My Mother Joins the Resistance: Poems by Richard Harrison
My Mother Joins the Resistance is broader than her role as his mother, or than her as an individual, or memories.
Memoirs
From Ragged Ass Road to Rideau Hall: Stories of Canada by Whit Fraser
How fortunate we are to have a Canadian like Whit who experiences such adventures and dares to tell about them.
Barefoot Gringo by George Bowering and Spying on America by Bill Gaston
Here two senior-level Canadian writers retrace bracing encounters with our two southern neighbours.
Big Girls Don’t Cry: A Memoir About Taking Up Space by Susan Swan
Although Swan had begun to write an earnest book about her experience of feminism in the 1970s, Margaret Atwood encouraged her to instead write a memoir about being tall.
A Current Through the Flesh by Richard-Yves Sitoski
As this suggests, for the author, family came with considerable pain, both psychological and physical.
Walking into Healing: A Review of Colleen O’Toole’s Restoring Joy
The walk parallels O’Toole’s inner journey of healing from wounds caused by a family estrangement.
Excavating Identity from a Near-forgotten History: Go-Between Girl by Andrea Gunraj
Go-Between Girl, by Andrea Gunraj, is a memoir told across a collection of essays that examines what it means to be the descendent of the racialized indentured class.
Sincerely Katherine: Life, Gender, Inclusivity and Leadership for the Future by Katherine Dudtschak
Sincerely Katherine: Life, Gender, Inclusivity and Leadership for the Future by Katherine Dudtschak is a memoir that is synthesizing the past in order to better live the future. As the subtitle indicates, through Katherine’s story she frames a way forward for a better society. Personally, I like what I don’t know anything about, so Katherine’s …
Unshaming: A Memoir of Recovery, Relapse, and What Comes After By Jowita Bydlowska
As if arriving fresh from the fever dream of her sensational memoir Drunk Mom Jowita Bydlowska sways toward us with a new tale, a different one, and on the first page she is as drunk as ever, but just as surefooted in her prose.
Hide and Sikh: Letters from a Life in Brown Skin by Sunny Dhillon
Through letters to his firstborn daughter, Jaya, Dhillon shares his experiences as a brown-skinned Canadian breaking through an industry that still cries for more diversity and inclusion.
Book of Lives: A Memoir of Sorts by Margaret Atwood
An adept technician and genius at the craft of spinning a story, Atwood, who turns 86 in November, breathes tremendous vitality into Book of Lives.
You Will Not Kill Our Imagination by Saeed Teebi
You Will Not Kill Our Imagination is an impossibly patient telling of how the author sees us, seeing him.
Banging on the Walls of the Tank by Haidar Eid
Banging on the Walls of the Tank: Dispatches from Gaza collects the writings of Gaza-based professor of postcolonial and postmodern literature, Haidar Eid.
Worldly Girls by Tamara Jong
Worldly Girls by Tamara Jong is a skillfully written memoir about the foray she and her mother made into the Jehovah’s Witness religion, and her ultimate coming of age journey.
40 Days and 40 Hikes: Loving the Bruce Trail One Loop at a Time by Nicola Ross
This book gives hikers concise one-page summaries of each loop, including maps, technical information about trail requirements, entrances and exits, interesting plants and animals to look for along the way. The accompanying text offers a well-researched recounting of the history, present circumstances and possible futures of the snake spine of land that rises through South-Central Ontario and is the Niagara Escarpment and of the Bruce Trail that follows it.
