Let Me Go!

Marguerite Andersen is a professor of French studies at the University
of Guelph.

Let Me Go! is the English-language transcript of the documentary film Tu
as crié by Anne Claire Poirier, an award-winning feminist filmmaker.
Written in collaboration with Marie-Claire Blais, the book, which is
essentially a collection of prose poems, makes for painful reading. It
concerns Poirer’s attempts to understand her daughter Yanne, a heroin
addict, who was murdered when she was 26. In powerful poems that manage
to express profound pain without sentimentality, the mother—who
describes the mother–daughter relationship as “the richest and most
perilous love”—looks for her daughter inside herself, in the
landscape of childhood, in memories of light and also of darkness. At
one point, she compares the breaking away of her daughter with an ice
floe breaking away from a glacier, an image magnificently evoked by the
book’s striking cover illustration. Poirier appeals to parents with
addicted children of their own “to smash the hypocritical silence /
surrounding drug addiction.” If you have a daughter, read this book.