Memoir

Resilience and Chocolate: A Refugee Family’s Remarkable Journey

/ Lynne Melcombe / 2 Comments

I’m finding it hard to live in the world at this moment in history. Over and above the daily headlines about Gaza and Ukraine, there is a major violent humanitarian crisis in Sudan, which has been largely overshadowed by the focus on the former two. In fact, the website for the Geneva Academy tells us that there are currently over 100 armed conflicts raging across the globe. None of these affect me personally, and yet in a way all of them do. Edited to add: And now, Israel has started a war with Iran.

Cover of 'Peace by Chocolate' book featuring the Hadhad family on a beach, with text highlighting their journey from Syria to Canada.

So, you can imagine how I felt reading Jon Tattrie’s Peace by Chocolate: The Hadhad Family’s Remarkable Journey from Syria to Canada (Goose Lane Editions, 2020), perhaps the most uplifting book I’ve read in—well, maybe ever.

Okay, Anne of Green Gables, but that’s fiction. 

Peace by Chocolate is the story of a large family that had a successful, internationally renowned chocolate business in Damascus, a business the father had created from scratch as a young man. This business was the reason he met his beloved wife, which led to the births of seven children. It was the reason his family home, a single-story building when his own father was young, grew into a 10-storey home for much of his extended family. It’s a story of success and love and plenty …

… until the Assad regime responded to the arrival of the Arab Spring in Syria by turning on its own people, killing hundreds of thousands and turning hundreds of thousands more into refugees. The Hadhad family survived, but their beloved family home and their chocolate business did not. 

After three years of languishing as refugees in Lebanon, the Canadian government finally chooses the eldest son, Tareq, to come to Canada. Meanwhile, a group of people in Nova Scotia have come together to welcome at least one family, to save at least one person, from this horrible conflict by bringing them to Canada and helping them settle in the small town of Antigonish. 

When Tareq arrives at Halifax airport on a snowy night just before Christmas, to his surprise, he is greeted by dozens of people who have been making calls and filling out paperwork and fundraising for a couple of years. Tareq’s arrival is the first of the fruits of their labour. 

What follows—the way things come together, the barriers that fall away, the pieces that fall into place—is nothing short of remarkable. Within months, he is joined by most of his family. His father begins making chocolate in the kitchen of their new home and selling it at a winter fair. The chocolate business outgrows the kitchen, and then the basement, and then a shed. Within less than a year, the Hadhads open a factory in the small town that’s welcomed them—and several other Syrian families—and Peace by Chocolate, the company, becomes a major local employer. 

The farther their remarkable story spreads, the more remarkable it becomes, leading to international speaking engagements, meetings with heads of state—and a request by CBC journalist and author Jon Tattrie to write a book about them. As Tattrie writes of his first meeting with Tareq in the Author’s Note:

I’d been watching Tareq Hadhad for almost two years. I knew the names of his mother, father, sisters, and brother. I knew of his dreams to be a doctor. I knew of his family’s passion for chocolate. I knew they’d lost everything in the Syrian war and rebuilt it in Canada. But I didn’t know how. How had they turned from refugees into pillars of the community so quickly?

And I didn’t know how small-town Canada had truly reacted to a Middle Eastern Muslim family dropping out of the clear sky to take up residence. My previous books had documented the intense and often violent racism minorities face in Nova Scotia. Eddie Carvery was a young black man in the 1960s when Halifax bulldozed Africville, his family home for generations. He moved into the ruins in 1970 to plant his body as a living protest for justice. He was still there forty years later when I asked him if I could tell his story. And I’d written about the notorious Edward Cornwallis, the British soldier who founded Halifax and tried to exterminate the Mi’kmaq First Nation. I’d written about Daniel Paul, the Mi’kmaw elder who campaigned for decades to get the city to take down its Cornwallis statue.

Would I find the same grime under the shiny story I’d been reading about the Hadhad family and Peace by Chocolate?

The answer is no. But to find out more you’ll have to read Peace by Chocolate, which quickly became a national bestseller and was later made into a multi-award winning motion picture. Whichever way you choose to find out more about this story, I caution you to do so with a box of tissues at hand. I’m getting misty again just writing this.

Other books about food:

How to Clean a Fish: And Other Adventures in Portugal, by Esmeralda Cabral.

The Fruitful City: The Enduring Power of the Urban Forest, by Helena Moncrieff.

How to Share an Egg: A True Story of Hunger, Love, and Plenty, by Bonny Reichert.

Chasing Smoke: A Memoir of Firefighting in British Columbia’s Interior

/ Lynne Melcombe / 3 Comments

Long ago, in a previous life, I worked in archaeology. One summer in Hat Creek Valley, 26 kilometres beyond Cache Creek, BC, our 26-person crew was dawdling over breakfast when local ranchers drove by to notify us that a few small fires had broken out at the north end of the valley. Would we help put them out?

Book cover of 'Chasing Smoke: A Wildfire Memoir' by Aaron Williams, featuring a forest scene with smoke and an orange sky.

We put down our breakfast dishes, piled into our trucks, and sped off (like the heroes we thought we were) to spend the morning digging small fireguards and throwing dirt on flames that kept cropping up here and there. It was hot, hard work for a bunch of university students who spent most of our time sitting on stools in one-metre-square holes in the ground excavating millimetres at a time with trowels and paint brushes. 

I was thinking about that as I was reading Aaron Williams’s Chasing Smoke: A Wildfire Memoir (Harbour Publishing, 2017), which tells of his firefighting experience during the summer of 2014 (he’d been firefighting since 2006). Of course, there’s no comparing my miniscule experience with his, yet I can’t help thinking that the memory of how easily a single spark can jump 20 metres, or a small flame can travel underground along a tree root and pop up 10 metres away gives me a tiny bit of perspective on what real forest-firefighters are up against. 

Chasing Smoke provides insight into how firefighting works, why forest fires have been getting worse with climate change, and what the whole experience of firefighting is like, from a brutal training camp in May to sheer exhaustion in August. The author’s descriptions of fire are intensely visual:

A thunderstorm approaches. Little pockets of fire, previously resting in the moss, are brought to life by the strong winds preceding the downpour. The flames look tenacious under the dark clouds. I stand and watch a pocket of heat thrash around as it starts spitting rain. The flames, billowing and wide on the forest floor, find a spruce tree. One more kill before they lose the battle to the rain. 

The fire grabs on to the spruce and its lower limbs being to sizzle. Flames climb the tree and when they reach the top they balloon out, feasting on the fat clump of recent growth crowding the tree’s peak. The fire burns slow up there and the rest of the tree cools down and fades to a less intense orange. But the top still burns bright, the colour of a street light against the storm.

Many moments in this memoir are reminders that this work is decidedly dangerous:

Trees start coming down like I’ve never seen before. They’re limbless save for their very tops, where wind catches the foliage and pushes the tree over. … 

At first I’m calm as the trees fall. But suddenly a mess of wood, bent horizontal and cribbed into the trees above us, comes down in a rush of a hundred machine-gun snaps. Trees caught in the nest flail around before hitting the ground. Our eyes dart everywhere, trying to keep track of every moment. Trees break free and swing themselves like catapults. Splintered chunks of wood slash through the air like propellers. Tabes and I look in opposite directions, standing guard for each other. We don’t dare move, as that would take our complete focus from the storm of debris. 

As soon as it’s over I turn to Tabes. “Fuck this, let’s get out of here.” 

For all its intensity, though, Chasing Smoke is also an entertaining read. Williams has a sardonic sense of humour and laughs at himself and his crew at least once every few pages:

Dan holds the after-work meeting while we grill the steaks. The crew is paying more attention to us than to Dan’s end-of-day spiel. The pressure of getting the meat right is immense. Is it too rare? Or the ultimate shame—is it too cooked? It turns out fine, and Tabe and I share a moment when it’s all done. A stern nod to each other acknowledges that our integrity as men has never been stronger.

This was one of the first books I read when I decided to pursue this project of working my way through and reviewing all the books published by alumni of University of King’s College’s MFA program in Creative Nonfiction Writing. And it’s a great example of why I keep coming back for more. 

Books on different types of disasters:

On Borrowed Time: North America’s Next Big Quake, by Gregor Craigie.

Overrun: Dispatches from the Asian Carp Crisis, by Andrew Reeves.

Fifteen Thousand Pieces: A Medical Examiner’s Journey Through Disaster, by Gina Leola Woolsey.

University of King’s College MFA Program in Creative Nonfiction: Books Published So Far

/ Lynne Melcombe / 3 Comments

If you’re already on this list, congratulations! You’re in terrific company. If you’re not on this list, keep putting yourself (and more importantly your book) out there. Meanwhile, in case you’re curious, here’s what (I think) the list is so far. If I’ve missed anything, gotten any details wrong, or in some cases don’t know the year you graduated, please let me know.

Book cover of 'The Heart of a Superfan' by Nav Bhatia, featuring a smiling man in a Raptors jersey and a black and red jacket, with a white turban, against a purple background.
Book cover for 'Run, Hide, Repeat: A Memoir of a Fugitive Childhood' by Pauline Dakin featuring a vintage roadside scene.

Cover of the book 'Murder on the Inside: The True Story of the Deadly Riot at Kingston Penitentiary' by Catherine Fogarty, featuring an image of the penitentiary.

the Eiffel Tower with the book title overlaying it

cover of book No Place to Go with image of empty toilet paper roll.

Book cover of 'Heartbroken: Field Notes on a Constant Condition' by Laura Pratt, featuring a stylized image of a rose with a smoky effect and the word 'Canadian' in the top right corner.

Book cover for 'How to Share an Egg' by Bonny Reichert, featuring an illustration of an egg on a blue background with the title and author's name displayed.

Book cover of 'Still, I Cannot Save You' by Kelly S. Thompson, featuring a person in red walking on a sandy shore with a vast landscape in the background.

Coming of Age as a Millennial: Completely Different and Not Different At All

/ Lynne Melcombe / 3 Comments

I lost my virginity when I was 14. It was the early seventies, a decade one must have lived through to understand, and it was practically a competition between my friends and I. I was one of the first and all of it just happened, the way things do when you’re 14 and in a very big hurry to become cool after a childhood of being thought just the opposite.

But then when I was 15, my best friend had a baby. When I was 16, my dad died suddenly. When I was 17, I got very sick and almost died, just as my mother and I were moving to the other side of the country to be closer to extended family but far, far away from any of my friends or anything familiar. My adolescence started out as the typical baby-boomer experience you’d see on That Seventies Show, but it didn’t end up that way. After the wild summer when I was 14, I grew up very fast. 

My experience was the polar opposite of what Nellwyn Lampert (class of 2017) describes in her memoir, Every Boy I Ever Kissed (Dundurn, 2019). A member of the millennial generation, Lampert talks about her coming-of-age experiences, including what can only be described as a long and frustrating battle to lose her virginity to someone—anyone, really—with wit, humour, and really good writing. Here’s a sample: 

The first time I got really drunk was at my mother’s fiftieth birthday party the summer before I started university.

It was the perfect, small-town summer day. The trees were dappled by the sun, the grass was freshly cut, and the lake was a calm, deep blue. Those are the country days I dream about and novelists spend hours trying to describe. The soft smoke from the barbecue; the deep Muskoka chairs; the condensation from a cold bottle of beer dripping from the corners of your mouth; the tall, blue-eyed country boy lounging in your back yard. 

Tyler was an old childhood friend. He was always hanging around our house, sleeping over, and showing up for dinner unannounced. My family always greeted him with loud hellos, hugs, and a big plate of whatever was on the stove. 

I thought he was lovely.

He was the kind of guy who could make you feel at home simply by smiling at you. Loved. Included. Special. None of it was forced. His smiles, his laughter, they were always the realest thing in the room.

The sun was setting and casting its soft glow over the day when my older brother brought out a bottle of vodka. He and his friends stood around the kitchen counter lining up shot glasses in a row. The real adults were all outside not paying attention, but they wouldn’t have cared even if they knew. 

My brother counted the shot glasses on the counter. “Nell, you want one?”

“Sure.”

The word came out of my mouth even before I’d had a chance to think. I’d drunk a little bit of vodka before, mixed with juice, so I honestly didn’t think anything would happen after just one shot.

Turns out I was wrong. And turns out he’d poured me a double. 

My brother handed me a glass of orange juice. 

“You’ll want this after,” he said. 

I raised my shot glass to the ceiling and clutched the juice in my left hand.

I slammed the vodka down like a pro and downed the juice like a good girl. Almost instantly I stumbled back into the fridge. 

“You okay?” my brother asked with a smile. 

I stood up a little straighter.

“Never better.”

I felt taller. My breasts felt bigger. Without looking in the mirror, I could just feel that my hair and makeup were flawless. I licked my lips and looked up at Tyler through heavy eyelids. I wanted to throw my arms around his neck and press my lips against his.

But he was on the phone. Talking to his new girlfriend, my brother told me.

Ouch! 

And if you want to find out if she ever gets the boy, you’re going to have to read the book. 

I enjoyed this memoir thoroughly. There are just enough scenes in here that seem familiar, despite the fact that I grew up two generations earlier than Lampert, but also enough scenes that are thoroughly new to me to provide insight into my adult children’s generation. 

An excellent read, flowing enough to devour in a weekend. I highly recommend it. 

Diverse topics, discussed from a woman’s perspective:

Halal Sex: The Intimate Lives of Muslim Women in North America, by Sheima Benembarek.

F Bomb: Dispatches from the War on Feminism, by Lauren McKeon.

Conspiracy of Hope: The Truth About Breast Cancer Screening, by Reneé Pellerin.

Heartbroken: Field Notes on a Constant Condition, by Laura Pratt.

I Don’t Do Disability: And Other Lies I’ve Told Myself, by Adelle Purdham.

The Minister’s Wife: A Memoir of Faith, Doubt, Friendship, Loneliness, Forgiveness, and More … , by Karen Stiller.

From Starvation to Abundance: A Memoir of Family and Resilience

/ Lynne Melcombe / 5 Comments

I can’t imagine it. I’ve tried, but it’s beyond my ability. The closest I can come to imagining what it must have been like to survive the Holocaust and, against all odds, marry, have children, and live a happy life is knowing what it was like to be the child of an RCAF pilot who spent three months injured in a POW hospital in occupied France. 

I suppose it’s understandable that people can’t imagine living through such trauma themselves. It protects us. But when you’re the child of people who survived that horror, when the knowledge of what one or both of your parents experienced forms the backdrop for your entire life, lived in comfort and safety in one of the richest countries in the world—that’s a different story.

Marsha Lederman, author of the bestselling Kiss the Red Stairs: The Holocaust, Once Removed (McLelland &Stewart, 2022), which I devoured last year, was one of those children. Bonny Reichert (class of 2022, Master of Fine Arts in Creative Nonfiction, University of King’s College) was another.

For most of her life, Richert coped with the knowledge of what had happened to her father by not thinking about it. I don’t blame her. She and her father talked about one day writing a book together about it, but for one reason and another that day never came. Until one day, after a trip to her father’s native Poland and an encounter with the perfect bowl of borscht, Reichert realized the time had come. 

The result of that realization is How to Share an Egg: A True Story of Hunger, Love, and Plenty (Appetite by Random House, 2025). A memoir with strong culinary overtones, How to Share an Egg shares with the reader that good food has played an important role in the author’s life, not only because, as the daughter of a successful restaurateur, she grew up with excellent cooking but because her father had very nearly starved to death. 

The preface to the book opens like this:

Imagine two boys—a couple of skeletons, really—roaming the German countryside. One is fourteen, the other, a little older. It’s the spring of 1945, and they haven’t eaten much besides potato peels and coffee grounds for three years. They knock on door after door until they find a farmer who goes into his kitchen and brings something back: a single brown egg. One egg for two starving boys. … 

The book you’re about to read is a tale of hunger and sorrow and love. It’s a mishmash of what happened to my dad and what’s happened to me; a portrait of a parent and a child, a father and a daughter. It’s both a small story and an enormous one, a study of contrasts. And because it’s my family, it’s a story about food—sumptuous meals and meals of almost nothing at all; food that is simple and complicated, basic and bountiful. Food that is rife with meaning.

How does a daughter reconcile her privilege when her father had nothing? How does she set her table, heavy with plenty, when her ancestors were lucky to share a single egg? As much about survival as sustenance, the story you’re about to read is about a family that lost everything and built itself up again, one meal at a time. 

I sometimes worry that recent generations simply don’t know enough about the Holocaust. I worry about the way this lack of knowledge has been fuelling a global resurgence in antisemitism. I’m heartened by the appearance of books by the children of survivors, like Reichert. If there was ever a book to teach about that shameful period in human history while making you go from laughing to crying and back again, this is surely it. 

Books about the Holocaust:

Wanda’s War: An Untold Story of Nazi Europe, Forced Labour, and a Canadian Immigration Scandal, by Marsha Faubert. Review coming soon.

One in Six Million: The Baby by the Roadside and the Man Who Retraced a Holocaust Survivor’s Lost Identity, by Amy Fish. Review coming soon.

A Memoir of Faith: Insights from a Minister’s Wife

/ Lynne Melcombe / 5 Comments

I’m not religious. Which doesn’t mean I don’t have faith. My faith is atheism. I believe what we see is what we get, we have one chance to leave a positive impact on the people around us, and our afterlife is what we leave behind in those people’s hearts and minds. 

It also doesn’t mean I don’t respect other people’s faiths. I do, very much. Even when I don’t understand their religious choices, as I don’t understand all the choices the Muslim women Sheima Benembarek wrote about in Halal Sex, I respect their right to make those choices, free of judgment. Which is probably why a diehard atheist like me got so much out of a book of essays written by a devoted Christian. 

Karen Stiller (class of 2018), author of The Minister’s Wife: A Memoir of Faith, Doubt, Friendship, Loneliness, Forgiveness, and More (Tyndale, 2020), has written a book filled with stories about what it’s like to be married to a member of the clergy—the burden of other people’s (and her own) unrealistic expectations, the wish that sometimes people would just stop talking to her and leave her alone, the loneliness of being unable to find a friend in one’s own community, the disappointment when her husband’s career takes the family places they’d rather not go instead of where they’d love to go. 

Stiller not only offers insight into what that life is really like, but she does so in an I-bet-you’re-more-fun-at-a-party-than-anyone-might-guess authorial voice, which she combines with a self-deprecating sense of humour that makes you wish that party was happening tonight. In a chapter on family, Stiller weighs in on what it’s like raising three human beings who are blessed and burdened with being minister’s children: 

The messes and misses are what Brent and I remember the most, what touch us so deeply—our clumsy selves just trying to do our best. There are so many real things that we did wrong, especially me with all my yelling. 

I wish I had never once shouted. I also wish they had not stretched plastic wrap around the living room lamps as I watched, helpless, while interviewing someone on the phone for a magazine article I was writing about whether or not spanking was a good thing. I wished they had not dumped a can of beans in their brother’s bed, or put all my bras in the freezer on April Fools’ Day. I wished that a frog had not been dropped in a sink full of dishes because, as it turns out, frogs die in hot, soapy water. …

I also wish I had done those things I had planned to do, like cooking a meal from a different country every week, learning about the culture together (sitting quietly, taking turns reading out loud), and praying for the people who lived there (sitting quietly, taking turns praying out loud). I did not do that, not even on one single Wednesday evening. That was an idea I had before we had kids, something nice to do with your puppy maybe.

This is a deeply human book, a book I chuckled along with as I recognized, against all odds, how much Stiller’s life reminded me of mine, a book I feared I wouldn’t enjoy (and then wouldn’t know what to write about) but instead ended up reading in one sitting. It’s the kind of book I like to read when I’m awake at 3 AM, much as I like reading Richard Wagamese’s gentle memoirs-in-essays, so that its kind and soothing message can take my mind off the troubles racing like squirrels around my brain—and allow me to find my way back to an untroubled rest.  

Books about faith:

Halal Sex: The Intimate Lives of Muslim Women in North America, by Sheima Benembarek.

The Scientist and the Psychic: A Son’s Exploration of His Mother’s Gift, by Christian Smith.

For Daffodil Month, a Journey Through Cancer in ‘Still, I Cannot Save You’

/ Lynne Melcombe / 3 Comments

As the daffodils come into bloom this year, I am reminded that April is Daffodil Month, the Canadian Cancer Society’s awareness and fundraising month for cancer. And then I can’t help thinking of the heart-wrenching memoir I recently finished reading, Still, I Cannot Save You: A Memoir of Sisterhood, Love, and Letting Go (McLelland and Stewart, 2023) by Kelly S. Thompson.

The book opens as Thompson, an officer in the Canadian military, waits to meet her sister in a shopping mall. Christmas music plays in the background as Thompson wonders if, this time, her older sister Meghan will show up. Meghan, we learn, is an addict and as such unpredictable and unreliable. And she also survived cancer as a very young child. She’s also thin, and three inches shorter than her younger sister. Genetics or the impact of cancer and chemotherapy on the development of a three-year-old? Impossible to know. 

As the years move forward, Meghan sobers up, finds a man, has a child, and marries the baby’s father, an abusive alcoholic. Thompson is medically discharged from the military due to her own bout with cancer. She too marries, learns she can’t have children, lives with depression. 

Through it all, the sisterly closeness that eluded them through Meghan’s addiction slowly returns. Just when they are closer than they’ve ever been, and as Meghan welcomes another child, she’s diagnosed with cancer again, this time a large sarcoma that had been hidden behind the growing fetus.  

With all the tragedy and hardship this family faces – both parents have survived cancer and the girls’ mother is coping with MS – it’s amazing that Thompson is able to write with humour about what must have been one of the darkest chapters of her life. At one point, Thompson sets about dying her sister’s hair in an effort to help her feel attractive. After letting the dye do its work, they head into the bathroom to rinse it out. 

“Alright, let’s hose you down,” I said, gesturing to the bathroom. 

“How am I going to keep my pyjamas clean?” …

“Just go in there naked. I’m your sister, what do I care? I’ll be in my bra and underwear anyways. Don’t want to get soaked.” …

She gingerly stripped down to reveal a padded Depend, convenient after having a child. Her breasts were pendulous, filled with milk, nipples white with colostrum. I could not take my eyes off them. “Well at least your boobs look great.” 

She gave her chest a gentle shimmy. “Yeah, I’m a regular porn star.” We giggled at this as I helped her shuffle into the bathroom, shocked at how she was rail thin yet simultaneously puffy. She sat on the supportive bathing chair and then leaned forward as I set to work with the extendable shower head, releasing a stream of inky brown from the tendrils that dangled over her face. That is, until I dropped the shower handle, cracking off the cover and sending water everywhere in a zealous spray, cascading blotches of dye across the walls, Meghan, and the bathroom. The incontinence brief hung limp with liquid and mascara ran down my face, pooling within the brown sludge at our feet. 

“There’s a porn movie in this somewhere,” Meghan said, laughing so hard she was gasping and clutching at her misshapen stomach. 

“What’s with you and porn today? Besides, I don’t think anyone in porn is wearing a diaper.” I was laughing too hard to control the shower handle … 

“Oh, you’d be surprised,” she said. And then we laughed even harder. 

I devoured this book in a couple of days. You should too, but make sure you have a box of tissues at hand.

Edited to add: I belatedly learned that Kelly S. Thompson is not an alumnus of the MFA program but a mentor! Oh well, I’d always figured once I was running out of books by grads I’d start reviewing books my mentors and directors—there are plenty of those too. Now if the grads would just take a pause from being so prolific …

Other books about family, for better and worse:

One Strong Girl: Surviving the Unimaginable—A Mother’s Memoir, by S. Lesley Buxton.

How to Clean a Fish: And Other Adventures in Portugal, by Esmeralda Cabral.

Run, Hide, Repeat: A Memoir of a Fugitive Childhood, by Pauline Dakin.

The View from Coffin Ridge: A Childhood Exhumed, by Gwen Lamont.

The Scientist and the Psychic: A Son’s Exploration of His Mother’s Gift, by Christian Smith.

The Minister’s Wife: A Memoir of Faith, Doubt, Friendship, Loneliness, Forgiveness, and More …, by Karen Stiller.

Peace by Chocolate: The Hadhad Family’s Remarkable Journey from Syria to Canada, by Jon Tattrie.

The Heart of Homestay: Creating Meaningful Connections While Hosting International Students, by Jennifer Robin Wilson.

Journey To Portugal: A Family’s Culinary Trip Through Their Heritage

/ Lynne Melcombe / 6 Comments

When my two older children were small, I had a dream. We would, as a family, put our belongings in storage, take two years off work and school, and travel the world. As time passed, I reduced it to a year travelling Europe. Then it was a six-month road trip around North America. 

None of that ever happened. We did, after I’d had significant windfalls, have six weeks in Cabo San Lucas when our older kids were four and six, and a month in Costa Rica when our older two were leaving home and our youngest was 12. And since my divorce, I’ve had a month in Ireland and three weeks in Scotland. I love to travel.  

So, when I heard that Esmeralda Cabral’s (class of 2019) book, How to Clean a Fish and Other Adventures in Portugal (U of Alberta Press, 2023) was all about a five-month sabbatical she and her husband took with their family to Portugal, I was intrigued. 

Cabral, a Portuguese Canadian, spent most of her childhood in the Azores, which I can only imagine as idyllic, so the opportunity to return to the land of her birth was too good not to take advantage of. And everything she writes about it makes me jealous. As one can imagine from the title, a lot of the book focuses on food, a delicious and important part of Portuguese culture. Here’s an excerpt from a tale early in the book: 

One of my favourite things to do in Costa was to browse in the market. I often went alone in the morning, while Eric [husband] and Georgia [daughter] did their work at home. I would stop and have a coffee at the counter of one of the coffee shops on the way, and sometimes I’d have a pastel [an egg custard tart] too. I’d go to the bakery to buy a loaf of bread or a few buns [mmm, Portuguese buns], and then head to the market, where I would talk to the vendors and fulfill my need for conversation. …

At a small stand right inside the north entrance, a woman sold mostly verduras, or greens. She didn’t seem to have much to sell on any given day and what she had looked a little wilted, but I usually bought something from her—lettuce, if nothing else. She would smile and greet me as I entered the market, and I found it difficult to get past her without buying anything. I would stop to talk to her, and then the woman from the next stall (who had much better-looking produce) would join in our conversation. From her, I’d buy potatoes, kale, carrots, and whatever else looked good. ….

Farther down in the fruit stall area, there was the man who sold what I deemed to be the sweetest oranges. … The crisp, peppery smell of citrus in this part of the market often permeated my nostrils and filled my head with memories of my childhood in the Azores. … I remember looking forward to Saturday morning walks to the orchard with my father because it felt like I was going to work with him. We’d come home laden with bags of oranges and lemons and sometimes bananas too, and my mother would promptly make fruit salad. …

Past the fruit stalls was a large, partly closed-off area full of tables with fish and seafood displayed on mounds of ice. Women in oil-cloth aprons called out their catch of the day and competed for customers. I didn’t go in there very often because I felt conspicuous in my ignorance … and I was intimidated by these women, all of whom were loud and looked strong and confident. … I wasn’t yet brave enough to buy fish as I had no idea how to clean or cook most of it. … One day I’ll buy fish there, I’d think to myself. 

And of course, one day, she finally did, and the woman in the market cleaned it for her and told her how to cook it. And it turned out just right. 

The whole book is a series of memories, with picturesque descriptions of the scenery and the food and the people, many of them including food images so precise that reading made me hungry, and all of it interlaced with memories of Cabral’s childhood. It’s a gently written book that left me wanting to revisit that long-ago idea of putting my life in storage and heading out to see the world again.

Maybe one day I’ll do that. 

Other books about travel:

Winter in the City of Light: Finding Yourself in Retirement, by Sue Harper.

Walking the Camino: On Earth as It Is, Maryanna Gabriel. Review coming soon.

The Illogical Adventure: A Memoir of Love and Fate, by James MacDuff and Mirriam Mweemba. Review coming soon.

Visiting Africa: A Memoir, by Jesse O’Reilly-Conlin. Review coming soon.

Here’s a book about making the world come to you:

The Heart of Homestay: Creating Meaningful Connections When Hosting International Students, by Jennifer Robin Wilson.

Finding Yourself in Retirement: Memoir of a Journey of Self-Discovery

/ Lynne Melcombe / 4 Comments

Sue Harper’s Winter in the City of Light: A Search for Self in Retirement (self-published, 2019, class of 2016) is about exactly what the title suggests. After years of teaching, the author and her partner retired. A talented artist, her partner knew exactly who she would be in retirement. Harper wasn’t quite so sure. 

the Eiffel Tower with the book title overlaying it

Within a few years of retiring, they went on an adventure: a winter in Paris, where Harper’s partner attended an art course at the Sorbonne. Harper imagined that, during the days when her partner was at school, she would explore the most exciting city in the world, waiting for inspiration to strike, and then withdraw to the small apartment they’d rented and churn out book manuscripts.

It didn’t work out that way. On her own all day in a strange city, Harper had to face her fears, not only about going out on her own to explore the city, but about whether the author she’d thought was inside her was struggling as hard to get out as she’d always thought. About midway through the book, Harper writes: 

When we retire, we have lots of time to doubt ourselves. While the imposter phenomenon is destructive, it’s also difficult to overcome because no one talks about it. One of the researchers who labelled this phenomenon, psychologist Dr. Suzanne Imes, says little can be done to change the imposter’s feelings about herself. She is convinced she’s the only one who feels this way and fears that if she told anyone else she was a phoney “she would meet with criticism or at least very little understanding on the part of others.” …

It’s funny. I never felt fraudulent when I was writing textbooks, teaching, or helping other teachers, even when I earned promotions at work. My doubt seems strongest when I go to school. I’ve tried to pinpoint the reason for this. Was it because I always compared myself to my brother, who scored in the ninety-ninth percentile on the university entrance exams? Or maybe I couldn’t forget my father’s comment when I showed him my 88% in music: “What happened to the other 12%?”

Ouch. 

The point is that retirement is something we do in the winter of life, but we can never forget that winter can also be a turning point in a journey back to light. And ultimately that’s what Harper’s time in Paris became. Overcoming her imposter syndrome enough to complete the Master of Fine Arts program in Creative Nonfiction Writing at University of King’s College in Halifax, she also completed a book manuscript describing her own journey. 

Full disclosure: I met Harper through the University of King’s College MFA in Creative Nonfiction program and later copy edited her manuscript. I haven’t quite made it to retirement myself, but it’s likely when I get there I’ll go back and read it again to help myself face my fears and make my winter a time of new beginnings, as she did. 

Other books about journeys to self-discovery:

Run, Hide, Repeat: Memoir of a Fugitive Childhood, by Pauline Dakin.

The View from Coffin Ridge: A Childhood Exhumed, by Gwen Lamont.

Every Boy I Ever Kissed: A Memoir, by Nellwyn Lampert.

Heartbroken: Field Notes on a Constant Condition, Laura Pratt.

I Don’t Do Disability: And Other Lies I’ve Told Myself, by Adelle Purdham.

Louisburg or Bust: A Surfer’s Wild Ride Down Nova Scotia’s Drowned Coast, by RC Scott.

The Minister’s Wife: A Memoir of Faith, Doubt, Friendship, Loneliness, Forgiveness, and More, by Karen Stiller.

Heartbroken: A Journey Through Loss and Love

/ Lynne Melcombe / 4 Comments

Every year for Christmas, everyone in my family puts together a wish list. For the past several years, my list has included whatever books have been published by graduates of King’s University’s MFA in creative nonfiction, minus whichever of those I’ve already read. The list keeps growing—it now includes more than 50 books, of which I’ve read about half—so which ones appear under the Christmas tree is increasingly a surprise.

For Christmas 2023, one of the books was Laura Pratt’s Heartbroken: Field Notes on a Constant Condition (Random House Canada, 2023). I started reading it soon after Christmas. But then a new relationship I was in, for which I had high hopes, ended abruptly and I didn’t have the heart to continue. 

I picked it up again in the summer when I was travelling. Overall, the trip didn’t go well. There was a death in the family right before I left, I had my phone and wallet stolen while I was on a train to northern Scotland, and my sailing charter around the Inner Hebrides was cut short because of gale-force winds, including the tail end of Hurricane Ernesto. Not my best trip ever. 

Reading Heartbroken was a high point while confined below decks to escape the weather. With my own sad relationship a few months into the rearview, Pratt’s book helped me deal with the dregs of my feelings about it. The back cover sums the book up this way: 

“When Laura Pratt’s long-distance partner of six years tells her ‘it’s over’ at a busy downtown train station, she is sent reeling, the breakup coming out of the blue. He, meanwhile, closes himself off, refusing to acknowledge Laura and her requests for explanation. 

“In the following days, months, and then years, Laura struggles to make sense of the sudden ending, alone and filled with questions. A journalist, she seeks to understand the freefall that is heartbreak and how so many before her survived it, drawing on forces across time and form, and uncovers literary, philosophical, scientific, and psychological accounts of the mysterious alchemy of how we human beings fall in love in the first place, and why, when it ends, some of us take longer to get over it, or never do. She weaves this background of cultural history with her own bracing story of passionate love and its loss, and offers some hope for arriving—changed, broadened, grateful—on the other side.” 

What I enjoyed most about this book was the way Pratt weaves together the story of her all-encompassing loss with minute details of a vibrant and passionate love affair unfolding in a club in Toronto, an apartment in Montreal, the Laurentian Mountains, the streets of New Orleans, and anywhere else the couple’s whimsy took them. And then she enlivens the lyrical quality of her own prose with snippets of poetry, fiction, and research on everything from stages of grief to the history of love and the science of memory. In a chapter on happiness, she writes:

“And so we fed on each other, writing and playing and fucking, a thousand points of light. And we did it all inside the exquisite torture of a long-distance relationship, the inherent privation, privilege, and prolonging of which cannot be overstated. Extraordinary circumstances breed extraordinary experiences and our intermittent encounters were feverish. I was overheated as I brushed my hair in the airport bathroom on those brilliant Thursday evenings, my sparks glancing off the tiles. I was beautiful and couldn’t wait to show him, to step out of those sliding doors and into the Montreal evening and his Toyota. To light up the sky with our happiness.”

This was a beautiful, heartbreaking book. I recommend it to readers of all ages who have loved, whether or not they have also lost. 

PS. Closing in on a year after my four-month relationship ended, I still find myself wrestling with what went wrong, waiting for the day I can simply say “It was fun while it lasted” and leave it at that. 

Books about love and loss:

One Strong Girl: Surviving the Unimaginable—A Mother’s Memoir, by S. Lesley Buxton.

Still, I Cannot Save You: A Memoir of Sisterhood, Love, and Letting Go, by Kelly S. Thompson.