Heart Matters
Mood:  happy
Topic: Writing Outings
Thursday 10:32pm 19Oct06

My first Talk/Interview for IFOA was Adrienne Clarkson (the ex Governor General) interviewed by Pamela Wallin.

Adrienne's talk was about her memoir, Heart Matters. She both talked and read from the book. She was excellent. I kept questioning myself whether I really wanted to attend and not go to a reading instead. How interesting is she going to be? Really interesting.

My only disappointment was that Pamela Wallin didn't give the audience a chance to ask any questions which is the norm at interviews. I actually had a question for Adrienne. So I'm going to try and find her email address to ask her the question.

Adrienne discussed coming to Canada from Hong Kong as a refugee and that each family member could only bring one suitcase per person. Imagine looking through all your belongings and only being allowed to fill a suitcase. What would you choose? What could I choose? What would I be able to limit myself to?

She quoted Margaret Laurence - "you must feel in your heart the reality of others."

Her memoir is filled with her memories, stories her mother and father told her and the information that she gleaned from her father's memoir that he'd worked on for years and then left for safe keeping in the Bank of Montreal in 1946. When Adrienne was the Governor General she went to that Bank and asked if they still had stuff left there by her father and they did. And they gave it to her. More than 50 years later. That fascinates me beyond belief especially since Kali gets to read Rachel's memoirs in my novel White Wishes.

Her Talk was mostly inspiring to me for my work on White Wishes.

It made me think about what my mother used to always say, "I could write a book." How we as our parents children take their stuff a step further. She could write a book and I am writing one. In White Wishes both mother and daughter write a book. Adrienne said that she and her brother had to go to University 'for our parents'. It wasn't the opportunity they were given - the father who cried himself to sleep every night because he couldn't attend high school and the mother who'd felt abandoned as a child when her brother shoved her out of the way and no one from the family noticed that she wasn't with them. She sat on the street waiting for them for several hours to come back for her.

She talked about the Chinese being big into photos of which my mother was and the importance for her to look back at those photos when she was working on her memoirs. My mother used to drive me crazy with all the photos she took of us growing up but then those photos were my life line when she died. My fascination with the mother/daughter relationship is because of my relationship with my mother so our stuff is just as important as Rachel and Kali's stuff.

Pamela discussed Adrienne's ability to stand outside of her life story as if she were looking at herself as a stranger. The level of immersion versus detachment.

Adrienne mentioned a girl that interviewed her last week who was Lithuanian or something along those lines and how the young girl compared herself to Adrienne said, "I'm just like you. I have to be more perfect than perfect." Which was how I was raised. In a white man's world a black child should be beyond reproach because we're already seen as savages, criminals, not good enough and the whole nine.

The question posed regarding writing her memoir was, "What am I ready to tell?" That's a great journal question, a great blog question, and a great character question. "Rachel, what are you ready to tell?

And the final thing of note was that Adrienne said that her father gave her the confidence to know that she was competent to be who she wanted to be in a man's world made for men. I wrote it down as, "in a world made by white men for white men."

The interesting thing about memoirs is that there is a universality. We all have a knowledge of our families especially about things we weren't told about. Feelings that couldn't be expressed because we were too young, secrets that are kept that we sense or know on a subconscious level. Families are fascinating. What are all the pieces that you would choose to tell to make people understand you or gain an essence of who you are? What do you stories do you remember that were told about your beginnings?


Heart Matters, another book added to my wish list...

EY