Search Results: Returned 4 Results, Displaying Titles 1 - 4
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By Pick, Alison2014., Adult, Doubleday Canada Call No: BIO Bio P594b Availability:1 of 1 At Your Library Summary Note: From the Man Booker-nominated author of the novel Far to Go comes an unflinching, moving and unforgettable memoir about family secrets and the rediscovered past. Alison Pick was born in the 1970s and raised in a supportive, loving family in Kitchener, Ontario. As far as Pick knew, both her parents were Christian. Then as a teenager, Alison made a discovery that instantly changed her understanding of her family. She learned that her Pick grandparents, who had escaped from the Czech Republic during WWII, were Jewish--and that most of this side of the family had died in concentration camps. In her early thirties, engaged to be married to her longtime boyfriend but struggling with a crippling depression, Alison slowly but doggedly began to research and uncover her Jewish heritage. Eventually she came to realize that her true path forward was to reclaim her history and indentity as a Jew. In this by times raw, by times sublime memoir, Alison recounts her struggle with the meaning of her faith, her journey to convert to Judaism, her battle with depression, and her path towards facing and accepting the past and embracing the future. Illuminated with heartbreaking insight into the very real lives of the dead, and hard-won hope for the lives of all those who carry on after. Alision Pick has published two volumes of poetry, and is a faculty member at the Humber School for Writers and the Banff Centre for the Arts. She lives in Toronto.
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2016., Adult, Random House Canada Call No: Bio A284m Availability:1 of 1 At Your Library Summary Note: A stunning follow-up to her Canada Reads-winning first memoir, Something Fierce. A powerful, heartfelt and grippingly honest memoir of finding meaning in life and one's voice as an artist after being a teenaged revolutionary, and of developing the strength to confront a childhood trauma. Carmen Aguirre has lived many lives, all of them to the full. At age six she was a Chilean refugee adjusting to life as a Latina in North America. At eighteen she was a revolutionary dissident married to a generous-hearted man she couldn't fully love. In her early twenties she fought to find her voice as an actress and to break away from the stereotypical roles thrust upon her - Housekeeper, Hotel Maid, Mexican Hooker #1 - all the while navigating the complex paths of lust and heartbreak. Aguirre became a writer, a director, an actress, and then a mother, but alongside her many multi-faceted identities was another that was unbearable to embrace yet impossible to escape; that of the thirteen-year-old girl attacked by one of Canada's most feared rapists. Thirty-three years after the assault, Aguirre decided it was time to meet the man who changed her life. Aguirre interweaves her account of overcoming the attack that shook her world with a host of stories of life and love. From her passionate but explosive relationship with a gorgeous Argentinian basketball player to the all-consuming days at drama school in Vancouver; from the end of the Chilean revolutionary dream to life among the Chicano theatre scene of Los Angeles; from the child who was made the victim of a terrible crime to the artist who found the courage to confront her assailant, Aguirre tells a story of strength and survival. Carmen Aguirre is a Vancouver-based writer and theatre artist who has worked extensively in North and South America. She has written or co-written twenty plays and has sixty film, TV and stage acting credits, including lead roles in the Showcase series Endgame and Quinceañera. Her 2011 book Something Fierce: Memoirs of a Revolutionary Daughter was a memoir of her childhood in Chile. Her parents were members of the Chilean Resistance movement fighting against dictator Augusto Pinochet.
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[2015]., Adult, Doubleday Canada Call No: Bio G437t Availability:1 of 1 At Your Library Summary Note: "Camilla Gibb, author of Sweetness in the Belly and The Beauty of Humanity Movement, reveals the intensity of the grief that besieged her as the happiness of a longed for family shattered. Grief that lived in a potent mix with the solace that arose with the creation of another, most unexpected family. A family constituted by a small cast of resilient souls, adults broken in the way many of us are, united in love for a child. Reflecting on tangled moments of past sadness and joy, alienation and belonging, Gibb revisits her stories now in relation to the happy daughter who will inherit them, and she finds there new meaning and beauty. This Is Happy asks the big questions and finds answers in the tender moments of the everyday. Camilla Gibb has a Ph.D. from Oxford University and teaches in the graduate creative writing programs at the University of Toronto and the University of Guelph-Humber"--Provided by publisher.
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-- Story of tangled love and family secrets.2023., Adult, Knopf Canada Call No: NEW Bio M163u Availability:1 of 1 At Your Library Summary Note: Three months after Kyo Maclear's father dies in December 2018, she gets the results of a DNA test showing that she and the father who raised her are not biologically related. Suddenly Maclear becomes a detective in her own life, unravelling a family mystery piece by piece, and assembling the story of her biological father. Along the way, larger questions arise: what exactly is kinship? And what does it mean to be a family? Kyo Maclear shares a captivating and propulsive story of inheritance that goes beyond heredity. Infused with moments of suspense, it is also a thoughtful reflection on race, lineage, and our cultural fixation on recreational genetics. What gets planted, and what gets buried? What role does storytelling play in unearthing the past and making sense of a life? Can the humble act of tending a garden provide common ground for an inquisitive daughter and her complicated mother?
