Anne Coleman

Anne Coleman’s previous memoir I’ll Tell You a Secret was published in 2004. A work of creative non-fiction, it was a Governor General’s Finalist and also won the Edna Staebler Award for Creative Non Fiction. It told the story of Anne’s girlhood friendship with the writer Hugh MacLennan, at the time the foremost novelist in Canada, and was set in the resort village of North Hatley, Quebec.

He was considerably older, handsome and brilliant, and became her idyllic dream-hero. The relationship lasted over seven summers, becoming most intense the summer of 1957, his long-ailing wife having died in the spring. 

Hugh MacLennan

All that crucial summer, Anne’s emotions were pulled in two directions: to MacLennan – but also to Frank, an Eastern European with a troubled war-time past and darkly brooding handsomeness, whom she was to marry at the end of August. She feared the marriage but ultimately chose to go ahead with it, ending the relationship with MacLennan.

Jane

Anne Coleman’s second memoir, Inland Navigation by the Stars, tells the rest of her tale. In it the reader discovers what happens after that marriage, its dramatic swings between happy periods and terrifying ones and its violent conclusion.

Anne learns a way of surviving and even finding joy in her marriage. She learns a saving denialism of the dark times. This is a strange and fascinating account.  At a time when there is no support, practical, emotional or in any form, for a woman facing a drastically difficult marriage, Anne keeps herself and her children safe. It is only decades later that she fully understands why and how she does this.

Frančišek Selesči Marcus Molnar

Anne 

At that point, Anne, having only a general BA from McGill, must get a further degree in order to teach and support her small family. She chooses to go to Bishop’s University. It is only ten miles from North Hatley and thus close to her parents. She and the children often visit them on the weekend and soon meet a new family who have bought the Coleman family’s former house. It is an intriguing household: Doug is a professor and poet (publishing as D.G. Jones) and he and Betty have four young children. Betty is very pregnant with a fifth. There is a young Bishop’s student boarding with them, Michael Ondaatje from Sri Lanka.

D.G. Jones, sketch by Anne Coleman

The household is lively and very literary. Anne, much later, realizes that North Hatley writers were becoming a Canadian version of the Bloomsbury Group where very talented people engaged in all sorts of mutual inspiration and intrigue. To Anne at the time, the household simply seemed to have a strange atmosphere, as if there is a sub-text, a mystery. Anne in her new self and newly awakened mood is drawn to this ’secret’, at the same time as she is unsure if she is imagining it. Tensions heighten when Peggy (Margaret Atwood) arrives. Threads of emotion are pulling in every wrong direction. As spring unfolds all the relationships are reconfigured.

After completing her Masters, Anne teaches English at a girls’ school in Westmount, Miss Edgar’s and Miss Cramp’s, from 1965-1970. Montreal in the late sixties was vibrant, full of excited preparations for Expo 67 and Anne has a gregarious group of friends. There are constant gatherings and parties in both Montreal and North Hatley and in both places, Anne’s best friend at the time, Judy Gault, is at the centre of the excitement. Leonard Cohen, an old friend of Judy’s, is part of the scene whenever he is back in Quebec and he and Anne have several intriguing encounters.

Anne’s wolf-dog

One of her joys during those years is the wilderness property she owns for 16 years. It is a high, rolling plateau at Alpine level and is home to moose, bears and many birds, including migrating sandhill cranes and swans. Anne feels almost a witch as she communes with her owls, calling them down to her. She calls her magical place Narnia after the books she and her children love.

 Anne wrote this second memoir out of a compulsion to seek a pattern in the dramatic chapters of her life. Now in her 80’s, she needed to test her memories and especially her past judgements of herself and others.

In the process she learned that what she recognizes as her indomitable self was created by many forces: genetics (perhaps most important of all); circumstances of era and class; and at every turn her own choices – which of course arise out of the others. A person can never unpick what is so tightly woven but the attempt is wonderfully redemptive.

In her memoir she reenters her past, a past rich in challenges, sometimes very scary ones, but also rich in the good fortune of her strength and optimism and her impulse always to seek out what is lovable.

She has always looked for and found beauty – in other humans and in the world.