I'll Tell you a Secret: A Memory of Seven Summers

Pauline Carey is an actor, playwright, and fiction writer. She is the
author of Magic and What’s in a Name?

At the start of this book of memories of adolescence, the author writes
in the voice of her 14-year-old self in the summer of 1950 in North
Hatley, Quebec. This is the year in which she first spoke with author
Hugh MacLennan, a married man in his 40s, and began a friendship that
grew over the course of seven summers into something so puzzling that at
the other end of her life she sat down to try to figure it out.

The narrative of the young girl rings true with its self-involvement
allied with a sharp perception of both herself and “Mr. MacLennan”
as she always called him. Four years later, at McGill University, she
was more aware of his patriarchal ideas but still turned to him as a
friend. However, when she found herself about to marry a younger man and
tried to discuss what she sensed would be a terrible mistake, the friend
was of little help. How could he not know her despair?

Other tales surface in this graceful memoir of the 1950s, but it is
Coleman’s relationship with Hugh MacLennan that preoccupies her and
therefore us. It is a poignant story since neither ever spoke freely of
how they felt about each other or even about their own lives. She, with
the desperation of youth, at least made an attempt; he, in the end,
failed her.

Years later, during a chance meeting with her two children, MacLennan
said something that astonished Coleman and suggests to the reader that
she was clearly too much for him. He may have been also too much for
himself. “There are shadows in him,” she says when she first meets
him, but she is happy to have someone to talk to, someone she thinks
takes her seriously.

Some readers will enjoy the portrait Coleman draws of the famous
Canadian writer, while most will be intrigued by the complications of
the friendship. Even when he seemed to fail her, MacLennan clearly
enriched the author’s life.