This is Happy

by Camilla Gibb

"All sorrows can be borne if you put them into a story or tell a story about them,' Isak Dinesen once said. Sorrows are all pain otherwise, pain without sense or meaning. But joys, too, it seems to me, need their context. And sometimes their coexistence needs to be borne. The coexistence or possibility of the opposite can be what gives an experience its meaning. At its simplest, that is a story." --Camilla Gibb, This Is Happy

In this profoundly moving memoir, Camilla Gibb, the award-winning, bestselling author of Sweetness in the Belly and The Beauty of Humanity Movement, reveals the intensity of the grief that besieged her as the happiness of a longed for family shattered. Grief that lived in a potent mix with the solace that arose with the creation of another, most unexpected family. A family constituted by a small cast of resilient souls, adults broken in the way many of us are, united in love for a child. Reflecting on tangled moments of past sadness and joy, alienation and belonging, Gibb revisits her stories now in relation to the happy daughter who will inherit them, and she finds there new meaning and beauty.

Raw and unflinching, intelligent and humane, This Is Happy asks the big questions and finds answers in the tender moments of the everyday.

Genres: Memoir, Nonfiction, Canada, Biography, Biography Memoir, Book Club, Parenting

288 pages, Hardcover

First published August 18, 2015

About the author

From the author's web site:

"Camilla Gibb, born in 1968, is the author of three novels, Mouthing the Words, The Petty Details of So-and-so's Life and Sweetness in the Belly, as well as numerous short stories, articles and reviews.

She was the winner of the Trillium Book Award in 2006, a Scotiabank Giller Prize short list nominee in 2005, winner of the City of Toronto Book Award in 2000 and the recipient of the CBC Canadian Literary Award for short fiction in 2001. Her books have been published in 18 countries and translated into 14 languages and she was named by the jury of the prestigious Orange Prize as one of 21 writers to watch in the new century.

Camilla was born in London, England, and grew up in Toronto, Canada. She has a B.A. in anthropology and Middle Eastern studies from the University of Toronto, completed her Ph.D. in social anthropology at Oxford University in 1997, and spent two years at the University of Toronto as a post-doctoral research fellow before becoming a full-time writer.

Camilla has been writer-in-residence at the University of Alberta and the University of Toronto where, for the past two years, she served as an adjunct faculty member of the English Department's MA in Creative Writing Program.

She is currently working on a new novel and divides her time between Toronto and London, England."

Reviews

[Friederike Knabe · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have been a fan of Camilla Gibb's two novels set in far away places. Both,Sweetness in the Belly and The Beauty of Humanity Movementdrew me into the stories and also into her gentle and often poetic writing. It was a given therefore that I would rush out to get my hands on her new memoir, this is happy . I have to admit I did not get what I anticipated, but much much more. Not that I had a clear notion of what to expect not having read any of the publicity beforehand.

Camilla Gibb's memoir got under my skin very quickly and very profoundly. It is not a book that I will forget soon. This is the heartrending account of a very courageous individual, baring open her deepest fears and anxieties, her traumas and desperate efforts to hold on to some kind of life and hope for a future. And out of the many fragments of the past, from childhood to first and great loves followed by deep losses and desolation, she succeeds in construction a new life with the building blocks of lessons learned from that past. She can see a future within a new close-knit community of family and friends and her young daughter at the centre of a new happiness.

Camilla Gibb's memoir is a compelling account, exquisitely realized in tone and language, often emotionally charged, yet also written where appropriate with the distance of an observer. Her reflections have meaning beyond her personal experience and reach into the emotional fabric of what makes us who we are and who we can become. Reading this is happy kept me up reading late into the night.

[Jessica Rose · Rating 5 out of 5]

Review originally appeared here: http://www.notmytypewriter.com/2015/0...

I read the first pages of This Is Happy, Camilla Gibb’s first memoir, on the edge of Guelph Lake with a folk festival buzzing behind me. It was the final weekend of July, and I’d snuck away from the chaos: The sweaty bodies fighting for shade, the dancing women in flowing skirts, the line-up for overpriced beer. I found an hour of solitude as the sun began to set and hipster parents called their little ones back toward shore.

This is happy, I thought to myself.

“We come to know ourselves only through stories,” writes Gibb on one of these early pages. “We listen to the stories of others, we inherit the stories of those who came before, and we make sense of our own experiences by constructing a narrative that holds them, and holds us, together.” This Is Happy isn’t Camilla Gibb’s story. It’s her many stories, and don’t let the title fool you. Together they build a far from happy tale.

Divided in four parts — incubate, hatch, roost, and flight — This Is Happy begins where many memoirs do, at the beginning. Gibb’s rocky childhood, marred by her parents’ divorce and her father’s cruel outbursts, sets the scene. In these early days, we see a character struggling to belong, a theme that follows Gibb into an adulthood plagued by restlessness, illness, and profound heartbreak.

Amidst the often excruciating unhappiness found between the covers of This Is Happy, there is a light — a light so pure and fragile that Gibb calls it her egg. Her egg, a daughter, is born just months after Anna, with whom Gibb shared a “thorough, pure, unassailable” love, leaves suddenly, a loss that threatens to destroy Gibb at a time when someone so “pure and innocent and uncontaminated” is waiting to be born.

While the egg brings Gibb a light, it doesn’t cure the sadness that lives inside her, but it does give her a reason to survive. Around the egg, Gibb builds the family she never had with the help of Tita, the nanny, Micah, her drug-addicted brother, and her friend Miles, a “lonely gay.” The egg is at the heart of this chosen family that exists to protect her in the months that follow her birth.

“How do you protect a child from heartbreak? All I know is that the egg wants to be held all the time, and perhaps if I hold her all the time she will know that she is loved in such a fundamental and profound way that when her heart is broken as an adult, she will not fall apart, will know she is still loved and lovable.”

This Is Happy is a stunning memoir shaped by overwhelming highs and excruciating lows. It explores the commonalities all our life stories share: fantasies, failures, losses, and loves. It’s a memoir about finding light in a world that, for some, seems nothing but dark. As a reader, I couldn’t help but feel protective of Gibb, precarious and fragile, as she bears her grief, especially after her relationship ends.

“Grief is the overwhelming result of so many compounded losses that it is impossible to process as a whole. So you don’t. You spend a thousand hours in therapy talking about the thousand things that hurt, one by one, in excruciating detail. That mass of grief holds the loss of the person you loved, the idea of them, the person you were with them, the life you shared, the friends and community and extended family you shared, the idea of who you were together — it challenges the very idea of your life and yourself.
This quotation-heavy review should act as evidence that I loved this book. I loved it in a way I haven’t loved a memoir since I read Patti Smith’s Just Kids, my enduring answer to the question: “What’s your favourite book?” I found myself jotting passages from This Is Happy and sharing them with others. This is one of those books you want to tell the world about.

So often, memoirs are steeped in nostalgia, but This Is Happy looks instead toward a brighter future. It may in many ways be a memoir about new parenthood, but it’s about so much more. Ultimately, it’s about the need we all have within us to find a place to belong.

[Krista · Rating 4 out of 5]

We are the storytelling animal; our stories are what make us human.

I didn't know what to expect from This is Happy – I picked it up because the book was recently shortlisted for the RBC Taylor Prize for literary nonfiction – and based on the title, I expected something, erm, happy. That it is not. In what is quite a short narrative, author Camilla Gibb describes a miserable and chaotic childhood, her mental illness and suicide attempts as a graduate student at Oxford, a string of tumultuous love affairs, and just when she believes her life is settled and complete (enjoying success as an author, and after four years of a happy marriage, eight weeks pregnant with a longed-for child), everything crumbles: her wife announces that she's leaving and Gibb must scramble to find a new place to live and a new support network, all the while crying incessantly and feeling inadequate to the task of motherhood. After the baby arrives and Gibb is still crying incessantly, she sends off an email to her writerly acquaintance Ian Brown (author of The Boy in the Moon about his experiences with his severely disabled son), and Brown advises her to “write it all down because you must”. Presumably, this book is what came of that advice.

Being able to put your experiences into a narrative gives meaning to the life you have lived. It can allow you to make sense of the things that have seemed the most senseless and cruel by providing some context - even if that context is nothing more than: it didn't kill me. I am alive to tell this tale. I am here, where I was once there. There is a story, possibly a universal one, of the passage between there and here.

Although in an interview Gibb said that she didn't want the breakup of her marriage to be seen as “the defining chapter” of her life, it was certainly a major turning point: whereas before she might have fantasised about ways to end her life, having sole responsibility for an infant removed that “option”. And by opening her home and her heart to a Filipina nanny, Gibb began to regrow the circle of support that she would need: a circle that would eventually include her estranged drug-addict brother; her emotionally distant mother and stepfather; a grad student trying to make sense of what it means to be a “lonely gay”; and the nanny's own growing family. In the end, it's in these relationships that Gibb recognises happiness.

I can appreciate the beauty of these moments when I describe them, but I have little feeling of beauty inside me. I can create happy moments for us and I can know that they are happy. I am doing my best to give my daughter a good life, exposing and introducing her to diverse and interesting people and experiences. I am watching her, watching the world. I have spent so much of my life watching from a distance. Now it seems I am twice removed.

And this removal is evident in Gibb's storytelling: the language in This is Happy is sparse and matter-of-fact – even when she's relating very painful memories; even when recalling suicide attempts – and while every now and then there is a lovely or insightful turn-of-phrase, I think that the spare language serves Gibb well; we are shown the facts, but without florid writing, we are not invited to share in the pain. As an author memoir, I appreciated the parts about her time in Ethiopia (and how that would have informed Gibb's writing of Sweetness in the Belly; a book I loved), and after reading the scene where her then-homeless, alcoholic father showed up for a reading of Mouthing the Words, I am very interested in reading that. I want to point out that I was fairly incensed to read that the ex-wife – someone with no biological ties to the baby, and since she left Gibb so early in her pregnancy, someone with no personal investment in the baby – enjoys parental rights and visits and was even able to barge into the delivery room soon after the baby was born. I was also saddened to read that following the breakup of her marriage Gibb hasn't been able to write any more fiction. From the same interview, Gibb says, “I have no patience for it. I used to be the biggest champion of fiction. I can tell you why the artifice is necessary. But it’s an intellectual argument that doesn’t actually reflect how I feel.” So, as a reader, that's kind of sad.

I have a job to do as a storyteller: we all do. To tell stories that make us knowable to others, most importantly our children. To give them the tools to help them know themselves. And perhaps we come to know ourselves differently as a consequence.

In the end, this is a short read (something like four hours), and while Gibb's childhood was pretty terrible, she doesn't dwell on it like some others do in the recent spate of misery memoirs. The conclusions that she comes to aren't particularly earth-shattering – storytelling helps us frail humans to make sense of our lives and, in the end, “family” encompasses more than our blood relations – but perhaps that is simply what she meant about the “passage from there to here” being a “universal” story. Ultimately, I find Gibb to be a very likeable person and I hope she really has found her happiness; not because she deserves it more than anyone else, but because she deserves it just as much as we all do. It's a worthwhile read.

[Alison · Rating 3 out of 5]

I really liked and could relate to some aspects of this story but in the end I felt that it just became another self-indulgent first world memoir, which was disappointing

[Cathryn Wellner · Rating 5 out of 5]

After hearing an interview with Camilla Gibb on CBC, I wanted to read This Is Happy. I knew a little of what was ahead of me. Her birth family would be broken. She would sink into despair and consider suicide. The safe, secure family she formed with the woman she married would suddenly dissolve, leaving her pregnant and alone.

What drew me to pick up the book and read enough of it to be hooked was something she said in the interview: "...so much of [happy] is about our embeddedness within a community of people who do accept us." That resonated for me. We are all broken, but in the company of people who see that brokenness and love us anyway, we form a life that we can come to see as "happy".

So I entered the book wanting to know more about Gibb and the community of people who had led her to give her memoir of woundedness such an unlikely title. I was not disappointed. By the last page, Gibb had rowed the boat of her life through waters rough with grief and loss, yet ultimately smoothed by the unconventional family whose love formed a life raft for all of them.

I devour books with a hunger that never abates. I read them quickly and go on to the next. Only rarely am I reluctant to come to the last page, sad to leave the world the book has drawn me into and to say goodbye to the writer who has somehow captured a piece of my heart. This was one of them, and I am grateful for that.

As someone who has long believed that stories are as essential to us as breathing, I sat for a long time with one of the last paragraphs of the book. Gibb wrote, "I have a job to do as a storyteller: we all do. To tell stories that make us knowable to others, most importantly our children. To give them the tools to help them know themselves. And perhaps we come to know ourselves differently as a consequence."

That rings true for me. Though I shed many things each time I uproot and replant myself, I never discard my journals, old letters, and story files (both print and digital). So it is not surprising This Is Happy was, for me, like a long conversation with a trusted friend.

[Christina · Rating 2 out of 5]

The title of this book should have a question mark because most of the time the author was miserable. At one point she says that she could take the happy out of any situation and I'm thinking - no kidding!

After the first chapter I felt like you do when you are trapped by a stranger who is telling you their life story with all the intimate details you really don't want to know. She is so immersed in her emotional landscape that we don't learn enough about the external one. It would have made for a far more balanced and interesting book; she's a writer, I wanted to know more about the writing.

Though for a writer she didn't seem very observant; how do you have people leave you and not pick up some clues beforehand? I never cared much for any of these people. I partly think this was because she wasn't being honest with the reader. If we knew more of the story I think some of her reactions wouldn't have seemed so inexplicable and extreme.

She says, in reference to Joan Didion's book about the death of her husband, The Year of Magical Thinking, what makes her so special? That was exactly my thought about this book.

[Maayan K · Rating 4 out of 5]

I burned through this in one sitting while I should have been writing a paper for my comprehensive exams. It defies its somewhat treacly title - this isn't really a sweet book at all, though it is a cautiously redemptive one.

I'm getting a bit more familiar with the memoir/personal narrative genre lately, with reading Vivian Gornick's "Fierce Attachments," Joan Didion's essays, and Cheryl Strayed and Robyn Davidson's books. Camilla Gibb's latest book is a very fine example of the genre. The task of dramatizing an internal life is a hugely challenging one. The detail needs to be inclusive enough to be coherent but exclusive enough to still leave space for imagination and drama. In this I think Gibb is mostly successful, though she perhaps errs on the sparing side.

The first half of Gibb's memoir tracks her relationships and development as a writer from a disjointed and unhappy childhood, to an academically overachieving young adulthood, to a more happy and successful period in her 30s. Then, when she is newly pregnant at the age of 41, her wife abruptly leaves her. This abandonment is the dramatic lynchpin of the book, as the crushed narrator attempts to assemble an unconventional family for her about-to-be-born daughter in the ruin of the life she had every reason to believe would be hers. In this way, a Philipina nanny (Tita), Camilla's estranged brother (Micah), and single female friend (Miles) all take up residence in a house hastily purchased by Camilla on Toronto's east side immediately after the dissolution of her marriage. This hodgepodge of lost people create the provisional circle in which Camilla's daughter spends her infancy.

Some characters fully come to life: her father, the nanny Tita, her brother Micah. Others remain too vague to quite make sense to the reader as the powerful forces they clearly are in Camilla's internal world: her earlier boyfriends, other female friends, and her ex-wife.

One of the most moving relationships in the book is with Tita, the 29-year old nanny with a husband and 10 dependents back home in the Philippines. Her personality, language, and the nicknames she gives everyone in Camilla's life make her real. By contrast, the character of Miles, the "lonely gay" young woman who is adopted/adopts Camilla and her daughter remains a bit vaguely drawn. Of course, most all the people Gibb talks about are presumably still part of her life. I assume that because of this, there is a sense of tentativeness about her treatment of some of them. While there is rawness and honesty, there is no savagery, and very little sharpness. Gibb is walking a tightrope between exposure and prudence in this retelling of he family's very recent history. Another area where more details would have been interesting is money - it might be grubby of me to be interested, but the practicalities of having vulnerable relatives, divorce, paying a live-in nanny, and buying and selling real estate in Toronto, on a writer's income (while not being able to afford an expensive therapist), are interesting. Such tensions are hinted at but not properly explained.

Intertwined with the themes of writing, and coupling/uncoupling, the issue of mental illness is present throughout. Psychotherapy gets an endorsement, while psychiatry is mostly indicted - though Gibbs' account of her years on drugs and multiple stints in psych wards are less brutal and more equivocal than some others I've read. One thing I was surprised by is the lack of preoccupation with queerness in the story. Camilla's marriage to a woman after years of relationships with men simply isn't discussed in any way. In one brief sexual encounter, we don't even know if the partner is male or female. I'm not sure if it's refreshing or evasive - evidently sexuality was not a source of internal drama in the same register that Gibb's childhood and abandonment were.

One of the most delectable aspects of this book was seeing how pieces of Gibb's life were grafted into her novels (the one I've read, "Sweetness in the Belly" is a tour de force). Overall, the book could have been a bit fuller in a few ways, but it left me wanting more, not less. That feeling speaks for itself.

[Lorraine · Rating 2 out of 5]

"This is boring" is, unfortunately, what I thought much of the time while reading this book. Even though it is first person, there's more telling than showing in the writing and it feels detached. Strange, because it is quite personal and raw and tragic, but even when the verb tense shifts from past to present it didn't feel any more real to me. Perhaps I'm not broken enough to relate to the experiences in this book. Perhaps someone who has had their own struggles with mental health and loneliness can find something profound to hold on to from this perspective, but I just did not connect.
I'd recommend Janette Walls instead. Or Adult Onset by Ann-Marie MacDonald.

[Natasha · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book left me feeling optimistic and happy. There are some brutal, sad moments in it but there are moments of rising beyond them. Gibb has me thinking about how to look at situations and what parts to tell, as a storyteller.

[Tracy · Rating 4 out of 5]

I loved The Beauty of Humanity Movement. Just thinking about it makes me feel peaceful. This book isn't peaceful. It is often very sad as Camilla Gibb remembers her troubled childhood and tumultuous young adulthood. She gets pregnant at age 41 and her wife of four years leaves her soon afterwards. The latter part of the book is a rumination on the grief she felt when her marriage ended as she was struggling with her pregnancy, home renovations and building a new life. The author had struggled with depression most of her life and trying to cope with all of these simultaneously very stressful. She is often in tears trying to figure out if she is losing her mind. Somehow she perseveres, builds a new family...her drug addicted brother, her nanny, a dear friend and figures out how to be a mother. I loved her descriptions of her new family and the love she feels for all of them. And in the end she does find a kind of peace. Not the life she thought she would have but something wonderful nonetheless.

[Roberta · Rating 3 out of 5]

I've liked Gibbs' novels, especially Sweetness in the Belly, and it was interesting to get a glimpse of what inspired her. Also, she portrays adolescence well. After awhile though and in more than a few places, I found myself impatient with endless moaning about her past and about what seemed to be very much first world problems. She felt very self absorbed.

[April · Rating 5 out of 5]

also going through depression, was able to relate to some of the feelings the protagonist goes through. It was a relief to be able to see what depression makes people go through in the quite accurate wording of the author.
Makes me realize that happiness is only happiness when you believe it is, and that anything can be part of your happiness if you believe it to be so.

[Christine · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a beautiful and engaging memoir - one I would like to start over and read all over again right away. It's honest, and completing and heartfelt. Her story is her own and yet she tells a story that is truly about all of us - out need to feel whole and belong.

[Erika Nerdypants · Rating 3 out of 5]

I wanted to like this more. Gibb is such a wonderful storyteller and this story has some very compelling elements. I think what let me down in the end was that she doesn’t really let us into her relationship with Anna, which is the catalyst for everything that happens. I don’t buy that she didn’t have an inkling. She mentions she felt hurt that Anna went to the hockey game and confronted her when she came home. There is whole story there that leads up to that moment, and so for me it’s not nearly as raw as everyone else seems to think. I do understand why Gibb has held back. Her ex partner and the other woman she mentions are both high profile Canadians, and I imagine she had to tread a very fine line. I also found it incredible that she is saddened that the nanny can’t be with her husband and family because she has to support them, without ever questioning her own complicity in the situation. I wasn’t entirely surprised, as I saw similar themes in Sweetness in the Belly. The most heartbreaking moment for me was the three of them laying on the bed together, right after the birth, not touching. And of course I love that this is a queer story! Kudos for making queer lives visible.

[Jennifer G · Rating 3 out of 5]

Although this book wasn't quite what I was expecting, I did enjoy it. I found the book really easy to read and enjoyed the writing style of the author. Memoirs aren't usually so well written, but the writer is an accomplished author and has written many books.

The back of the book hints that this is an emotional book, however, I wasn't quite prepared for the mental illness aspect. It is interesting though to think about whether the author's mental difficulties are genetic, or whether many of them stem from having had such a rough childhood.

I found that I enjoyed this book, but don't think that it will stay with me, or be anywhere close to being one of my favourites.

[Carolyn · Rating 4 out of 5]

At the end of the month I have an opportunity to go to a memoir workshop with the author, as she is the writer - in- residence at the Kitchener Public Library this year. I was surprisingly drawn in to this particular story.
It was a moving tale, full of unexpected things that left me feeling drawn in and wanting to hug the author. Her truth was palatable.
She grew up in an unconventional situation... having a father who was undiagnosed as possibly bi-polar. Her parents separated, but she and her brother did spend some time with their father. Her younger brother living with him for two years while she only visited on weekends. Later in life her brother suffered from drug use and addition.
She was diagnosed with bi-polar disorder and she delves into her life dealing with this mental health disorder and how it shapes and colours her experience.
I was slammed when her partner decided to leave her during the first months of her pregnancy. The experience made her stronger, but not before she felt she was hanging on by a thread. Building a 'family' of her own helped her find her place again... it helped ground her.
It was wonderful to read about her experience and see how strong and vital she is today. I raise my glass to her willingness to share her experience so openly. I look forward to meeting her in person this Wednesday (May 30, 2018).

[Alexandra Knowles · Rating 5 out of 5]

A raw, honest, and uplifting memoir that guts the reader (particularly if you come from an abusive upbringing), leaves you hopeless, and through the finest needle prick of light in a landscape of blackness, offers the possibility of something like happiness.

[Heather(Gibby) · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a gut wrenching and uplifting book all at the same time. I am glad I had read a couple of her books before I read her memoir. She is a fantastic author.

[Brooke — brooklynnnnereads · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was incredible. Incredible, being an understatement.

I have never read anything by Camilla Gibb before and it really was by chance that I picked this book up. To put it simply, I judged a book by its cover. This cover was aesthetically pleasing and the title also stuck out. I did not even read a summary or description before I delved right in.

If you are going into the book with the expectation of it being a light, 'happy' read as the title suggests, you will be surprised (as I was). This story hits you fast and hard with the harsh realities of a difficult life. When I was reading this narration of her life and all the difficulties that she repeatedly faced, sometimes I sat there in shock. Shock of how this was non-fiction, this WAS someone's story.

Also eye opening was the experience and lifestyles in Ethiopia which was only a small fraction of the book. It's in those moments that I'm truly aware and appreciative of the blessings that I have in my life.

This memoir was heart wrenching, emotional, and real. Camilla Gibb really exposed and opened herself to her readers in this memoir. The writing flowed and was easy to read (even if the content was not). I will highly recommend this book. Camilla Gibb, you are a strong, strong, woman.

[Carole · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Being able to put your experiences into a narrative gives meaning to the life you have lived. It can allow you to make sense of the things that have seemed the most senseless and cruel by providing some context—even if that context is nothing more than: It didn’t kill me. I am alive to tell this tale. I am here, where I was once there. There is a story, possibly a universal one, of the passage between there and here."

These words from Camilla Gibb's "This is Happy " form the premise of a memoir of a dramatic and traumatic episode in her life, a series of events which resulted in her being a single mother of her daughter. Although her earliest works are novels, Gibb has relied on her own life for some of the source material of her fictional narratives as well.

I recently attended a meeting at which Camilla Gibb read from and talked about this, her latest book. She was an excellent speaker and reader and this definitely led me to read "This is Happy " which turned out to be much more than I expected. She tells her story with brutal honesty and admirable courage.

[Kevin · Rating 3 out of 5]

Eagerly read through most of the memoir, pretty well written in an engaging conversational style. There was something fascinating and relatable in her struggles and experiences. Towards the end chapters it became apparent to me by the onset of a creeping nausea, of the sheer self indulgence and entitlement of the writer. I felt like 'how can she not be embarrassed to admit being this person?' I was rooting for her while she revealed her terrible challenges early in life, but the person she became seemed boring and again, indulgent, shallow, and I just couldn't care anymore. If it were simply a fictional novel, I'd say it had a disappointing nihilist ending. You've just read a story about a person's life struggles which se seemed to win out on in a way, but in the end it was pointless and who cares.

[Andrea MacPherson · Rating 2 out of 5]

I have read every novel Camilla Gibb has written, and loved them. I was always deeply engaged with the characters, drawn in by the narrative.

So I expected to love this memoir. But I didn't.

It was as if all the elements that make Gibb's fiction so powerful were absent here. It felt detached, vague, skimming over particularly important and profound moments. Characters were not named. Moments that should have been deeply emotional were not. Her story itself is fascinating, layered, and very relatable. But it felt as though she was holding back, trying to simultaneously tell her story, and reserve is for herself.

To be fair, this is exactly why I think a memoir would be so challenging. It's very difficult to examine your own life honestly, in all its messiness.

[Ash Shea · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this book, not only was it different from any other book I have read this year but it was my first memoir.

"Being able to put your experiences into a narrative gives meaning to the life you have lived. It can allow you to make sense of the things that have seemed the most senseless and cruel by providing some context - even if that context is nothing more than: it didn't kill me. I am alive to tell this tale. I am here, where I was once there. There is a story, possibly a universal one, of the passage between there and here."

Thank you to my beautiful sister for such an amazing book, one that is now full of tags and folded corners so that for future reference I can re- read those paragraphs that inspired conscious thought.

[Risa · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the best books I ever read! Camilla Gibb has a special way with words, sentences, paragraphs, chapters and whole books. I read another one of her books - "The Beauty of Humanity Movement" and loved it, too. I wonder how Ms. Gibb wrote such wonderful novels while suffering deep depressive episodes. Having, myself, suffered from depression I can identify with a lot of what Ms. Gibb wrote. I deeply appreciate her honesty in this memoir and can't wait for her next book to be published. In the meantime, I bought "Sweetness in the Belly" which will be my next book to read.

[Jo-anne · Rating 4 out of 5]

Joan Didion's "We tell ourselves stories in order to live" was a guiding light for Gibbs. Writing her story appears to have been the key to Gibb's survival from a series of life's challenges. Journaling is a tool for many but Camilla Gibb's decision to sharing it with readers has created a beautifully written intensely personal memoir that resonated with me. Being a huge fan of her earlier novel 'Sweetness in the Belly', I was particularly engaged by the section of the novel that describes Gibb's year living in Harar, Ethiopia with a traditional Muslim family.

[Susan · Rating 2 out of 5]

This should have been better. Young women with troubled family, many suffering from mental health issues. Despite this she has many interesting life experiences and opportunities. What I disliked about this book was how self absorbed she was and her lack of insight into why things turned out the way they did. It reminded me of the diaries I kept in my early teens. As a result her inner dialogue got tedious. It seems she forgot she was writing a book that was going to be read by others.

[Kathy · Rating 5 out of 5]

I remain a fan of Gibb's, having read a couple of her works of fiction in the past. This book is a memoir, a sometimes raw account of her difficult childhood, her struggles with depression, the heartbreak following the breakup with her partner, and managing life as a single mother. It is the purest expression of what makes us human: trying to find meaning in life's obstacles and joys.

[Lauren Dandridge · Rating 3 out of 5]

a very poetic read 3
this woman has truly lived a life

[Joanne · Rating 3 out of 5]

The reviews I read of this book led me to expect more than I got. While it was interesting enough, it really didn't touch me in any way. I just didn't feel any emotional attachment to it at all. Not a bad book, just a slight one.

[Bryen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very enjoyable and quick read. Contained a number of incidents that left me wanting but no answers (I suppose much like life) - nonetheless, a moving memoir about depression, motherhood, travel, Ontario, Toronto, complex family relationships...