This collection of essays by Oscar-nominated screenwriter, director and actor Sarah Polley are all interrelated, with her own body as a central focus and a site of struggle.
That struggle is elegantly, frankly and forensically explored, taking its energy from a reckoning: with herself, her parents, the film industry and the oppressive structures that injure. As a child actor, Polley was thrust into a very adult world, from her work on the beloved Road to Avonlea to Terry Gilliam’s The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, with the latter experience vividly relayed in the essay Mad Genius. Here, Polley poses questions that need to be asked, about safeguarding, and the stability and instability of memory.
This element is compelling, because Polley’s approach is so nuanced; even when she is disappointed, traumatised and diminished, she seeks to understand how certain things could have happened and why those involved might have different recollections of the same event.
This speaks to Polley’s empathy - as tough on herself as she is on others, there are many moving moments; trying to understand the complex nature of her father in the wake of her mother’s untimely death from cancer, and her own painful experience with scoliosis in Alice, Collapsing, to her life-altering accident and brain injury in Run Towards the Danger.
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In a sense, this essay frames the whole collection, its title taken from the advice she had been given by the pioneering concussion specialist Dr Michael Collins, who advised her to run towards the danger, leading her to a revelation: “Now in my forties, I have changed in ways that reach far beyond the limits of my concussion recovery. I know now that I will become weaker at what I avoid, that what I run towards will strengthen in me.”
Over the course of these six essays, she gains in strength and purpose, whether exploring her experience with sexual assault in The Woman Who Stayed Silent; to complications amid pregnancy in High Risk; and making peace with her early life on Road to Avonlea, both conjuring and vanquishing the ghosts that had haunted her. These brilliantly written essays are also about the resilience of the female body, so often a site of struggle but also a site of strength.
