Run Towards The Danger: Confrontations with a Body of Memory

by Sarah Polley

FROM OSCAR-WINNING DIRECTOR AND SCREENWRITER OF WOMEN TALKING

'Fascinating, harrowing, courageous, and deeply felt... speaks to all who have encountered dark waters and have had to navigate them' Margaret Atwood

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 skills, 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 and the embodied reactions of children and women adapting and surviving. The guiding light is the possibility of experiencing the past anew, as the person she is now but was not then.

In this extraordinary book, Polley explores what it is to live in one's body, in a constant state of becoming, learning and changing. As she was advised after a catastrophic head injury - if we relinquish our protective crouch and run towards the danger, then life can be reset, reshaped and lived afresh.

PRAISE FOR RUN TOWARDS THE DANGER

'An episodic memoir of life as an actor, director and human being unlike any I have ever it deals with childhood bereavement, extreme stage fright, crises of pregnancy, and abuse within the entertainment industry... bruisingly intelligent and candid' Claire Armitstead, Guardian

'The little girl who carried the weight of Hollywood movie budgets and theater actors’ salaries on her shoulders is now a grown woman whose stolen childhood has made her at once a stunningly sophisticated observer of the world and an imperfect witness to the truth. Her willingness to embrace such paradoxes, in this book as well as in her films, is the mark of a real artist' Meghan Daum, New York Times Book Review

'A roving, psychologically probing memoir in essays... Polley turns out to be as brave, funny, and unself-serious as she is on the screen' Alexandra Schwartz, New Yorker

'A visceral and incisive collection of six propulsive personal essays' Vanity Fair

I loved this book! Like light refracted through a prism, each essay offers a unique view of the rich inner world and illustrious career of one of our most important artists. Smart, funny, devastating and compassionate - often all in the same paragraph - Run Towards the Danger reminds us of literature’s power to synthesize the human condition and to transform a reader in the process' Alison Pick, Booker Prize-nominated author of Far to Go

273 pages, Kindle Edition

Published April 14, 2022

About the author

SARAH POLLEY is an Academy Award-nominated screenwriter, director, and actor. After making short films, Polley made her feature-length directorial debut with the drama film Away from Her in 2006. Polley received an Oscar nomination for the screenplay, which she adapted from the Alice Munro story “The Bear Came Over the Mountain.” Her other projects include the documentary film Stories We Tell (2012), which won the New York Film Critics Circle prize and the National Board of Review award for best documentary; the miniseries adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s novel Alias Grace (2017); and the romantic comedy Take This Waltz (2011). Polley began her acting career as a child, starring in many productions for film and television.