I'm still recovering from the body-blow of brilliance that is Sarah Polley’s new book, Run Towards the Danger. I'm also still recovering because I didn’t just devour the book, I read it so avidly, I practically swallowed it whole. For one, it's endlessly fascinating, but it is also thick with intelligence and insight, sewn through with truth and wisdom, and exquisitely written. Highly recommended.
From the book jacket:
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.
Sarah Polley’s work as an actor, screenwriter, and director is celebrated for its honesty, complexity, and deep humanity. She brings all those qualities, along with her exquisite storytelling chops, to these six essays. Each one 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.”