Memoir

Book of the month – September 2025

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During our teaching careers, hubby and I had to learn numerous acronyms describing ND (neurodivergent) children: ADHD (Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder), OCD (Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder), ASD (Autism Spectrum Disorder), ODD (Oppositional Defiant Disorder) and so on, but the book that I’m reviewing this month is an extreme example of what hubby calls PPS (Poor Parenting Syndrome)!

Wavewalker: A Memoir of Breaking Free

Suzanne Heywood

At seven years old, Suzanne Heywood set sail from England with her parents and younger brother on what was supposed to be a three-year trip around the world retracing one of Captain Cook’s voyages. What followed was a decade of isolation on a 70-foot sailboat crossing some of the world’s most dangerous oceans and surviving horrendous storms, shipwrecks, and reefs. What sounded like the romantic adventure of a lifetime became a child’s worst nightmare “trapped inside someone else’s dream”.

Deprived of safety, friendship, and education, Suzanne longed to return to the stability of England and the opportunity to attend school, but her parents saw this only as selfishness on her part and refused to entertain the idea. Determined to educate herself, she worked diligently on correspondence courses dropping lessons into the mail whenever and wherever the family went ashore. Ultimately her desire for independence and self-determination became so intolerable to her parents, particularly her mother, that at age 16, they dropped her off at an isolated cabin on the north island of New Zealand, leaving her responsible for her younger brother while they continued their travels around the South Pacific!   

It would be hard to read this book without becoming increasingly angry at the parents who, according to the epilogue, told their daughter later that she had a “privileged” upbringing! It is, however, a story of resilience and determination. At 17, finally escaping the constraints of her bizarre childhood, Suzanne was accepted into college at Oxford where she went on to earn her PhD.

While Suzanne’s childhood was one of neglect rather than physical abuse, there are strong parallels between her story and Tara Westover’s powerful memoir, Educated. 

Book of the month – August 2025

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The Girl in the Red Coat: A Memoir

Roma Ligocka

The book opens with an elderly Jewish woman sitting in the elegant dining room of a posh hotel on the French Riviera. Suddenly and quite seamlessly it transitions to the dark Ghetto of Kraków, Poland during World War II and I was hooked!

Roma Ligocka was born to Jewish parents in Poland in November 1938, less than a year before the beginning of World War II. Told through the eyes of a child, the story of her early years living in the Jewish Ghetto of Kraków is a harrowing account of uniformed men in shiny black boots with snarling dogs, people being shot indiscriminately, her mother’s tears, and from her hiding place under a table, seeing her own grandmother seized by SS officers. After her father is arrested and taken to Auschwitz, Roma and her mother, with their hair dyed blonde and carrying falsified documents, escape the Ghetto and are taken in by a non-Jewish family who pass them off as visiting cousins. Sometime later, when her father escapes the concentration camp and is reunited with his family, she fails to recognize the haggard spectre that he has become.

Roma is just short of her seventh birthday when the war comes to an end, but her life continues to be marked by severe hardship. Within two years her father dies and the communists take control of Poland.

As her adult life unfolds, we see the results of the trauma that she endured as a child. Although she studied art and costume design at the prestigious Academy of the Arts and became a successful costume and set designer, she continued to confront her frightful memories and her adult life is characterized by anxiety, eating disorders, substance abuse and the inability to maintain lasting relationships.

Finally, at the age of 55, on March 2, 1994, Roma reluctantly attended the première of Steven Spielberg’s epic movie “Schindler’s List” in Kraków. The Academy Award-winning movie was shot entirely in black and white except for the image of a little girl in a red coat. Seeing something of herself in that little girl, Roma, who had had a bright red coat of her own as a wee child, finally felt inspired and strong enough to tell the story of her own experiences.

Interestingly, although I suspected it early on, until late in the book, Ligocka doesn’t reveal the fact that her cousin, Roman, with whom she had a close relationship, was none other than the famous director, producer, writer and actor, Roman Polanski.

Book of the Month – August 2024

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Forgiveness: A Gift from My Grandparents

Mark Sakamoto

Screenshot 2024-08-30 at 12.24.18 PMIn this compelling family memoir, Canadian lawyer Mark Sakamoto writes about his grandparents’ harrowing experiences during World War II. In so doing, he shares with us one of the ugliest and most shameful parts of our country’s history, the forced evacuation of Japanese Canadians from the coastal areas of British Columbia.

The author’s paternal grandparents, Hideo and Mitsue Sakamoto, both Canadian citizens born in Canada, were living and working in Vancouver when the war broke out. They were forced from their home and relocated to a sugar beet farm in southern Alberta where they lived in a crudely converted chicken coop and worked like slaves. They lost their possessions, their community, and their freedom and when the war was over, the government of Canada reimbursed them $25.65, less than 2% of the value of their lost possessions and wages. 

While the Sakamotos were eking out an existence in southern Alberta, the author’s maternal grandfather, Ralph MacLean, experienced a very different war. A young soldier from eastern Canada’s Magdalen Islands, he was shipped out to Hong Kong where he was captured by the Japanese army. Spending the remainder of the war in prisoner of war camps, he enduring illness, abuse, and degradation at the hands of his captors. Barely surviving, he was released at the end of the war and returned to Canada where he found work in Medicine Hat, Alberta.  

A generation later, Ralph and his wife come face to face with Hideo and Mitsue when their daughter falls in love with the Sakamoto’s son. It is a testament to both sides when they are able to put aside the past, choose to forgive, and become friends. 

In the final third of the book, the author focuses on his own life’s story, particularly the trauma that he experienced after his parents’ marriage ends, his mother remarries a violent man, and her life descends into the depths of alcohol and drug addiction. The theme of forgiveness ties the story together, however; forgiveness learned from his grandparents. 

I would caution those who are interested in historical accuracy that the book does contain a few errors related to geography and timing that should have been caught by the editor, but keep in mind that the writer was depending on his grandparents’ memories and telling their story rather than basing his book on historical research. 

Forgiveness: A Gift from My Grandparents won the Canada Reads 2018 award and a stage adaptation by Hiroko Kanagawa played in live theatres across Canada in 2022-2023. I vaguely remember hearing about it then and now I wish that I had purchased tickets and made the effort to travel to the city for a performance.