Pluck: A memoir of a Newfoundland childhood and the raucous, terrible, amazing journey to becoming a novelist - Softcover

Morrissey, Donna

 
9780735239197: Pluck: A memoir of a Newfoundland childhood and the raucous, terrible, amazing journey to becoming a novelist
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0735239193 ISBN 13: 9780735239197
Verlag: Viking, 2021

Inhaltsangabe

NATIONAL BESTSELLER

FINALIST FOR THE 2022 ATLANTIC BOOK AWARDS’ EVELYN RICHARDSON NON-FICTION AWARD
 
A deeply personal account of love's restorative ability as it leads renowned novelist Donna Morrissey through mental illness, family death, and despair to becoming a writer--told with charm and inimitable humour.

When Donna Morrissey left the only home she had ever known, an isolated Newfoundland settlement, at age 16, she was ready for adventure. She had grown up without television or telephones but had absorbed the tragic stories and comic yarns of her close-knit family and community. The death of her infant brother marked the family, and years later, Morrissey suffers devastating guilt about the accidental death of her teenage brother, whom she'd enticed to join her in the oilfields. Her misery was compounded by her own misdiagnosis of a terminal illness, all of which contributed to crippling anxiety and an actual diagnosis of PTSD. Many of those events and themes would eventually be transformed and recast as fictional gold in Morrissey's novels.

In another writer's hands, Morrissey's account of her personal story could easily be a tragedy. Instead, she combines darkness and light, levity and sadness into her tale, as her indomitable spirit and humour sustain her. Morrissey's path takes her from the drudgery of being a grocery clerk (who occasionally enlivens her shift with recreational drugs) to western oilfields, to marriage and divorce and working in a fish-processing plant to support herself and her two young children. Throughout her struggles, she nourishes a love of learning and language.

Morrissey layers her account of her life with stories of those who came before her, a breed rarely seen in the modern world. It centers around iron-willed women: mothers and daughters, wives, sisters, teachers and mentors who find the support, the wind for their wings, outside the bounds given to them by nature. And it is a mysterious older woman she meets in Halifax who eventually unleashes the writer that Morrissey is destined to become.

An inspiring and insightful memoir, Pluck illustrates that even when you find yourself unravelling, you can find a way to spin the yarns that will save you--and delight readers everywhere.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

DONNA MORRISSEY is the author of the nationally bestselling memoir Pluck, which was a finalist for the Atlantic Book Awards' Non-Fiction Award, and of six acclaimed and bestselling novels. Among her honours are the Thomas Raddall Atlantic Fiction Award and the Arthur Ellis Award for Best Crime Fiction for The Fortunate Brother; Sylvanus Now was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers' Prize; and The Deception of Livvy Higgs was a One Read pick for Nova Scotia in 2017. Her fiction has also won awards in the US and the UK, and has been translated into several languages. Born and raised in Newfoundland, she lives in Halifax.

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PROLOGUE
 
If you were a bird flying over the most easterly fringe of Canada you’d see a great island broiling out of the Atlantic, its granite shores rollicking with fishing boats and flakes and fishermen. A sweep of coloured houses face the wind, smoke whirling from their chimneys, youngsters scrabbling after sheep and hens and grandmothers scrabbling after youngsters, hiding now within swaths of sheets billowing around them from the clotheslines.
 
Swoop inland and you’d see the quilted greens and browns of its forests, sequined with ponds and rioting rivers and waterfalls. Should you glide up the forty-mile inlet of White Bay on the northwest side of the island, with its steep wooded hills shouldering the sky, you might hover over a strip of beach with two tiny outports at either end. They’re a five-minute walk apart and about ten houses each, separated by a point of land jutting into the sea. Upper Beaches and Lower Beaches. That’s where I was born on January 13, 1956. Upper Beaches. Or, to those on the Lower Beaches, up on the point. Likewise, we referred to them as down below.
 
Not much came to us before the late sixties. Televisions, telephones, cars, roads, none of that. Most visitors were fogbound fishers, the odd aunt or uncle, the occasional young man or woman coming ashore to go courting. Yet lots came to us in different ways: songs, dances, jannying. Yarns spun on the spot and growing with each teller of the tale. No doubt things have opened up since I was a girl. Still, such an environment, culture, and circumstance spawned a uniqueness of character that resides in most of us who grew up there. I never tire of talking about it.
 
It was during an adult education course, after I’d graduated university in my thirty-eighth year, that I started writing. I’d met an older woman named Elly who enraptured my mind with stories of skeleton women trapped in bad marriages who ended up walking the floors of frozen oceans, trying to get out; stories of how we see ourselves not as swans but as ugly ducklings, of how we eat the poison apple of sleep rather than invite spiritual awakening. It was in the midst of one of those tales when she turned to me and said, “You’re dragging your own bag of bones, dear. Go find your voice and write your own myth.”
 
I bought an alarm clock. Every morning I got up at six, and before going to work I’d sit with the homeless in a downtown café, writing, writing, writing. I wrote about the pigeons hobbling around on the icy sidewalk beneath my window, the sun rising over the southern hillside, the peonies in my grandmother’s garden, the irks and ills of my siblings, of my mother, my father, my grandparents, until my pen took on a life of its own and my father became a boy called Luke, my mother a girl called Claire, my brother Glenn a cat called Pirate. I myself would carry many names
 
.I write words spoken by my mother. I write words spoken by aunts and uncles. I write about what I’ve seen, heard, and, well, made up. Thus far it has fed into six novels situated in Newfoundland culture, some of those novels undergoing up to seven translations. When I asked my Japanese editor why her publisher had been attracted to Kit’s Law, the story of a girl growing up in a rural Newfoundland outport, she answered, “It is a story of faith, the elderly, and family love. It is what our Japanese culture was built upon, and we struggle now to keep it.”
 
It matters not our differences, then, because we all eat from the one basket of life with its fruits of joy, kindness, goodness, and patience. We all speak the universal language of love, laughter, fear, and grief evoked by this tremendous and terrible journey through life. And of the fruits in the basket it’s joy I covet the most, as it allows me to see the beauty in a frost-etched window and hear the singing of broken glass being swept by my mother’s broom. And joy is fed by love. It’s fed by gratification and blessedness and it is the seventh heaven. It was the memory of joy that kept me going during my trials of physical and spiritual impoverishment. It was the memory of joy that sustained me through the dark hole I fell into during my forties, joy that held me throughout the hellish battle for sanity in a world suddenly turned on its head. And yet it was during those moments when joy was blanketed by fear, grief, contempt, guilt, shame, and so many other ills that I was kicked, bruised and hurting, into consciousness—which is, I believe, where God lives.
 
For our truly conscious moments happen when something—big or small—awakens us to a deeper way of seeing things, dredging us up from innocence into awareness. Looking back, I see those moments (some of them lasting for days, months, perhaps years) as lampposts pinpointing my journey through the dark corridors of my past. This memoir follows a trajectory through some of the more significant of these, leading up to the death of my mother and the publication of my first novel, one that her courage helped me create during her final days. For each moment recounted here there are thousands more not written. And whenever my personal story becomes lost in my mother’s story, it is because she carried me in hers.
 
 
IMAGINATION

FEAR
 
It came without being beckoned. It came within a flash. It touched cold against my skin, and before I could grasp what it was it seeded itself inside the moist dark marrow of my bones.
 
I was eight. It was warm and sunny, the ocean lapping along the shore. I was heading for home, proud of the six-foot slab I’d just pulled from the sea for firewood. It was smelly and water-sogged heavy. When I reached the first house, Aunt Rose’s place, she was leaning on her fence, staring down the road. Something was wrong. My aunts were hovering on the road in front of my house. The aunts never hovered in a huddle on the road. They were always inside, doing things. They came out only when a youngster cried too hard or they needed a bit of kindling from the porch to flame a fire. They’d scoot to another’s house for a cup of tea or to borrow a bit of pork fat or butter. They’d team up with buckets and rags and clean the school or Aunt Rene’s or Grandmother’s house if those women were feeling too poorly to do it themselves. They never huddled and hovered in a group on the road.
 
Aunt Rose lifted the latch of her gate and stepped outside. She hadn’t been outside her gate in sixty years. She caught sight of me and her wrinkly mouth trembled. “Your little brother is dead, my love, your little brother is dead. Sin, sin, just startin’ to walk and now he’s dead.”
 
I didn’t know what dead was. I’d seen a chicken in Grandmother’s henhouse once that was stiff and dirty and cold to the touch, and Grandmother had said it was dead. But Baby Paul wasn’t a chicken. And he was in hospital because he had a cough. I didn’t know what hospital was, either.
 
My father bounded out of our house and jumped into his truck, firing up the engine. I dropped the slab. My mother came running too, her sweater half on, Aunt Beat holding the truck door open for her. My mother was barely inside before it jolted forward. I held out my arms, running. The brakes squealed as Dad rolled down his window, his voice catching on a wet cough as he yelled, “Go home, go on home now.”
 
They roared off in a flurry of dust from the dry gravel road, the aunts wringing their hands and staring after them. Aunt Marg whimpered, “My, oh my,...

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Verlag
Viking
Erscheinungsdatum
2021
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0735239193
ISBN 13 
9780735239197
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
320
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
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