Run Towards the Danger: Confrontations with a Body of Memory - Softcover

Polley, Sarah

 
9780593300374: Run Towards the Danger: Confrontations with a Body of Memory
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0593300378 ISBN 13: 9780593300374
Verlag: Penguin Publishing Group, 2024

Inhaltsangabe

“A visceral and incisive collection of six propulsive personal essays.” —Vanity Fair

*A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice * Named a Most-Anticipated Book by Entertainment Weekly, Lit Hub, and AV Club * New York Times Paperback Row*

From the Academy Award-winning screenwriter of Women Talking and the acclaimed director and actor Sarah Polley, Run Towards the Danger explores memory and the dialogue between her past and her present

These are the most dangerous stories of my life. The ones I have avoided, the ones I haven’t told, the ones that have kept me awake on countless nights. As these stories found echoes in my adult life, and then went another, better way than they did in childhood, they became lighter and easier to carry.

In this extraordinary book, Sarah Polley explores what it is to live in one’s body, in a constant state of becoming, learning, and changing. Each of these six essays captures a piece of Polley’s life as she remembers it, while at the same time examining the fallibility of memory, the mutability of reality in the mind, and the possibility of experiencing the past anew, as the person she is now but was not then. As Polley writes, the past and present are in a “reciprocal pressure dance.”

Polley contemplates stories from her own life ranging from stage fright to high-risk childbirth to endangerment and more. After struggling with the aftermath of a concussion, Polley met a specialist who gave her wholly new advice: to recover from a traumatic injury, she had to retrain her mind to strength by charging towards the very activities that triggered her symptoms. With riveting clarity, she shows the power of applying that same advice to other areas of her life in order to find a path forward, a way through. Rather than live in a protective crouch, she had to run towards the danger.

Die Inhaltsangabe kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Sarah Polley is the Academy Award-winning screenwriter of Women Talking and an Academy Award–nominated director and actor. After making short films, Polley made her feature-length directorial debut with the drama film Away from Her in 2006. Polley received an Oscar nomination for the screenplay, which she adapted from the Alice Munro story “The Bear Came Over the Mountain.” Her other projects include the documentary film Stories We Tell (2012), which won the New York Film Critics Circle prize and the National Board of Review award for best documentary; the miniseries adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s novel Alias Grace (2017); and the romantic comedy Take This Waltz (2011). Polley began her acting career as a child, starring in many productions for film and television.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

"I could tell you my adventures-beginning from this morning," said Alice a little timidly: "but it's no use going back to yesterday, because I was a different person then."

-Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

At least twice a week, I used to find myself in a periwinkle-blue poufy dress with a white pinafore. My stockings were striped and my hair was held firmly by a headband that dug into my head behind my ears. My breasts, still tender and growing, were painfully flattened by a tensor bandage. It was a dream that I frequently found myself in, where nothing anyone around me said made any sense and it was all hostile: hostile towards my common sense, hostile towards my youth, hostile towards my growing up. I knew I didn't want to be a child; I wanted to be a queen but I didn't want to be left alone, or tested, or made fun of or to do all the things that seemed to be necessary to become a queen. I would follow corkscrew paths. I had to run in order to stay in the same place. People would scream in pain before they were hurt. There was a mint in my mouth for good luck. I wanted to kill myself.

Sometimes when I woke from this dream, I remembered that I was, in fact, wearing a rose-coloured dress and not a blue one. Sometimes I corrected my subconscious. Most of the time, though, I woke up incapable of differentiating the portrait of myself from the iconic John Tenniel illustrations, coloured in modern reprints. I wonder if Alice Liddell had had the same problem.

The real Alice was a sullen-looking child with dark hair and eyes. In one of the photographs that Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll) took of her, "The Beggar Maid," she looks alarmingly sexual, taunting him, challenging him to want more. At least that's how I viewed the photograph when I was a young teenager. As I look at the same photograph now, as a grown woman, I wonder what instructions the adult taking the photograph gave to her to produce such an alarming effect. In the books and movies that were consumed by millions, though, Alice is golden and fair, WASPy beyond measure, and exudes innocence. The books, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, have passed through children's hands for over a century now, cloaked in this deceptive costume.

Ever since I can remember, these books inspired a terror and an exasperation in me. Every one of Alice's attempts to make sense of her new, irrational world, to find anything approximating normalcy, or to simply get home is thwarted by mean-spirited creatures with their own irrational systems of logic. Despite my father's love of these books, I never, as a young child, wanted to hear them read at bedtime. They left me exhausted, haunted by a kind of relentless uncertainty. I feared that if I took any time to live inside these stories, the walls and ceiling of my childhood bedroom might soon collapse into dust and be replaced by kooky angles of drywall.

As an adult, I experience this same aversion to movies that remind me of the Alice books or that mirror this same quality of someone constantly trying to get somewhere and failing. Movies like After Hours make we want to scream. They make me feel nauseous and aggravated and goosepimply.

I hate stories in which people can't get to where they're going.

As there seemed to be no chance of getting her hands up to her head, she tried to get her head down to them, and was delighted to find that her neck would bend about easily in any direction, like a serpent. She had just succeeded in curving it down into a graceful zigzag . . .

"But I'm not a serpent, I tell you!" said Alice. "I'm a-I'm a-"

"Well! What are you?" said the Pigeon. "I can see you're trying to invent something!"

"I-I'm a little girl," said Alice, rather doubtfully, as she remembered the number of changes she had gone through that day.

-Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

When I was fifteen years old I got caught through the looking glass in a pink dress, in a crisp white pinafore, with my breasts bound, playing younger than I was. My spine had by then bent-perhaps, I thought then, under the weight of grief-to a forty-five-degree angle, so along with the tensor bandages pulled tightly across my chest, the pink dress itself was lined with various strategically placed pads to make my shoulders, my back, and my waist appear symmetrical. Even then, it took effort to appear straight. On two-show days I would begin to sag sideways, the tips of my left hand's fingers almost touching the side of my left knee. One of my left ribs, just under my breasts, protruded so much that it created a noticeable lump right in the middle of my torso, causing the right rib to slough out of view.

I knew I had to wear a hard plastic brace sixteen hours a day to make my body grow straighter, but I didn't, so every few months I, and others, noticed that I twisted and bent a little more. By this point I knew I was close to needing major surgery to correct the curve, but that was to be my choice too, having no parent to oversee such choices. The surgery terrified me, not only the idea of being cut into and operated on for ten hours, having my spine stretched out, fused, and a pound of metal attached to it, but also I couldn't think who would take care of me while I recovered. I had stopped going to regular follow-ups at the hospital a long time before, had stopped wearing the brace around my body sixteen hours a day as prescribed, had stopped thinking about what the consequences of my negligence could be. I knew that I was free to keep twisting and curving and sloping and that nothing, ever, would stop me. There was no adult who could force me straight.

But I wondered, now, at fifteen years old, if the thing I had feared the most, the prospect of this major spinal surgery, could liberate me from something I found myself fearing even more: walking even one more time onto a stage at the Stratford Festival.

I had been diagnosed with scoliosis four years earlier during a routine insurance medical for the television series Road to Avonlea. The doctor asked me to touch my toes, and then spent a while tracing the protrusion of my spine with his fingers. When I stood up straight again and looked at him, his brow was furrowed.

It somehow made sense to me to be told that I wasn't straight, that my spine was curving nonsensically to the right at the top and to the left at the bottom. My world had started curving out of shape the previous year, and my own body curving alongside it gave things a logical symmetry. It also made sense of a few things that had been mysterious to me about my ever-changing body, chiefly (and most important to my eleven-year-old self) the noticeably lopsided breasts that had begun to emerge, the left one growing large and ripe while the other one remained almost nonexistent.

I was alone in the examining room with the doctor when he made the discovery, and when he said the word scoliosis, it sounded like death. My mother had died just months before, and my experience of diseases was that they didn't hold back. They took you and maimed you and ended you. So when I heard the diagnosis of something with a -sis on the end of it, I assumed that my days were numbered. He referred me to the orthopaedics department at Toronto's Hospital for Sick Children, and that is where I found myself a month later, in a waiting room with similarly crooked kids, all of us waiting to hear how badly we'd been bent out of shape.

After a trip to the X-ray machine it was determined that I had a thirty-eight-degree curvature in my thoracic spine. I stared, transfixed, at the X-ray. It was strange to see that my own spine, lit from behind by the light board, had been hiding secrets from me. For years it had been surreptitiously bending itself into the ugly beginnings of a coil. It seemed impossible that I could...

„Über diesen Titel“ kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.

Verlag
Penguin Publishing Group
Erscheinungsdatum
2024
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0593300378
ISBN 13 
9780593300374
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
272
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Harder
https://www.edel.com

Neum�hlen 17
Hamburg
Hamburg
22763
Deutschland

Weitere beliebte Ausgaben desselben Titels

9780593300350: Run Towards the Danger: Confrontations with a Body of Memory

Vorgestellte Ausgabe

ISBN 10:  0593300351 ISBN 13:  9780593300350
Verlag: Penguin Press, 2022
Hardcover