The Vintage Book of Canadian Memoirs [Paperback]

A 57-year-old writer receives a phone call from a woman claiming she has just seen the writer's mother--who has been dead 15 years. A happily married professor realizes she is a lesbian. A Prairie newspaper proves an ideal training ground for a cub reporter. A living legend bestows on a young actor a great gift--the realization that his calling is as a writer.

The experiences are as varied as the voices in The Vintage Book of Canadian Memoirs. Many of those voices are quite well known, since this substantial volume features many of the biggest names of CanLit. That's Timothy Findlay's story, the one about the young actor--the legend was actress Ruth Gordon. Mordecai Richler weighs in with one of the most entertaining pieces, a rueful recollection of his time in Paris. Poet Al Purdy is represented by an excerpt from his memoir about growing up in eastern Ontario. And both Michael Ondaatje and Margaret Atwood are here, the former contributing a piece about his Sri Lankan upbringing and the latter a remembrance of writer Marian Engel.

Some of the more powerful, or at least more interesting, memoirs come from lesser-known writers, however. Author and former journalist Heather Robertson's "The Last of the Terrible Men" breaks from the earnest Canadian-ness of many of the entries with a Chandler-esque rhapsody on working for two Winnipeg newspapers in the early '60s. "It was the smell of the Free Press that hooked me," writes Robertson, "that insidious narcotic made up of newsprint and ink, hot lead, cold coffee, floor wax, stale sweat, cigars, yesterday's sandwiches, sharpened pencils, dust, developing fluid, old linoleum, bad whisky, and fifty years of dirt." In "Baba Was a Bohunk," non-fiction writer Myrna Kostash writes analytically about her background, and the "traditions" many Canadians take for granted. "There is an irony here, and it is that the skills displayed by these folk arts are themselves largely a product of North American, middle-class lifestyle; no peasant woman, either in the Ukraine or frontier Alberta, had the time or energy to spend on infinitesimally patterned eggs or microscopically embroidered clothes or laboriously braided beads." With solid writing and a myriad of lives sampled, the collection makes a strong case for editor George Fetherling's contention that Canadians--for a variety of reasons--do memoirs at least as well as Americans and the English. --Shawn Conner

Editor George Fetherling, himself the author of an acclaimed memoir, Travels by Night: A Memoir of the Sixties, has selected twenty-four literary memoirs by well-known Canadian writers for this unique and timely anthology. Michael Ondaatje's Running in the Family, Margaret Atwood's Remembering Marian Engel, Timothy Findley's From Stage to Page, and Mordercai Richler's A Sense of the Ridiculous are just a few of the fascinating selections.

George Fetherling's lively and thoughtful introduction sheds light on the characteristics that make the memoir genre so unique, a genre for which Canadians seem to have a particular passion. The anthology is divided into four thematically grouped sections, each with its own preface written by the editor — At Home and Abroad; Getting Started; Uprootedness and Family; and Tragedies, Choices and Losses. There is also a comprehensive bibliography.

As Douglas Fetherling, George Fetherling has published fifty books of poetry, fiction, essays, history, biography and criticism, including the critically acclaimed, Travels by Night: A Memoir of the Sixties. He is also former literary editor of both The Toronto Star and the Kingston Whig-Standard, and has received a Harbourfront Prize for his "substantial contribution to Canadian letters." George Fetherling's A Biographical Dictionary of the World's Assassins is being published by Random House Canada (March 2000). A regular columnist and book reviewer, Fetherling lives in British Columbia.