April 11, 2022

4 Great Essay Collections

Run Towards the Danger, by Sarah Polley

I’ve read a run of great essay collections lately, which kicked off with actor/director Sarah Polley’s bestselling new release. It was a book I regarded curiously, at first, because the premise was strange: six essays about various experiences from Polley’s life, in which an adult perspective circles back on childhood trauma. Polley is a former child actor and now an acclaimed film director and writer, and I wondered if the whole project might be a gimmick, but then I kept hearing from reader after reader about how excellent the book actually is. And they were right. I loved this one, its searing, visceral writing, its willingness to complicate, to circle back and around, its acknowledgement of darkness and light, often in the very same place. Brave, original, and interesting, Polley writes about growing up too soon after the death of her mother, about stage fright, exploitation as a child actor, about carrying the story of her experience abuse by a notorious celebrity, about a complicated pregnancy and introduction to motherhood. Polley has had a remarkable life and she owns both her privilege and her trials at once, demonstrating that our experiences and our perceptions of experiences are multitudinous and ever subject to change.

---

Spílexm, by Nicola I. Campbell

Celebrated children’s book author Nicola I. Campbell’s Spílexm (which means “remembered stories” in the language spoken by Nlaka’pamux in British Columbia) is a beautiful collection weaving poetry, memoir, journals and letters to tell her story of becoming as Nlaka’pamux, Sylix, and Metis, and the daughter/granddaughter/etc of residential school survivors. This is a story of grief and survival, and a testament to the remarkable powers of love, family ties and personal will to overcome trauma and design a better future for one’s self, and Campbell imagines the same for Indigenous people across Turtle Island. My favourite parts of the story are those where she writes about canoe racing, discovering her own power and the power of community. This is such a generous and achingly beautiful offering to the world.

---

Send Me Into the Woods Alone, by Erin Pepler

While this collection is subtitled “Essays on Motherhood,” it too is a story of becoming, a story of womanhood and daughterhood, and personhood. Truly it’s a smorgasbord of goodness, essays recounting a difficult pregnancy, the details of labour (that one is called “A Million Hands in One Vagina”), and onward through the years. At the beginning I wondered if these essays might suffer a bit from the desire to be relatable and inclusive at the expense of specificity, but such concerns fell away as Pepler delves into her own story and writes with such candour about her struggles with anxiety, and about how her own family experiences growing up inform her parenting now, for better or for worse. The collection is tremendously moving, but also very funny—I kept reading parts aloud to whoever happened to be in the room with me. Like motherhood itself, Send Me Into The Woods Alone is equal-parts light and dark, joy and misery, another writer who’s unafraid to be complicated and tell the truth.

---

I Came All This Way to Meet You, by Jami Attenberg

And finally this collection by American novelist Attenberg, the story of her Midwestern roots, her years in New York, and finding home in New Orleans, an unlikely outcome for someone who spent years couch-surfing, which turned into years staying in friends’ spare rooms as their lives stabilized but hers didn’t for such a long time. Coming later to writing, put off by an assault in her first year of undergraduate studies, a story she tells in connection to the testimony of Christine Blasey Ford about how Supreme Court nominee had sexually assaulted her years before. Attenberg writes, “Why do we believe these men are the best when they are the worst? Why do we hold on to them?” In this collection, Attenberg writes her process of coming to own her story and her voice, all of this underlined her her persistence in staying true to her art through the ups and downs of the writing life and her determination to succeed as a writer.