The Vintage Book of Canadian Memoirs

Patricia Whitney, former coordinator of the Women’s Studies Program at
the University of Prince Edward Island, is the Bank of Montreal Visiting
Scholar in Women’s Studies at the University of Ottawa.

What a richness of Canadian life writing George Fetherling has drawn
together in this brilliant collection. The well-known authors who speak
about their lives include Dorothy Livesay, Margaret Atwood, Timothy
Findley, Michael Ignatieff, Al Purdy, and Michael Ondaatje. Lesser-known
writers and their works are also featured. For example, Moira Farr’s
“After Daniel,” permits us to stand on the sacred ground of a
woman’s grief for her beloved, taken from her and from his own self by
his benighted act of suicide. This deeply personal lament sears the
reader’s heart in its chaste passion of emotion and perfectly
controlled prose.

Fetherling has organized his material in four thematically marked
sections—“At Home and Abroad,” “Getting Started,”
“Uprootedness and Family,” and “Tragedies, Choices and
Losses”—which present a harmonious balance of incident, gendered and
racialized voice, and location. “At Home and Abroa” includes an
excerpt from John Glassco’s playful Memoirs of Montparnasse (1995),
based on his time in Paris around 1928; Glassco’s wickedly funny
send-up of that other Canadian in Paris, Morley Callaghan; and the
description of the cheeky young Glassco’s meeting with the formidable
Gertrude Stein.

Michael Ondaatje speaks of “uprootedness and family” in a selection
from Running in the Family (1999), which is set in his birth nation of
Ceylon (now Sri Lanka). Like a dream held in the deepest places of the
heart, the memory of family, tea gardens, and rain shatters time and
space, creating a perfectly knowable eternal now of love and tragedy.

In prose hardly less arresting is Heather Robertson’s memoir of her
green years as a “girl reporter” at the old Winnipeg Free Press
(“The Last of the Terrible Men”). Booze-soaked guys, battered
furniture, the intoxicating rumble of the presses, and the overarching
memory of the mighty John Dafoe help to define the young leftist
Robertson. Other fine selections include Elspeth’s Cameron’s
delicate memoir of a successful writer and academic coming alive to love
and lesbian identity in midlife. All in all, these are splendid
writings.