Memoir

I remember when Pauline Dakin gave her pitch to the class of 2015. We were the inaugural class of the MFA in Creative Nonfiction program at University of King’s College. That meant that everything that first year was a bit of an experiment, with about 20 of us as very willing, very excited lab rats. We’d arrived on a Sunday in August, spent a day getting oriented, and thereafter went into our mentor groups for three hours every morning and whole-group sessions in the afternoons. We started our pitches on the second or third afternoon.

Book cover shows a family snapshot of two children, a girl of about 6 and a boy of about 4, playing on a sun-drenched beach.

I was intimidated by my classmates. I was a nobody who’d done a dozen years of freelance journalism, much of it for magazines no one had heard of, followed by a dozen years of communications for small not-for-profits, overlapping with a dozen years of copy editing. The rest of the class included a reporter from CBC’s The National, a former assistant editor of Chatelaine, a published novelist on staff at The Walrus, and a graduate of UBC’s esteemed BFA in Creative Writing—writers who were way out of my league.

Pauline was one of them. A long-time health reporter with CBC Radio, she pitched a timely and well-researched idea about the health impacts of screen time on the growing brains of children and youth. It would have made a timely and interesting book. But then she said she had another idea. She’d been toying with it for quite a while, but she wasn’t sure.

Finally, she shared the story of her unusual childhood. As she spoke, the room fell still and silent. After she finished, someone said something like, “I-I really like your first idea but, but your second idea—wow! Yeah, uh, do that one.”

Pauline might have been the first of us to get a book deal, the result being the bestselling Run, Hide, Repeat: A Memoir of a Fugitive Childhood (Viking, 2017, 2022). The book flap says: “Pauline Dakin spent her childhood on the run. Without warning, her mother twice uprooted her and her brother, moving thousands of miles away from family and friends. Disturbing events interrupt their outwardly normal life: break-ins, car thefts, even physical attacks on a family friend. Many years later, her mother finally revealed they’d been running from the Mafia and were receiving protection from a covert anti-organized crime task force.

“But the truth was even more bizarre. Gradually, Dakin’s fears give way to suspicion. She puts her journalistic training to work and discovers that the Mafia threat was actually an elaborate web of lies. As she revisits her past, Dakin discovers the human capacity for betrayal and deception, and the power of love to forgive.”

Run, Hide, Repeat is the kind of page-turner you stay awake half the night to finish, all the more compelling because every word is true. Winner of the 2018 Edna Staebler Award for Creative Non-Fiction and shortlisted for several other awards, Run, Hide, Repeat was re-released in 2022 to coincide with its launch as a five-part CBC podcast.

Recalling that afternoon pitch session for an article on cbc.ca about the podcast, Pauline says “I did my big pitch [on the impact of screen time on children and adolescents] and everyone nodded. And then, I just stood there. I didn’t know this was coming; I said, ‘Can I pitch you another story?’ … I just told this group of strangers and I was just trembling as I told it. Of course, I finished and they were all looking at me with eyes as big as pie plates going, ‘yeah you should write that one!’

“Even then … I didn’t dive right in. I waffled back and forth over two years about which book I was writing. Ultimately, this was the one. I am so glad I did because I think the act of telling the secret, of being loud about the secret, undid some of the damage of the secret. … Eventually I came to feel that not holding secrets lets you let go. It’s the secrets that are so toxic.”

Books can have such amazing ability to challenge the way you think, make you feel things you didn’t know you could feel, teach you things you never dreamed of learning. Run, Hide, Repeat is the epitome of all that. A powerful book, and I’m proud to number the author among my friends.

Books about family, for better and worse:

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

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

Acadian Driftwood: One Family and the Great Expulsion, by Tyler LeBlanc.

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

[Note: I’d planned to write about Pauline Dakin’s book, Run, Hide, Repeat, in this post until I realized that Lesley Buxton is giving a webinar in less than a week. See end of post for details and link.]

I knew of Lesley Buxton before I met her. A friend and colleague of mine in Ottawa, where Lesley lived at the time, had shared the unimaginable story of her losing her only child to a rare neurological disease. This had happened just over a year before she began the MFA program (class of 2016). I was, and remain, in awe of her resilience.

I remember when Lesley began writing her book, One Strong Girl: Surviving the Unimaginable—a Mother’s Memoir (Pottersfield Press, 2018). She didn’t want to tell her story in chronological order because everyone would know the ending before they began.

Instead, the book opens a few months after her daughter, India, has died. She and her husband are on a plane to Japan, with which India was obsessed, to celebrate what would have been her seventeenth birthday. They’d had a speck of their daughter’s ashes baked into 16 colourful glass beads that they planned to leave in places she would have loved to visit. When I heard this story, I thought that was a far better idea than anything else I could think of doing with the memory of a child, especially one who’d seemed destined to do creative and interesting things.

Lesley’s story then goes back to a time when India was just 10 years old. It’s the day the first symptom of India’s illness appeared, remarkable only for the fact that Lesley had a dental appointment that day, until India inexplicably fell. Their journey began, the journey that every parent hopes will never begin for them.

From there, the story moves back and forth in time, sort of the way grief moves back and forth, taking us from the present to a memory in the distant past to thoughts of the future to a memory in the recent past, in no particular order.

“Mark and I decided, when we headed west through the States to Vancouver, a stop on our way to Japan, that if we wanted something, we’d treat ourselves. By the time we returned to Quebec in the middle of June, the back seat of our car was heaving with souvenirs …

“In Gibson’s, British Columbia, I bought myself a dress on a whim. The dress had a halter top and a wide 1950s skirt. It was sky blue and covered with pirate flags. I knew she would approve, though she probably would have told me it was too low cut.

“I never censored India’s taste. A romantic with a flair for the dramatic, she favoured Manga-inspired outfits over low-cut t-shirts and short skirts. She often looked as if she’d stepped out of an anime movie.

“We still have her clothes. Everything is packed in big blue Tupperware boxes. Among them, a cream-coloured satin Regent style wedding dress she liked because it looked like it belonged to a Jane Austen character, and a Goth evening gown which, when she was sick, she used to watch TV in. I have no idea what will become of these things.

“Whenever I buy clothes, the first thing I ask myself is if India would approve. She was very opinionated about how I should dress. Once when I was wearing white pants, she told me, ‘Mummy, you can’t wear white. You’re not Beyonce.’ I’m not sure what I said, but I’m pretty sure I laughed. Now I don’t ever wear white. Too afraid. India might strike me down with a lightning bolt.”

A few years after India died, Lesley and her husband, Mark, moved out to BC, where her sister and parents still live. A few years after that, Mark was diagnosed with cancer; he died in 2022. I remember being in awe of Lesley’s attitude after he passed. I live with depression and often struggle with thoughts of suicide, and all three of my children are still alive and well. I don’t know how I would manage in Lesley’s circumstances. But a short while after Mark passed, Lesley wrote on Facebook that continuing to live well and enjoy life would be her way of honouring Mark and India. It’s what they would want for her.

It’s no wonder India was one strong girl. Her mother is one strong woman.

One Strong Girl won the first-ever Pottersfield Prize for Creative Nonfiction. On Sunday October 27, 2024, Lesley Buxton will present a webinar, Scene Stealing: Creating Textured Scenes Using Your Five Senses, through the Federation of BC Writers.

Other books about illness and disability:

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

Just Jen: Thriving Through Multiple Sclerosis, by Jen Powell.

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

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