White Lies (for My Mother)

Ian C. Nelson is Assistant Director of Libraries, University of
Saskatchewan; and Director, Saskatoon Gateway Plays, Regina Summer
Stage, and La Troupe du Jour.

Incredibly poignant in its honesty and depth of feeling, this book
distils 15 years of an incest survivor’s journal entries into a
narrative that reads like the very best of Marie-Claire Blais’s early
works of fiction.

Alas, Liza Potvin’s experience of sexual abuse was reality. Her
writing is a glorious release from the devastation caused by her
abusers, and by the mother who mindlessly ignored her daughter’s
plight. Although, as she herself points out, “a good feminist never
blames her mother,” Potvin addresses her mother on virtually every
page of her published journal: “I carry your portrait in my heart,
engraved in the metal of my mind, the only features I never wanted to
keep, indelibly preserved.” Miraculously, she finds the parent she
needs and deserves within her own adult self: “I remake my clothes
from garments I have long outgrown, seduced by the rich textures of
these old fabrics, but not understanding their history, their
secrets.”

Printed with generous leading and white space to allow room for
openness and healing, this book presents a step-by-step microscopic
discovery of each twist in the thread of history and secrets that made
up the author’s life. Among those threads are very troubling
quotations of religious admonition, which appear to have abetted the
abuse visited upon the author. What is remarkable is that while all the
(classic) ways in which a child copes with incestuous sexual abuse—and
in which an adult heals—are minutely and recognizably recorded, never
does the writing take on an air of clinical or sociological
punctiliousness.

Any reader will weep to retrace with the author the steps of her
remembering process and, eventually, her healing journey. A survivor of
incest and sexual abuse myself, I was in total awe of Potvin’s ability
to bring such beautiful and articulate expression to such sordid and
painful experiences. White Lies (for My Mother) is a must read.