All Things Consoled

All Things Consoled PDF Author: Elizabeth Hay
Publisher: McClelland & Stewart
ISBN: 0771039743
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
From Elizabeth Hay, one of Canada's beloved novelists, comes a startling and beautiful memoir about the drama of her parents' end, and the longer drama of being their daughter. Winner of the 2018 Hilary Weston Writers' Trust Prize for Nonficiton. Jean and Gordon Hay were a colourful, formidable pair. Jean, a late-blooming artist with a marvellous sense of humour, was superlatively frugal; nothing got wasted, not even maggoty soup. Gordon was a proud and ambitious schoolteacher with a terrifying temper, a deep streak of melancholy, and a devotion to flowers, cars, words, and his wife. As old age collides with the tragedy of living too long, these once ferociously independent parents become increasingly dependent on Lizzie, the so-called difficult child. By looking after them in their final decline, she hopes to prove that she can be a good daughter after all. In this courageous memoir, written with tough-minded candour, tenderness, and wit, Elizabeth Hay lays bare the exquisite agony of a family's dynamics--entrenched favouritism, sibling rivalries, grievances that last for decades, genuine admiration, and enduring love. In the end, she reaches a more complete understanding of the most unforgettable characters she will ever know, the vivid giants in her life who were her parents.

All Things Consoled

All Things Consoled PDF Author: Elizabeth Hay
Publisher: McClelland & Stewart
ISBN: 0771039743
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
From Elizabeth Hay, one of Canada's beloved novelists, comes a startling and beautiful memoir about the drama of her parents' end, and the longer drama of being their daughter. Winner of the 2018 Hilary Weston Writers' Trust Prize for Nonficiton. Jean and Gordon Hay were a colourful, formidable pair. Jean, a late-blooming artist with a marvellous sense of humour, was superlatively frugal; nothing got wasted, not even maggoty soup. Gordon was a proud and ambitious schoolteacher with a terrifying temper, a deep streak of melancholy, and a devotion to flowers, cars, words, and his wife. As old age collides with the tragedy of living too long, these once ferociously independent parents become increasingly dependent on Lizzie, the so-called difficult child. By looking after them in their final decline, she hopes to prove that she can be a good daughter after all. In this courageous memoir, written with tough-minded candour, tenderness, and wit, Elizabeth Hay lays bare the exquisite agony of a family's dynamics--entrenched favouritism, sibling rivalries, grievances that last for decades, genuine admiration, and enduring love. In the end, she reaches a more complete understanding of the most unforgettable characters she will ever know, the vivid giants in her life who were her parents.

All Things Consoled

All Things Consoled PDF Author: Elizabeth Hay
Publisher: McClelland & Stewart
ISBN: 0771039751
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 274

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Book Description
From Elizabeth Hay, one of Canada's beloved novelists, comes a startling and beautiful memoir about the drama of her parents' end, and the longer drama of being their daughter. Winner of the 2018 Hilary Weston Writers' Trust Prize for Nonficiton. Jean and Gordon Hay were a colourful, formidable pair. Jean, a late-blooming artist with a marvellous sense of humour, was superlatively frugal; nothing got wasted, not even maggoty soup. Gordon was a proud and ambitious schoolteacher with a terrifying temper, a deep streak of melancholy, and a devotion to flowers, cars, words, and his wife. As old age collides with the tragedy of living too long, these once ferociously independent parents become increasingly dependent on Lizzie, the so-called difficult child. By looking after them in their final decline, she hopes to prove that she can be a good daughter after all. In this courageous memoir, written with tough-minded candour, tenderness, and wit, Elizabeth Hay lays bare the exquisite agony of a family's dynamics—entrenched favouritism, sibling rivalries, grievances that last for decades, genuine admiration, and enduring love. In the end, she reaches a more complete understanding of the most unforgettable characters she will ever know, the vivid giants in her life who were her parents.

Late Nights on Air

Late Nights on Air PDF Author: Elizabeth Hay
Publisher: McClelland & Stewart
ISBN: 1551994313
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 378

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Book Description
The Scotiabank Giller Prize–winning novel from Elizabeth Hay. Harry Boyd, a hard-bitten refugee from failure in Toronto television, has returned to a small radio station in the Canadian North. There, in Yellowknife, in the summer of 1975, he falls in love with a voice on air, though the real woman, Dido Paris, is both a surprise and even more than he imagined. Dido and Harry are part of the cast of eccentric, utterly loveable characters, all transplants from elsewhere, who form an unlikely group at the station. Their loves and longings, their rivalries and entanglements, the stories of their pasts and what brought each of them to the North, form the centre. One summer, on a canoe trip four of them make into the Arctic wilderness (following in the steps of the legendary Englishman John Hornby, who, along with his small party, starved to death in the barrens in 1927), they find the balance of love shifting, much as the balance of power in the North is being changed by the proposed Mackenzie Valley gas pipeline, which threatens to displace Native people from their land. With unforgettable characters, vividly evoked settings, in this award–winning novel, Hay brings to bear her skewering intelligence into the frailties of the human heart and her ability to tell a spellbinding story. Written in gorgeous prose, laced with dark humour, Late Nights on Air is Hay’s most seductive and accomplished novel yet.

All Things Consoled

All Things Consoled PDF Author: Elizabeth Hay
Publisher:
ISBN: 0771039735
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 274

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Book Description
"Elizabeth Hay, one of Canada's most beloved novelists has written a poignant, complex, and hugely resonant memoir about the shift she experienced between being her parents' daughter to their guardian and caregiver. As the daughter takes charge, and the writer takes notes, her mother and father are like two legendary icebergs floating south. They melt into the ocean of partial, painful, inconsistent, and funny stories that a family makes over time. Hay's eloquent memoir distills these stories into basic truths about parents and children and their efforts of understanding. With her uncommon sharpness and wit, Elizabeth Hay offers her insights into the peculiarities of her family's dynamics--her parents' marriage, sibling rivalries, miscommunications that spur decades of resentment all matched by true and genuine love and devotion. Her parents are each startling characters in their own right--her mother is a true skinflint who would rather serve up wormy soup (twice) than throw away an ancient packet of "perfectly good" mix; her father is a proud and well-mannered man with a temper that can be explosive. When All Thing's Consoled is a startlingly beautiful memoir that addresses the exquisite agony of family, the unstoppable force of dementia, and the inevitability of aging."--

Garbo Laughs

Garbo Laughs PDF Author: Elizabeth Hay
Publisher: Counterpoint
ISBN: 9781582432922
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 310

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Book Description
This is a novel about movie love. Set in Ottawa in the 1990s, it is the quixotic tale of tall, thin Harriet Browning, inflamed by the movies she was deprived of as a child. Harriet is a woman so saturated with the movies, seen repeatedly and swallowed whole, that she no longer fits into this world. Bent on seeing everything she has missed, she forms a Friday night movie club with three companions-of-the-screen: a boy who loves Frank Sinatra, a girl with Bette Davis eyes, and an earthy sidekick named Dinah for Dinah Shore. Breaking in upon this quiet backwater, in time with the devastating ice storm of 1998, come two refugees from Hollywood, the faded widow of a famous screenwriter and her movie-expert stepson. They are Harsh Reality. With them come blackouts, arguments, accidents, illness and sudden death. But what chance does real life stand when we can watch movies instead? What hope does real love have when movie love, in all its brief intensity, is an easy option? In this comedy of secondhand desire, movies and movie lovers come first.

A Student of Weather

A Student of Weather PDF Author: Elizabeth Hay
Publisher: McClelland & Stewart
ISBN: 155199433X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 378

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Book Description
From some accidents of love and weather we never quite recover. At the worst of the Prairie dust bowl of the 1930s, a young man appears out of a blizzard and forever alters the lives of two sisters. There is the beautiful, fastidious Lucinda, and the tricky and tenacious Norma Joyce, at first a strange, self-possessed child, later a woman who learns something of self-forgiveness and of the redemptive nature of art. Their rivalry sets the stage for all that follows in a narrative spanning over thirty years, beginning in Saskatchewan and moving, in the decades following the war, to Ottawa and New York City. Disarming, vividly told, unforgettable, this is a story about the mistakes we make that never go away, about how the things we want to keep vanish and the things we want to lose return to haunt us.

God, Family, Country

God, Family, Country PDF Author: Craig Morgan
Publisher: Blackstone Publishing
ISBN: 1665058668
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 305

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Book Description
Country music icon, army veteran, father, outdoorsman—Craig Morgan shares all aspects of his life, revealing stories even his most avid fans don’t know. Written with Jim DeFelice, author of the #1 New York Times bestseller American Sniper In 1989, as US news outlets declared an end to Operation Just Cause, Craig Morgan was part of an elite group of military operatives jumping into the jungle along the Panamanian border on a covert operation. Fans know the country music star from his hit songs and acclaimed albums, but there’s a lot more to him—a soldier who worked with the CIA in Panama, an undercover agent who fought sex traffickers in Thailand, and a dedicated family man who lives the values he sings. Craig details these many facets of his life and more in God, Family, Country. An on-stage appearance with his father’s band at age ten may have planted the seeds for life as a country star, but first he trained as a paratrooper in the army. After earning numerous distinctions, his path to sergeant major was all but assured. Then came a momentous decision: he left the active military to pursue music. With unwavering support from his wife and a pack of part-time jobs, he toughed out the lean years and achieved his first big success with the poignant ballad “Almost Home.” Other hits soon followed, from party songs like “Redneck Yacht Club” to the soul-rending “The Father, My Son, and the Holy Ghost.” Born from the anguish of his son Jerry’s passing, the song’s tribute has consoled and inspired millions across the world. Duty to country has been a constant throughout his life and globe-spanning career. In 2006, as “That’s What I Love about Sunday” topped country radio charts, Craig was riding in a convoy of Humvees in Iraq. An avid outdoorsman, a former sheriff’s deputy who’s still a member of the auxiliary, and always a husband and father first, Craig Morgan will inspire you with his life lived by the deepest values: God, family, country.

The Organist

The Organist PDF Author: Mark Abley
Publisher: Regina Collection
ISBN: 9780889775817
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 312

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Book Description
A son reflects on his complicated relationship with his depressive but brilliant father.

The Dead Moms Club

The Dead Moms Club PDF Author: Kate Spencer
Publisher: Seal Press
ISBN: 1580056881
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
Kate Spencer lost her mom to cancer when she was 27. In The Dead Moms Club, she walks readers through her experience of stumbling through grief and loss, and helps them to get through it, too. This isn't a weepy, sentimental story, but rather a frank, up-front look at what it means to go through gruesome grief and come out on the other side. An empathetic read, The Dead Moms Club covers how losing her mother changed nearly everything in her life: both men and women readers who have lost parents or experienced grief of this magnitude will be comforted and consoled. Spencer even concludes each chapter with a cheeky but useful tip for readers (like the "It's None of Your Business Card" to copy and hand out to nosy strangers asking about your passed loved one).

Kiss the Red Stairs

Kiss the Red Stairs PDF Author: Marsha Lederman
Publisher: McClelland & Stewart
ISBN: 0771049382
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 401

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Book Description
WINNER of the Cindy Roadburg Memorial Prize—Western Canada Jewish Book Awards NATIONAL BESTSELLER For readers of All Things Consoled by Elizabeth Hay and They Left Us Everything by Plum Johnson, Kiss the Red Stairs is a compelling memoir by award-winning journalist Marsha Lederman delves into her parents’ Holocaust stories in the wake of her own divorce, investigating how trauma migrates through generations with empathy, humour, and resilience. Marsha was five when a simple question led to a horrifying answer. Sitting in her kitchen, she asked her mother why she didn’t have any grandparents. Her mother told her the truth: the Holocaust. Decades later, her parents dead and herself a mother to a young son, Marsha begins to wonder how much history has shaped her own life. Reeling in the wake of a divorce, she craves her parents’ help. But in their absence, she is gripped by a need to understand the trauma they suffered, and she begins her own journey into the past to tell her family’s stories of loss and resilience. Kiss the Red Stairs is a compelling memoir of Holocaust survival, intergenerational trauma, divorce, and discovery that will guide readers through several lifetimes of monumental change.