It is safe to say that never once in my life had I dreamed of being in bed with a convicted killer, let alone one with his teeth in a margarine container in the kitchen, his mother in the next room, and the word HI! tattooed in tiny blue letters on his penis.Near the end of 2005 – in a funk on the heels of a tough breakup that had led to persistent writer's block – award-winning Canadian author Diane Schoemperlen took the advice of a friend and began volunteering at a hot lunch program as a distraction. Three months later, “Shane” arrived as a dishwasher, and with open minds and hearts, Schoemperlen and the other volunteers befriended the man whom they knew to be a local prisoner on an escorted day pass. Within months, Shane was declaring that Schoemperlen was the woman for him, and by the end of a year, she decided to give sway to her heart and start a romantic relationship with him. This relationship would last (on and off) for six years, and in the fascinating book This Is Not My Life, Schoemperlen outlines the good and the bad, laying bare her own psyche and the frustrations of dealing with the Canadian Penal System.
As an author, an educator, a single mother, you know that Schoemperlen is neither weak nor dim, and she pulls no punches while outlining what in her own history might have made her deaf to the clanging alarm bells (that even most of her friends could recognise) as this romance began to blossom. Within a year of “dating” – and in no small part due to Schoemperlen's own efforts – Shane received full parole and moved into her home. After thirty years in prison, Shane had no skills for living in the community – making this period of living together tense and unhappy – and after just 49 days, he moved out. Within two more months, Shane had broken the conditions of his parole and was sent back to a higher security-level prison. Schoemperlen decided she was done with him, spent a year in counselling to get over the breakup, and eventually decided to give the relationship another chance; a much less satisfying experience now that Shane no longer enjoyed day or weekend passes and Schoemperlen was obliged to suffer the indignities of tighter security around in-prison visits. As Shane once again devolved into a jealous and manipulative, yet not actually present, partner, Schoemperlen had an epiphany that led to their final breakup:
That night I finally understood that I was in love with the story of my relationship with Shane. That the story – oh the story – was so beautiful, tender, and romantic. But the reality was not any of those things. The reality was only abusive, destructive, and unbearable...That night I understood that for all those years, I'd been in love with the story – not the reality – of my life joined to Shane's. The story of myself as the one who could lead him out of the darkness, the one who could make him whole, healthy, happy. The story of myself as the one who could save him.This Is Not My Life is consistently thoughtful and engaging; Schoemperlen is open and reflective. She is definitely not one of those women who glamourises violence – she didn't seek this out like those confused souls who would send proposals of marriage to Ted Bundy or Richard Ramirez – but this isn't exactly a “it could happen to anyone” story: unlike Schoemperlen, I would never have been attracted to the tough guy with the homemade tattoos covering his body (including up his neck and a teardrop by his eye); and when Shane eventually detailed what had landed him a life sentence – the bludgeoning of a man with a hammer (followed by strangulation by electrical cord to be good and certain he was dead) because the victim might have jeopardised an earlier parole – I would have been out of there; there is compassion and understanding for a fellow human being's past indiscretions, and there is recognising evil (and while Schoemperlen didn't exactly portray Shane as “evil”, he was a career criminal, and theirs was no fairy tale). I appreciated her portrayal of Shane as an example of the penal system's failure to prepare a convict for re-entry into society, and on many levels, this book is an informative expose of Canada's prisons and their lack of effective rehabilitation. On the other hand, it has a definite liberal slant including: Schoemperlen and Shane requiring two counselling sessions to deal with the election of a Conservative majority government in 2011; space given to the protest led by penal expert Margaret Atwood after the shuttering of prison farms; and an extra expression of thankfulness in the Acknowledgments section for the election of Justin Trudeau as the thirty-third prime minister of Canada who is destined to “bring Canada back to a more humane and effective criminal justice system based on research, evidence, the respect of human rights, and the true protection of public safety”. Gag. While I 100% agree that budget cuts that lead to overcrowding and understaffing are indefensible, after reading of Schoemperlen's frustrated dealings with the Kafkaesque Canadian prison system, it's hard for me to see the utility of more government programs; more layers of bureaucracy. And here's my last complaint: other than one passage in which Schoemperlen is disturbed to discover that a familiar inmate from the visiting room is a notorious local violent pedophile, there is very little space given to the victims of crime. I'm sure it was demeaning for Schoemperlen to suddenly be forced to submit to drug-detecting dogs at the minimum security prison (especially while believing, and stating, that it's likely the guards who are bringing in the drugs), but I'm not sorry that the inmates no longer referred to that prison as “camp”; Shane brutally murdered a man, and this victim is never mentioned after Shane's first confession. When the news was released that the Kingston Penitentiary was to be closed – an aging structure noted as the oldest still-in-use prison in the world – Schoemperlen dreads the effect that news will have on local convicts:
Not only was KP an integral part of the history and identity of the city of Kingston, but also of all the men, like Shane, who had ever been incarcerated there. It was a badge of honour, I think, for him and the other prisoners who could say they'd done time there and survived, had escaped the place, so to speak, with their lives. A part of each of them would be stripped away by this closure.This shuttering and its effect on the living and safety conditions for Canadian prisoners might well have been wrongfooted, but how it affected these convicts' self-image and nostalgia means nothing to me. And yet, while Schoemperlen and I might have different political leanings, I liked this book very much; I thought it was a really strong example of a memoir that uses a fascinating focal point of a few fraught years to expose the workings of an entire life. I liked Schoemperlen's incidental sharing of her career as a celebrated author (I found it interesting to learn how many events she goes to; I wish that her success meant that she was more comfortable financially). I thought it was well organised, well written, informative, and honest; I expect to see this title again at award season.
