A Quokka Dreeds its Weird

These are the most dangerous stories of my life. The ones I have avoided, the ones I haven't told, the ones that have kept me awake on countless nights. As these stories found echoes in my adult life, and then went another, better way than they did in childhood, they became lighter and easier to carry.

A memoir in the form of six essays on various aspects of memory, trauma, and the body, very well-written. Polley was a Canadian child actor who grew up to be a director, a mother, and a political activist. You don't need to be at all familiar with Sarah Polley's other work to read this; she explains all the necessary context. It works well as a whole and should be read in order, but I did have specific essays that were my favorites.

I listened to this on audio, read by Polley, and I recommend that. She's an unsurprisingly excellent reader, does voices for characters, and made me laugh out loud at the two essays that have funny scenes - probably not coincidentally, those were two of my three favorites, "High Risk" (about the her high-risk pregnancy with her first child) and "Run Towards the Danger" (about a concussion and her recovery from it.) The third was "Mad Genius," about her hellish experience acting in The Adventures of Baron Munchausen as a child.

"Mad Genius" is harrowing on so many levels. Polley was nine when she acted in the movie. She worked for twelve or thirteen hours a day - why is that unacceptable for a child in a factory, but fine if it's a movie set? She was put in some situations that were genuinely dangerous, and some that maybe weren't but terrified her, and no way to tell the difference. (I kept thinking of the three child actors who were killed on the set of The Twilight Zone - the Movie with no consequences to those who were responsible.) She had to act when she was sick.

And all of this in service to the genius of Terry Gilliam, who not only gets away with exploiting and endangering a child because he's a genius, but who is seen as even more of a genius the more irrational and childish he acts. As Polley points out, this only works for white men. Women and people of color who act like lunatics on the set and are awful to their crew get immediately drummed out of the business. You don't have to be an enormous asshole to make art, so why do we elevate white male assholes above literally everyone else?

But the essay doesn't stop with the expose. It goes on to interrogate Polley's memories, her tendency to placate people who abused her, and the way her understanding of what happened and what it meant changed over time. This is typical of the essays in this intense, fiercely intelligent book. Polley is very willing to dig deep into events and their meanings; I kept thinking an essay was over, only for her to go further or look at the event from another angle.

It convinced me that child labor is illegal for a reason and the entertainment industry shouldn't be an exception. Polley says that the only two former child actors she knows who weren't drastically fucked up by the experience came from such abusive homes that being in an exploitative work environment was actually an improvement, and I believe her. I'm no longer convinced that the artistic benefit of movies, television, and films to have children in them is worth the harm done to the actual children doing the labor.

Her account of being famous as a child had weird resonance for me. I was famous as a child within an extremely small in-group, and had several of the same bizarre experiences, such as adults angrily telling me that they met me as a child fifteen years ago and I was rude to them.

But the book isn't all darkness. Her accounts of becoming a parent and remembering her mother are very beautiful and loving, and some essays have some extremely funny scenes. Unexpectedly, "High Risk" is the funniest. I literally burst out laughing at her account of a roomful of angry, hungry expectant mothers with gestational diabetes going berserk on a hapless nutritionist.

I recommend this memoir if you're interested in trauma and memory, parent-child relationships, mind-body issues, and/or the darker side of the entertainment industry.

Content notes: Exploitative and dangerous child labor as an actor, mother dies of cancer, lots of medical trauma, a miscarriage, a high-risk pregnancy (but her baby is fine!), rape (in "The Woman Who Stayed Silent"), abuse of women by the legal system.

A childhood/teenage memoir of growing up in Harlem during the 1940s and 1950s, focusing on Myers’ family and neighborhood, his early attempts at writing, and the pervasive racism that slowly poisons his life and dreams.

Myers’ relaxed, warm style and deadpan humor make this easy reading, though I suspect that the episodic structure and lack of emphasis on the moments of conventional action would appeal more to adults than to teenagers.

View on Amazon: Bad Boy: A Memoir