No Previous Experience: A Memoir of Love and Change

Ashley Thomson is a full librarian at Laurentian University and co-editor or co-author of nine books, most recently Margaret Atwood: A Reference Guide, 1988-2005.

Dr. Elspeth Cameron is an English professor, a journalist, and the
award-winning biographer of Earl Birney, Irving Layton, and Hugh
MacLennan. This book is a chronicle of the unexpected relationship she
developed with Janice Dickin, a professor of Canadian studies and law at
the University of Calgary.

By the time Cameron first met Dickin, at a biographers’ conference in
Edinburgh, she had spent most of her 48 years “amputating bits of
[her] personality so [she] could fit [her] surroundings” as the wife
of three men and as the mother of three children. This book traces her
evolving friendship with Dickin and her disastrous marriage to Paul
Lovejoy, a professor of African history and, in private, a drinker, wife
beater, and sexual brute. At the beginning, neither Cameron nor Dickin
expected their friendship to turn physical; by the end of the memoir, it
seems an inevitable resolution.

By coming out—and in such a public way—Cameron triumphs over the
inhibitions that oppressed her in her past. As a bonus, she joins the
ranks of Claire Bloom and others who have had the satisfaction of
trashing their ex-spouses in print. Those who like their dirt dished
with elegance will love this book; children of both Cameron and Dickin
are not likely to fall into that camp.