Books that contemplate a search for family and pain of abandonment
When you're a child and your mom or dad walks out of your life, there's a good chance you'll spend the rest of your life dealing with the trauma. Two award-winning authors have new books out that take readers on a search for family, for hope and a way out of the pain of abandonment.
Winnipeg author Colleen Nelson, who won the McNally Robinson Book of the Year for Young People in 2012, is back with a novel exposing the generational scars of a residential school. And Camilla Gibb, who was shortlisted for the Giller Prize for her best-selling book Sweetness in the Belly, is back with a memoir that will connect with many readers, about working her way through grief to a place of peace:
"Being able to put your experiences into a narrative gives meaning to the life you have lived. It can allow you to make sense of the things that have seemed the most senseless and cruel by providing some context – even if the context is nothing more than: it didn't kill me. I am alive to tell this tale. I am here, where I was once there. There is a story, possibly a universal one, of the passage between there and here."
This is Happy is a raw, exposed nerve sheathed in poetic insights. Gibb's father, dealing with a mental illness, is in and out of her life in bizarre and painful bursts. She details her struggles with depression, her suicide attempts, and the "most devastating moment" in her life: the day her wife leaves her, just a few weeks into Gibb's pregnancy.
And that is the heart of the memoir; Gibb's baby girl, known only as "the egg" becomes the centre of a family cobbled together from loneliness. Gibb builds a home and creates her own deeply committed family from the damaged people she loves, including her drug-addicted brother.
Gibb's journey from "there to here" is an honest and unflinching look at the pain of abandonment, and the deep digging and work you must undertake to rebuild your world and find your happiness.
250 Hours, by Colleen Nelson
The teenagers at the centre of Nelson's new young adult novel, 250 Hours, are also scarred by loss. Sara Jean's mother left when she was a baby, and now the 18-year old cares for her obese grandmother, while holding tight to her plans of escaping her small town. Jess's dad walked out when he was a kid. Now he sets fires. Jess feels the itch in his fingers when the pain overwhelms him:
"Sheds, dumpsters, garbage cans, his fires were small, easy to walk away from. His fires were about gaining control, not about destruction."
Jess has to work off 250 hours of community service helping Sara Jean clear out her late grandfather's garage. While going through boxes of his papers, the teens realize Sara Jean's grandfather was a teacher at the old abandoned residential school just outside town. The same school Jess's father went to as a child, before he grew up and left town a broken man.
Nelson covers a lot of big issues in a short time: small-town racism, the legacy of residential schools, and most importantly, what it takes to stand up for the people you call home — and also to the people you realize no longer are your home.
As in her two previous books, Tori by Design and The Fall, Nelson perfectly captures a slice of those pivotal, defining moments in a teenager's life.
250 Hours tells the intimate story of what family means to two lonely young people on the edge of adulthood.