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Sarah Polley

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Run Towards the Danger: Confrontations with a Body of Memory Kindle Edition

by Sarah Polley (Author) Format: Kindle Edition

4.6 1,132 ratings

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“A visceral and incisive collection of six propulsive personal essays.” —Vanity Fair

*A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice * Named a Most-Anticipated Book by Entertainment Weekly, Lit Hub, and AV Club * New York Times Paperback Row*

From the Academy Award-winning screenwriter of Women Talking and the acclaimed director and actor Sarah Polley, Run Towards the Danger explores memory and the dialogue between her past and her present

These are the most dangerous stories of my life. The ones I have avoided, the ones I haven’t told, the ones that have kept me awake on countless nights. As these stories found echoes in my adult life, and then went another, better way than they did in childhood, they became lighter and easier to carry.

In this extraordinary book, Sarah Polley explores what it is to live in one’s body, in a constant state of becoming, learning, and changing. Each of these six essays captures a piece of Polley’s life as she remembers it, while at the same time examining the fallibility of memory, the mutability of reality in the mind, and the possibility of experiencing the past anew, as the person she is now but was not then. As Polley writes, the past and present are in a “reciprocal pressure dance.”

Polley contemplates stories from her own life ranging from stage fright to high-risk childbirth to endangerment and more. After struggling with the aftermath of a concussion, Polley met a specialist who gave her wholly new advice: to recover from a traumatic injury, she had to retrain her mind to strength by charging towards the very activities that triggered her symptoms. With riveting clarity, she shows the power of applying that same advice to other areas of her life in order to find a path forward, a way through. Rather than live in a protective crouch, she had to run towards the danger.

Editorial Reviews

Review

“From the outside, Polley seemed like that rare thing—a child actor who made the impossible leap to mature artistry. The lived reality proved to be another story. Now Polley has published Run Towards the Danger, a roving, psychologically probing memoir in essays . . . On the page, Polley turns out to be as brave, funny, and unself-serious as she is on the screen.” —Alexandra Schwartz, The New Yorker

“The journey from child to child actor to director to mother gives the book its shape, but like the best essayists, Polley takes intricate, illuminating detours. And like her films, Run Towards the Danger explores the unreliability of memory and reinvention, accidental and purposeful. It’s a beautiful collection, carefully put together, that won’t disappoint fans of Polley or the personal essay.” —James Tate Hill, The Washington Independent Review of Books

“An episodic memoir of life as an actor, director and human being unlike any I have ever read: it deals with childhood bereavement, extreme stage fright, crises of pregnancy, and abuse within the entertainment industry . . . bruisingly intelligent and candid.” —Claire Armitstead, The Guardian

“An absolutely beautiful collection of essays: a cat's cradle of emotion around the ways in which her body lives in the world. Memories surrounding anxiety, scoliosis, trauma, child acting, pressure, surgery and repair coalesce in this brilliant, incisive, literary leap through Polley's mind.” —Zibby Owens, Good Morning America

“Meaty . . . the book is most interesting when Polley interrogates her own contradictions and manipulative instincts, many of which were a matter of survival . . . The little girl who carried the weight of Hollywood movie budgets and theater actors’ salaries on her shoulders is now a grown woman whose stolen childhood has made her at once a stunningly sophisticated observer of the world and an imperfect witness to the truth. Her willingness to embrace such paradoxes, in this book as well as in her films, is the mark of a real artist.” —Meghan Daum, The New York Times Book Review

“The six essays in this book are united by her careful, prismatic examination at the gulf between what we feel in the moment and how we feel in the aftermath. . . . As a writer, Polley runs towards the danger at every moment, unafraid of being likable, coming upon great truths about the human condition in the murk, and it’s totally unfair that she can now add great writer to her intimidating list of accomplishments.” —Elisabeth Donnelly, Buzzfeed

“Sarah Polley has embodied what feels like multiple lives. She’s been Canada’s sweetheart, a teen activist, an Academy Award-nominated screenwriter, a documentarian, a filmmaker, and a TV director. It’s no wonder her diverse body of work tends to center on protagonists whose identities are shifting and morphing under the weight of an unexamined past and a tense present. In this essay collection, Polley projects that recurring question of memory on pivotal moments in her own life for a book that promises to be more vulnerable and introspective than your usual child-star-turned-adult narrative.” —The A.V. Club

“Without a shred of self-pity, her candor, humor, wisdom and a fierce intelligence boldly examines some of life’s most physically and emotionally scarring events . . . Her story serves as an example of how sweet and even victorious life can be on the other side of the abyss.”—Jennifer Grey for Amazon Celebrity Picks

“Fascinating, harrowing, courageous, and deeply felt, these explorations of ‘dangerous stories,’ harmful past events, and trials of the soul speak to all who’ve encountered dark waters and have had to navigate them.” —Margaret Atwood, via Twitter

“I loved this book! Like light refracted through a prism, each essay offers a unique view of the rich inner world and illustrious career of one of our most important artists. Smart, funny, devastating and compassionate—often all in the same paragraph—Run Towards the Danger reminds us of literature’s power to synthesize the human condition and to transform a reader in the process.” —Alison Pick, Man Booker Prize-nominated author of Far to Go

“In Run Towards the Danger, Sarah Polley does just that. She tells us the truth, even when it feels razor sharp—even when it feels dangerous. She rips away at painful past experiences that she’s never shared before, and in this way emboldens us to sharpen our gaze on the shadowed moments in our own past, to understand their provenance and to bring meaning to them. She shows us how, by doing this, we can begin to move towards that specific peace of mind—you might even call it joy—that comes with confronting our demons and knowing ourselves. These brilliant essays (and Sarah Polley, with her melioristic heart and empathic eye) urge us, by example, towards the examined life, the life worth living, and give us a jolt of energy to muster the courage and compassion needed to live it.” —Miriam Toews, author of Women Talking

“Sarah Polley understands that questions of conscience are inseparable from the terrors and tenderness of the body, and that courage—moral or physical—is not fearlessness but our relationship to fear. How we confront pain, how we determine what is safe, how we comprehend the depth and limits of our responsibility to others and to ourselves—these are exacting, keening questions. This is a powerful and moving book, both in its seeking and its wisdom.” —Anne Michaels, author of The Winter Vault

About the Author

Sarah Polley is the Academy Award-winning screenwriter of Women Talking and an Academy Award–nominated director and actor. After making short films, Polley made her feature-length directorial debut with the drama film Away from Her in 2006. Polley received an Oscar nomination for the screenplay, which she adapted from the Alice Munro story “The Bear Came Over the Mountain.” Her other projects include the documentary film Stories We Tell (2012), which won the New York Film Critics Circle prize and the National Board of Review award for best documentary; the miniseries adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s novel Alias Grace (2017); and the romantic comedy Take This Waltz (2011). Polley began her acting career as a child, starring in many productions for film and television.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

"I could tell you my adventures-beginning from this morning," said Alice a little timidly: "but it's no use going back to yesterday, because I was a different person then."

-Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

At least twice a week, I used to find myself in a periwinkle-blue poufy dress with a white pinafore. My stockings were striped and my hair was held firmly by a headband that dug into my head behind my ears. My breasts, still tender and growing, were painfully flattened by a tensor bandage. It was a dream that I frequently found myself in, where nothing anyone around me said made any sense and it was all hostile: hostile towards my common sense, hostile towards my youth, hostile towards my growing up. I knew I didn't want to be a child; I wanted to be a queen but I didn't want to be left alone, or tested, or made fun of or to do all the things that seemed to be necessary to become a queen. I would follow corkscrew paths. I had to run in order to stay in the same place. People would scream in pain before they were hurt. There was a mint in my mouth for good luck. I wanted to kill myself.

Sometimes when I woke from this dream, I remembered that I was, in fact, wearing a rose-coloured dress and not a blue one. Sometimes I corrected my subconscious. Most of the time, though, I woke up incapable of differentiating the portrait of myself from the iconic John Tenniel illustrations, coloured in modern reprints. I wonder if Alice Liddell had had the same problem.

The real Alice was a sullen-looking child with dark hair and eyes. In one of the photographs that Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll) took of her, "The Beggar Maid," she looks alarmingly sexual, taunting him, challenging him to want more. At least that's how I viewed the photograph when I was a young teenager. As I look at the same photograph now, as a grown woman, I wonder what instructions the adult taking the photograph gave to her to produce such an alarming effect. In the books and movies that were consumed by millions, though, Alice is golden and fair, WASPy beyond measure, and exudes innocence. The books, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, have passed through children's hands for over a century now, cloaked in this deceptive costume.

Ever since I can remember, these books inspired a terror and an exasperation in me. Every one of Alice's attempts to make sense of her new, irrational world, to find anything approximating normalcy, or to simply get home is thwarted by mean-spirited creatures with their own irrational systems of logic. Despite my father's love of these books, I never, as a young child, wanted to hear them read at bedtime. They left me exhausted, haunted by a kind of relentless uncertainty. I feared that if I took any time to live inside these stories, the walls and ceiling of my childhood bedroom might soon collapse into dust and be replaced by kooky angles of drywall.

As an adult, I experience this same aversion to movies that remind me of the Alice books or that mirror this same quality of someone constantly trying to get somewhere and failing. Movies like After Hours make we want to scream. They make me feel nauseous and aggravated and goosepimply.

I hate stories in which people can't get to where they're going.

As there seemed to be no chance of getting her hands up to her head, she tried to get her head down to them, and was delighted to find that her neck would bend about easily in any direction, like a serpent. She had just succeeded in curving it down into a graceful zigzag . . .

"But I'm not a serpent, I tell you!" said Alice. "I'm a-I'm a-"

"Well! What are you?" said the Pigeon. "I can see you're trying to invent something!"

"I-I'm a little girl," said Alice, rather doubtfully, as she remembered the number of changes she had gone through that day.

-Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

When I was fifteen years old I got caught through the looking glass in a pink dress, in a crisp white pinafore, with my breasts bound, playing younger than I was. My spine had by then bent-perhaps, I thought then, under the weight of grief-to a forty-five-degree angle, so along with the tensor bandages pulled tightly across my chest, the pink dress itself was lined with various strategically placed pads to make my shoulders, my back, and my waist appear symmetrical. Even then, it took effort to appear straight. On two-show days I would begin to sag sideways, the tips of my left hand's fingers almost touching the side of my left knee. One of my left ribs, just under my breasts, protruded so much that it created a noticeable lump right in the middle of my torso, causing the right rib to slough out of view.

I knew I had to wear a hard plastic brace sixteen hours a day to make my body grow straighter, but I didn't, so every few months I, and others, noticed that I twisted and bent a little more. By this point I knew I was close to needing major surgery to correct the curve, but that was to be my choice too, having no parent to oversee such choices. The surgery terrified me, not only the idea of being cut into and operated on for ten hours, having my spine stretched out, fused, and a pound of metal attached to it, but also I couldn't think who would take care of me while I recovered. I had stopped going to regular follow-ups at the hospital a long time before, had stopped wearing the brace around my body sixteen hours a day as prescribed, had stopped thinking about what the consequences of my negligence could be. I knew that I was free to keep twisting and curving and sloping and that nothing, ever, would stop me. There was no adult who could force me straight.

But I wondered, now, at fifteen years old, if the thing I had feared the most, the prospect of this major spinal surgery, could liberate me from something I found myself fearing even more: walking even one more time onto a stage at the Stratford Festival.

I had been diagnosed with scoliosis four years earlier during a routine insurance medical for the television series Road to Avonlea. The doctor asked me to touch my toes, and then spent a while tracing the protrusion of my spine with his fingers. When I stood up straight again and looked at him, his brow was furrowed.

It somehow made sense to me to be told that I wasn't straight, that my spine was curving nonsensically to the right at the top and to the left at the bottom. My world had started curving out of shape the previous year, and my own body curving alongside it gave things a logical symmetry. It also made sense of a few things that had been mysterious to me about my ever-changing body, chiefly (and most important to my eleven-year-old self) the noticeably lopsided breasts that had begun to emerge, the left one growing large and ripe while the other one remained almost nonexistent.

I was alone in the examining room with the doctor when he made the discovery, and when he said the word scoliosis, it sounded like death. My mother had died just months before, and my experience of diseases was that they didn't hold back. They took you and maimed you and ended you. So when I heard the diagnosis of something with a -sis on the end of it, I assumed that my days were numbered. He referred me to the orthopaedics department at Toronto's Hospital for Sick Children, and that is where I found myself a month later, in a waiting room with similarly crooked kids, all of us waiting to hear how badly we'd been bent out of shape.

After a trip to the X-ray machine it was determined that I had a thirty-eight-degree curvature in my thoracic spine. I stared, transfixed, at the X-ray. It was strange to see that my own spine, lit from behind by the light board, had been hiding secrets from me. For years it had been surreptitiously bending itself into the ugly beginnings of a coil. It seemed impossible that I could be so deformed. Impossibly scary, and impossibly lucky.

The feeling of being lucky was one I kept to myself. There had been a part of me that, while my mother was dying, had relished having a parent with cancer. Cancer was a powerful word, one you could throw around with immediate results. It seemed to inspire a focus from people. They looked at you with what was supposed to be sympathy but felt, in fact, like a kind of exaltation. When my mother had cancer, I felt as though I was suddenly transformed into a sallow child of tragedy, imbued with a kind of magic that only children close to grim events can be. I was comfortable in this role, and delighted to help move the play forward, saying the word cancer in a hushed tone with an accomplished look of dread, reporting on my mother's latest surgery or round of chemotherapy with my eyes downcast and bashful in the face of the enormous attention it garnered. It helped that I never once really believed my mother was going to die. It allowed me the space to focus on other people's reactions and to delight in the special place I had earned in their hearts. I knew I was exaggerating, making it up. Deep inside, I believed that my mother had something very innocuous dressed up with a scary word, and I was just using the drama of this disease to get attention. I believed this until her actual death, which, for a long time, some part of me felt I was responsible for. By playing the part of the child with the dying mother so convincingly, I believed I had summoned a bad ending.

But I had missed the word cancer these last months. And now part of me was glad to have one to take its place.

I found out early on in my appointment with the orthopaedic surgeon at the Hospital for Sick Children that scoliosis wouldn't kill me. This was good news and bad. Good, because I'm pretty sure I didn't want to die at that point in time. Bad, because it limited my ability to create that same kind of wonder in adults that a dying mother had. "How did I get it?" I asked the doctor. She told me it was genetic. Since no one else in my family had scoliosis, I decided that it must be grief, the sadness I couldn't yet feel about my mother's death, bearing down on me until my spine bent, forcing me to feel it any way it could.

There were a couple of ways to treat scoliosis, according to my doctor. The first option, for the less severe cases, was to wear a tight plastic brace, which wrapped around the torso, for sixteen hours a day in the hopes that it would alter the course of the curving spine as the pubescent body continued to grow. The more severe cases had to be operated on. The spine would be stretched out, fused with graft from the hip bone, and two steel rods would be placed on either side of the spine to keep it in place as the graft took hold and hardened. The rods would be attached with many hooks and nuts and bolts, adding up to about a pound of metal in the back.

I was on the cusp of these grim options. I was fitted within the month for a total-contact thoraco-lumbar-sacral orthosis (TLSO) brace. This was a relief in itself, as the other brace option, which was horrifically detailed in Deenie, a Judy Blume book I had read, was the Milwaukee brace, which included a Frankenstein-esque ring of metal around the neck. The one I was being fitted for, the TLSO brace, came up to just below my chest in the front, though in the back it came up to just below the neck. It was hard plastic, with two thick Velcro straps that ran across the front, attached to the brace by eight little metal discs, giving it a robotic look. Most humiliating, the brace had been made from a cast of my body, so there was the actual shape of my body right there in front of me and anyone who saw the brace, hips just forming, rib cage uneven, a body in progress. Firm pads were strategically placed on the right side, where my upper and middle back fit into the brace, to help push my spine as it grew into something approximating straightness. There was also a hard pad in between these two, on the left side, to try to push the bottom part of the S into straightness. When they first strapped me into it in the hospital, I felt like I couldn't breathe. I was told I would get used to it, though the hard pads digging into my spine would likely give me welts for the first while. I was shown how to put it on, though not given a practice run putting it on by myself there at the hospital.

It turned out that getting it on at home alone was almost impossible. Pulling clothes up over it required some doing. Living in a body that changed suddenly and unpredictably with puberty required some doing, even without being strapped into a hard plastic brace.

It was recommended that I sleep all night in the brace, to cover at least half of the sixteen hours I was required to wear it, especially since I had to work on the television show Road to Avonlea during the days, and it would be hard to be as physical as I needed to be in certain scenes while wearing it. The first night, I struggled to pull the straps to the markings they had made with a pen at the hospital to show me when it was pulled tight enough. After a long struggle, I cried out that I couldn't do it. My dad ended up pulling me into the brace. I hated having him close me into that contraption. I was red with rage. He didn't deserve my anger, but he was the only parent in sight and no eleven-year-old girl wants her dad manipulating her body. After that first night, I pulled the straps away from my body with every bit of strength and frustration I had, hurting my arms and hands and crying with the effort, but managing, crucially, to avoid needing my dad's assistance.

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B096DJY7Q4
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Penguin Press (March 1, 2022)
Publication date ‏ : ‎ March 1, 2022
Language ‏ : ‎ English
File size ‏ : ‎ 3803 KB
Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
Print length ‏ : ‎ 265 pages
Page numbers source ISBN ‏ : ‎ 0593300378

Best Sellers Rank: #161,821 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #64 in Biographies of Comedians
- #475 in Biographies & Memoirs of Women
- #1,239 in Memoirs (Kindle Store)

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VBS

Excellent

Reviewed in the United States on April 14, 2024

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The engrossing essays in this great work inspire mental & physical fortitude and strength, while also honoring the fragility of the noble spirit in those faced with challenges ...both everyday challenges and unusual/unexpected challenges. This was a memorable read and remains a solid touchstone for the human soul.

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Darling

Part of me doesn't want to write this review...

Reviewed in the United States on March 23, 2022

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...I'm sure you've already read all the "catch words" that people like to throw into reviews like these. I won't give you those. I also won't give you things like, "this needs a trigger warning" or "this was captivating."

I didn't grow up watching Ms. Polley on Road to Avonlea as most women my age did. It was the CBC show Straight up that caught my attention as she played the goth character of Lily. Perhaps this is where I got my teenage, than early adult fashion sense from as I tuned in to each episode "captivated" by Sarah's acting as I tried to catch a glimpse of her. Maybe it was a couple of years later as I watched GO! in theatres. All I know is that as the years went on, she always popped up, and I always followed, so when I caught wind of this book, I knew I had to read it and was even more pleasantly surprised when it followed the essay format.

The book is divided into 6 unique sections that has Polley writing about different sections of her life that impacted her in different ways. As the title lets on, these sections all play upon the way she remembered them, either accurately, inaccurately, or perhaps in a way that she will never know to be either. Each section of the book was written from a different time in her life and it was very interesting to get to know Sarah intimately as all of these incidents, were very private. I I felt very honoured to be a part of this book because essentially, anyone that reads it, does become a part of Polley's life whether she intended it to be that way or not.

You should read this book if you ever felt like you couldn't trust your own memories about a situation, or event or if you ever felt like you needed confirmation of your own reality. I certainly came away with the feeling like trusting our own instincts sometimes is something that we don't do enough of. And of course, you should read this book if, like me, you always wanted to know what was behind that serious look of Sarah's.

24 people found this helpful

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Parish Nurse

She has made it through alot already in her young life!

Reviewed in the United States on March 30, 2023

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Her life stories are riveting. There should probably be a trigger warning on the book for some readers about the sexual violence chapter!
The fears and dangers are confronted with various levels of courage, just like any growing human!

2 people found this helpful

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16bitgamer

Simply-put it's brave and honest to a degree that's much needed in these times....

Reviewed in the United States on August 14, 2022

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Ohhh my land......where do I start to review this book? Sarah's honesty, candid communication style, and engaging storytelling keep you on the edge of your seat for the whole thing! I didn't watch Road to Avonlea, I didn't even see Ramona until I was around eleven, long after it aired in the late 80s. Oh no, the first film I ever saw or rather heard Sarah's voice was Babar the Movie (1989) so during listening to the book, I was trying to keep that as my point of first context for what she was talking about. And let me tell you, I was simply and utterly ASTOUNDED! The fact that she lost her mother to cancer in 1990, and that her mother was battling cancer during that voice-over session in 1989, and that art was unintentionally imitating life.....just wow. (Although she never mentions that voice-over session in the book anywhere.) Then to hear about her spinal issues and dealing with severe chronic pain, I could very much relate as I have mild spastic diplegia cerebral palsy, and have had worsening back pain since I was twelve.....Wow......then about how her daughter was born c-section and was a placenta previa scenario was INSANE to hear because when my mother was pregnant with me it was a partial placental detachment scenario! Then the head injury with the fire extinguisher (and sorry for all the spoilers) and how she recovered from a severe concussion, just oh my land land land! By the time I finished the book, I didn't really speak for about a day or two. I was just so in awe of how much Sarah has gone through, and overcome and how she's always run towards the danger for all 43 years of her life! Pick this little book up in any format you prefer, and you will NOT be disappointed! Get it! We need more people being this honest in the 21st century like Sarah! Simply a phenomenal book! Period!

11 people found this helpful

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shanhu Lee

Why did she change narrative about her father dramatically from her documentary?

Reviewed in the United States on November 20, 2022

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This is all I did since yesterday: I read a TNY article about Sarah Polley's new movie "Women Talking", and read an earlier interview of her in the same magazine, and watched her documentary (Stories We Tell), and finished the first chapter of her memoir. I became a big fan of Sarah Polley's works.

I keep comparing the documentary and this first chapter - about her father. In the documentary, her father was depicted as a selfless loving father, but in this chapter he was written as one of the worst fathers. Actually, Sarah herself mentioned in the TNY that we often tell stories differently even for the same narrative, which is most fascinating to me about her work. The complexity and paradox of human conditions. The weaving between Sarah and Alice, and between her father and Dodgson, is brilliant.

That being said, what was her motive to change the narrative about her father so dramatically in this book from her documentary? I wish the two sides of the story were told in the same medium at the same time. Then, what would have been the effect with the mixed narratives in the book or in the documentary?

(On another note, I wonder why her father or any of her old siblings never tried to hire someone to clean the neglected house.)

13 people found this helpful

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A. Ritko

Cathartic!

Reviewed in the United States on May 16, 2023

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Read this through on my first vacation in 4 years. Wow, this book spoke to me so much. While my life has been distinctly different, the themes and topics written about in this book really made me think about my own life and the things I’ve survived. As I try to start living again after so much loss, I couldn’t stop thinking how the strategy of running toward the danger is relevant to my attempts at starting anew. You can’t hide away, worried about every little thing, you’ve got to push through and keep enduring to live a full life. I used to wonder what happened with Sarah Polley, and wow, did I learn lot about myself in the process of reading her life stories.

5 people found this helpful

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Top reviews from other countries

Kerry Cook

inspiring

Reviewed in Canada on February 26, 2024

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Well written and VERY insightful. Makes me take a good look at my own ability to run towards the danger; and to re-evaluate my limitations. At 65 years old finally learning how to live in the moment - years later than what would have made my life far more fulfilling but never too late.
Thanks for a great read!

Cliente de Amazon

Funny, inspiring, FUN!

Reviewed in Mexico on June 5, 2023

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Sarah Polley is an amazing writer. Filled with wit, meaning and a wonderful sense of humor, RUN TOWARDS THE DANGER is also beautifully written. You will never want it to end.

D. K. Gullen

Terrific

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on October 12, 2023

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A profound, open and passionate book. Polley writes with a clear eye about very difficult times, how she passed through them, and what she learned. Wisdom here for everyone. Strongly recommended.

Levi Huxton

Brave, honest and thought-provoking

Reviewed in Australia on May 28, 2022

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I grew up watching Sarah Polley’s Canadian indie films, first as an actress, then the three features she wrote and directed (which I adore and highly recommend): Away From Her, Take This Waltz and Stories We Tell.

In this astute book, Polley recounts lifelong trauma, and how she learned, more recently, to “run towards the danger,” to articulate her fears and turn to face the pain. It broke my heart, but also challenged me to think harder about our collective responsibility in the face of trauma.

The subtitle, Confrontations with a Body of Memory, sets the tone. This isn’t a feelgood compendium of hacks by a wellness influencer. This is a painful reckoning between a woman and the serious trauma inflicted upon her, through bad genes, bad luck or adults who should have known better.

These six essays have been brewing in Polley’s head for a while, some for several decades. The weight of each word is carefully considered. They deal with the stresses and dangers she was exposed to as a child actor, stage fright, scoliosis, a life-threatening pregnancy, sexual abuse and suffering from concussion.

Coming to terms with trauma can take years of internal questioning, denial, bargaining, recovering buried memories and, just maybe, finding the strength to confront the danger. Revealing said trauma to the world means venturing – already vulnerable and exhausted - into another minefield: public opinion, denials, discreditation and counteraccusations.

The book is at its most moving when Polley describes “what it felt like to be certain that expressing a fear would make it worse”, the way humiliation at speaking out can outweigh the agony of living alone with one’s fear. It’s at its most uncomfortable when Polley – in a measured but unflinching way – names the perpetrators.

These accusations make for a difficult read. In these passages, I caught myself judging the evidence and while Polley’s pain is undeniable, my sympathy was tested by the harsh tone. But then I began to recoil at my reaction. Isn’t that precisely why victims don’t come forward – that fear of being judged by those who weren’t there? It’s a process, I concluded, that we all must get more comfortable with.

booklover9

Love Sarah Polley

Reviewed in Australia on February 28, 2023

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Ever since I first saw Sarah Polley on screen in a movie with Debbie Harry a few decades ago -- I have followed her career. I find Polley really authentic. So, I was excited to read her book of essays. They didn't disappoint. She talks about the dark territory that comes with being a child star, living with a head injury in addition to sexual abuse. It's a powerful book. I hope she continues to write for many years to come.

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Run Towards the Danger: Confrontations with a Body of Memory Kindle Edition

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