they caused.
That guidance provides the title for Polley’s first book, “Run Towards the Danger,” a collection of autobiographical essays recently released by Penguin Press.
The essays often link moments from her childhood, adolescence and adulthood, spanning her experiences as an artist and entertainer, a mother, a daughter and a woman. What they have in common, she said, is that they chronicle events “from the past that have been fundamentally changed by my relationship to them in the present.”
“They were things I didn’t talk about, because I didn’t know what the stories even were,” added Polley, 43. “Part of this is figuring out, what the hell happened?”
That includes her account of the concussion and her recovery, and although that accident was not her inspiration for writing “Run Towards the Danger” — “It’s a bit messier and more complex than that” — Polley said the book’s contents were informed by the paradigmshifting worldview her treatment yielded and its exhortation to confront sources of pain.
“The thing that will get you better is moving towards the things you’re avoiding,” she said. “But it’s kind of exhilarating, realizing that whatever story you’ve been telling about yourself — and everyone tells those stories — isn’t you. That got exploded for me as this prison I was living in.”
In its first chapter, “Run Towards the Danger” offers a melancholy reflection on Polley’s teenage struggles with scoliosis, her body horror juxtaposed with several anxious, frustrating months spent playing the lead in a Stratford Festival production of “Alice Through the Looking Glass.”
Her mother died of cancer when Polley was
11; her father sank into a depression, and by age 14, she had left home to move in with an older brother’s ex-girlfriend and largely figure out the world for herself.
This entry, titled “Alice, Collapsing,” is one that Polley said she had made multiple attempts at completing since she was 19. “That essay’s written by four different people,” she said.
Polley also revisits her work as a child actor in an essay called “Mad Genius,” about the making of Terry Gilliam’s 1988 fantasy
“The Adventures of Baron Munchausen.” That film, for which she was cast at age 8 to play the Baron’s young companion, Sally Salt, left her deeply traumatized.
For one battle scene, she was repeatedly made to run a terrifying gantlet of explosives and debris. She jammed cotton balls into her ears to drown out the noise. Another action sequence sent her to the hospital when a detonation startled a horse, causing it to thrust an explosive device in Polley’s direction.
In the essay, Polley reproduces an email exchange she had with
Gilliam several years later, writing to him that “i was pretty furious at you for a lot of years,” although she says that “the adults who should have been there to protect me were my parents, not you.” (Gilliam replies with an apology for the chaotic film shoot, writing, “Although things might have seemed to be dangerous, they weren’t.”)
Polley is hardly a novice when it comes to untangling knotty personal narratives in front of an audience. She previously
directed the 2012 documentary “Stories We Tell,” which used interviews with her family members and reenactments to reveal that her own birth had been the result of her mother’s affair with a man who was not the father who raised her.
Now, as a wider world discovers the sides of herself she reveals in “Run Towards the Danger,” Polley said that her sharing these stories doesn’t necessarily mean she is done with them — or that they
are done with her, either.
“There is just this messiness to the human experience that’s extraordinarily inconvenient if you’re trying to tell one story about it,” she said. “As I get older, I’m realizing it’s OK for stories to be messy or go down circuitous paths that don’t lead anywhere.”
She added: “We create these clean narratives to make sense of our basically bewildering lives. Hopefully, over time, we can loosen our iron grip and let other complexities in.”