Run Towards the Danger: Confrontations with a Body of Memory by Sarah Polley
From Goodreads
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.”
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.
★★★★★
I loved this book so much. These are some of the best essays I’ve ever read. Literally every single one made me cry. Polley’s writing is just super clear and incisive. She manages to convey super complex emotions in such an understandable way.
My favourite essays were Alice, Collapsing, The Woman who Stayed Silent, and High Risk. Alice, Collapsing was so interesting — it follows Polley’s time playing Alice in a stage production of Alice in Wonderland, which was one of her father’s favourite movies. She had a complicated relationship with Alice, and I loved her exploration of that. I related a lot to what Polley said in this essay, from “I hate stories in which people can’t get to where they’re going” to “Cancer was a powerful word, one you could throw around with immediate results.” These quotes (and the paragraph surrounding the second one) really stuck with me, so much so that when I had a dream about me pacing back and forth, not being able to find what I was looking for, I woke up thinking “this is what Sarah Polley was talking about.” I also learned a lot about Alice in Wonderland and it’s author, and liked Polley’s reflection on her father’s interest in both. Basically what I’m saying is that this essay was a fantastic start to the collection; it really came out swinging.
The Woman who Stayed Silent talks about the Jian Ghomeshi case, which was a sexual assault trial involving a well-known Canadian radio personality. Polley was assaulted by Ghomeshi but never came forward during the trial, and this essay explores her reasons for that, and discusses how the legal system treats sexual assault trials more generally. It’s a genuinely incredible essay, and I now consider it required reading for anyone who wants to be a lawyer in criminal law, as either defense or prosecution. Polley is able to demonstrate the issues with our justice system so clearly, and has so much empathy for the women involved in the trial. One of my favourite parts was when she spoke with Lucy DeCoutere, the first woman to identify herself in the case:
I tried to explain why I didn’t come forward. I said: “I had two tiny children. I was told it would drag on for years, that it would destroy me, that I would come close to suicide.”
She teared up and said, “I didn’t get any of that advice. No one told me any of that. And that is exactly what happened. […] I’m only happy for the women who didn’t come forward. […] If you need to hear from me that I’m cool with it, I am. It’s okay.”
Polley, in conversation with Lucy DeCoutere, the first woman to publicly identify herself in the Ghomeshi case
High Risk details Polley’s high-risk pregnancy, as well as her feelings about losing her mother at a young age. I lost my mom two years ago, and this essay made me sob, like, sob so hard my boyfriend had to come and sit next to me while I finished it. It’s just such a raw and emotional look at pregnancy and loss, at how the medical system treats pregnant people and their concerns, at motherhood in general. Maybe it was the mommy issues, but I loved this one a lot.
But the person who is really to blame is my mother, for dying. I’m hungry for my mother and it makes me angry and there is scar tissue ripping inside me making me scream and I might suddenly explode blood and I want a BATCH of something that is not diabetes-friendly that I can eat for days and days until there is no hunger anywhere inside me anymore so I can feel as though she didn’t die, leaving me to figure out how to be a mother after only eleven years of getting to witness my own.
Polley, discussing her mother (and her husband’s inability to cook in batches)
The other three essays are equally as strong, I just had less of a personal connection to them. Mad Genius details her time on the set of The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, a movie directed by Terry Gilliam, and a discussion about the pass we give “crazy but crazy intelligent” men in general. Dissolving Boundaries discusses her time on The Road to Avonlea, and how much of an impact being a child star had on her (#abolishchildstars), and the relief she felt when she realised random people didn’t recognized her anymore. Run Towards the Danger outlines her devastating concussion and subsequent recovery. I found this essay really touching and also incredibly funny. Fun fact, but Polley was actually writing the Little Women adaptation when she got her concussion, and it was given to Greta Gerwig after she could no longer continue writing.
Overall, I cannot recommend this book enough. If you only read one book I recommended all year, please let it be this one.
But anyway! Sorry this review is mainly me talking about how much I love each of these essays. I usually have more intelligent things to say about the books I review, but this one was just so good, all I could say was how good it was.
Have you read this book? What were your thoughts? I’d love to know!
Ally xx
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