“That girl that I was” – Moving memoirs at Event 49

“I didn’t need a mother but I wanted to know who my mother was,” Priscilla Uppal candidly declared during In the Beginning (Event 49). When Uppal was seven years old her mother fled to Brazil. Her father had become a quadriplegic five years earlier. Twenty years later Uppal happened across her mother’s website. Uppal told the audience, “I was in shock and did what any writer would do, I immediately applied for funding.” She was awarded funding and booked a flight to Brazil to meet her mother for the first time as an adult. This is the subject of her latest work Projection: Encounters with my Runaway Mother, a Governor General’s Literary Award finalist. When moderator Andreas Schroeder asked, “When did you stop looking at that enterprise as daughter and start looking at it as a writer?” Uppal replied, “Almost from the beginning”, finding that writing was a way of contending with the astonishing experience. “Family relationships are over-sentimentalized” Uppal continued, and explaining that we all want that “Oprah moment” which in her case was not possible. Taking ten years to craft this compelling account, Uppal asked herself at many points if she was being fair to those she depicted. Then Uppal shared a sentiment that resonated with many in the audience based on murmurs of acknowledgement and a spontaneous round of applause which followed her disclosure. Uppal explained that writing this book allowed her to come to terms with not including individuals in her life, with letting go of guilt and recognizing the impact of both seen and unseen trauma and pain on relationships.

There are certainly no “Oprah moments” in Amber Dawn’s memoir of sex work on Vancouver’s downtown eastside in How Poetry Saved my Life: A Hustler’s Memoir. Rather, this tale is a slow burn of narrative interspersed with poetry, an account of a prolonged struggle for survival, and story populated with women, many of whom did not emerge safely on the other side. Said Dawn, “I’m not interested in voyeurism or pity or becoming the voice of a social debate”…“what I try to show through a lot of my work is that we’re just all in this shit show together.” When asked about the impact of the experience of writing this memoir, Dawn admitted to a certain degree of disassociation until the moment she came across an old poem, hours before her final manuscript was due. Her eye caught upon handwriting which she recognized as her own, at the bottom of the page listing her old Carral Street address as well as a phone number for the womens centre. She didn’t have a phone at that time but she knew that someone at the centre could find her if she needed to be reached. This artefact, a note penned by her own hand years ago, triggered a memory of a younger version of herself, commuting from the downtown eastside to the University of British Columbia. In that moment, Dawn said, “I felt for that girl that I was.”

Jowita Bydlowska gave away little, but many in the audience clearly felt for the girl/woman that she once was as she joined the panel to discuss her debut memoir, Drunk Mom. The audience appreciated and rewarded her candour with warm applause following her reading. At times her voice waivered as she twisted her body into the mike, leaning on the podium, however she gathered momentum when she arrived at the pivotal moment in her reading, a powerfully rendered scene where she recognizes herself in the desperate addicts and drunks she passes when walking home. Later in the event Bydlowska revealed, “I feel very exposed sometimes, during readings, taking questions from the audience- for me it’s quite emotional.” When Schroeder her what she discovered through writing the memoir and what the process brought out, Bydlowska explained, “I pitched this book as a work of fiction so I had already put up a wall.” It was only afterwards while editing that the weight of her experience became visceral. Bydlowska reveals that pain of encountering new mothers with their infants, stating, “I missed that entire year. I don’t have those memories.”

The preservation of memories is what compelled Helen Humphreys to write a memoir of grief, what began as a letter to her brother when he died at the age of 45 of pancreatic cancer. Said Humphreys, “I really wanted to not forget him. I know, he said himself, he did not want to be forgotten.” By writing Nocturne: On the Life and Death of My Brother she also wanted to reveal what she describes as the grief mind. Before Humphreys began her reading, she commented that it was strange to read aloud in the second person. While that may be, this is precisely why her reading was so moving, the impact of the direct address was staggering. Her prose is raw but poetically articulate encapsulating the notion that although a loved one dies, your relationship with the deceased continues. Humphreys’ reading began with the first line of the book, “This is what happened after you died. We took the plastic bag with your clothes…” Anyone who has been at the bedside of a loved one who has passed will recognize the ludicrous way one suddenly contends with the arbitrary disposal of personal effects. One may recognize the experience of exiting the hospital and entering the world with the knowledge that a loved one is no longer here, feeling both numb and raw.  This memoir will break you open. I took to reading it in snippets on lunch breaks at my place of work to ward off tears. And to think Humphreys may have never shared this story. Humphreys explained, “I published a short piece to see if it was interesting to anyone other than myself.”

Clearly what is miraculous about all memoirs is not the subject matter, the prose, the reveal, but the way in which each account speaks to a reader somewhere. Loss, addiction, family, tragedy- life at its hardest and most gruelling, gritty moments- these memoirs of human experience commune with each of us on a personal level. When read aloud, when represented in the flesh at an event such as this, one can’t help but to admire the writer, just as much as the writing.