What follows are some of 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. These are stories that have haunted and directed me, unwittingly, down circuitous paths. 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. These stories don’t add up to a portrait of a life, or even a snapshot of one. They are about the transformative power of an ever-evolving relationship to memory. Telling them is a form of running towards the danger.
For this collection of six autobiographical essays, the title of Run Towards the Danger comes from the advice that a doctor recently gave to Sarah Polley: after suffering for nearly four years the brain damage and migraines resulting from a concussion — four years of respecting the boundaries of what would cause her pain or discomfort and retreating to dark rooms when the world around her got too stimulating — a concussion specialist in Pittsburgh told Polley that caution was exactly the wrong approach. After providing her with exercises that would work to rewire the pathways in her brain, Polley was advised to “pin her ears back and run towards the danger”. And within six weeks, her brain was healed. This idea of confronting the things that cause us pain and discomfort makes for a wonderful metaphor for what Polley has crafted here: in each of the six essays, Polley tells the story of a painful episode from her past, and with finely crafted prose and layers of self-reflection, she turns each grit of ache into a perfect little pearl to share with the world. The writing is skillful, the stories are compelling and affecting, and their lessons are universal: who could ask for more?
I’ve had a lot of illnesses and physical problems, many of them invisible: endometriosis, scoliosis, placenta previa, and now a concussion. I think it’s starting to get on people’s nerves and make them suspicious.
I won’t go over every essay, but will start by noting that I (and probably most other people) would never have realised that young Sarah had scoliosis, or that while she was a child television star, she was wearing a painful spine-straightening brace under her period costumes. With a number of other medical issues over the years, and several stories about people doubting her recollection of events, the subtitle “Confrontations with a Body of Memory” is also perfect; this is ultimately about the body and memory. Perhaps the best example of this is on Polley’s experience with disgraced CBC radio host Jian Ghomeshi:
I’ve been writing and rewriting this essay for years now. It’s difficult, when you’ve resisted telling a story for so long, to know where to start. Especially when it has haunted you not to tell it. When it has knocked around inside your brain, loudly in the middle of the night, asking why it didn’t deserve to be told, asking you who you might have hurt by not telling it, who you might truly be, deep down, because of your decision not to.
As other women who had been abused by Ghomeshi started coming forward with accusations, Polley heeded the advice of lawyer friends to not join their ranks: not just because being cross-examined in a sexual assault case is a terrible experience, but because Polley had been obliged to appear on Ghomeshi’s radio show over the years and her flirty/giggly performances would likely have only undermined the Crown’s case. Polley tells a harrowing story about her encounter with Ghomeshi, but the essay is more about how trauma affects memory and actions and how the victims of abuse can be incapable of acting as “perfect witnesses”. Another standout was the essay on Polley’s only foray into live theatre — when she was cast as the lead in Alice Through the Looking-Glass at the Stratford Festival — where she developed crippling stage fright as the season went on:
By this point, it may be obvious that a nervous breakdown of epic proportions was in the offing. This dichotomy between my womanly body, which was in a kind of collapse, and the oddness of experiencing a sort of reversal of puberty and hard-won independence, twisted with the knots of a story written by a likely pedophile that contained echoes of my relationship with my father, was a powder keg for my subconscious.
At fifteen (and having lived in Toronto with her boyfriend for a year by this point in the wake of her mother’s death and her father’s ensuing apathy), Polley was in the strange position of staying with an aunt and cousin in Stratford (who took loving care of her in a way her parents never had) and playing the part of a much younger girl on stage, but also playing the lead in that show and having the fate of the entire production rest in her untrained hands. The story of Alice and Lewis Carroll had a particular strange resonance for Polley and the pressure and the dissonance did lead to a breakdown (which saw Polley begging a surgeon to perform the long-dreaded spinal surgery that would get her out of her terror-inducing role.)
In an essay on her time filming The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, Polley tells a crazy story of the danger, neglect, and disregard she suffered under director Terry Gilliam. And while in her memory she blamed her parents (who were on set with her in Italy) for not protecting her, Polley eventually realises that even as a little child she had bought into the mythos of the “mad genius” that allows white, male directors to get away with unchallenged abuse on Hollywood films. Even when she tries to discuss the trauma she suffered on set with Gilliam as an adult, he responds by gaslighting her into not trusting her own memories:
So much of coming to terms with hard things from the past seems to be about believing our own accounts, having our memories confirmed by those who were there and honoured by those who weren’t. Why is it so hard for us to believe our own stories or begin to process them without corroborating witnesses appearing from the shadows of the past, or without people stepping forward with open arms when echoes of those stories present themselves again in the present?
Polley doesn’t write much about her time filming Road to Avonlea (other than making sure we know she hated the experience and the notoriety), but when she has a dream that convinces her to take her family on a vacation to Prince Edward Island, their time there will help her come to terms with the Avonlea experience:
Things have become murky for me on this island in a way they couldn’t have when I was younger — murky in the best possible sense, where whatever sharp narrative I’ve been spinning for years about parents and childhood and lost things has dissipated into foggier outlines. I wonder, now, if I escaped my childhood to arrive in this beautiful life, as I used to believe, or if I should be grateful to that childhood for leading me, so precisely, here.
Sarah Polley has had an outsized public life, and while the stories that reference those public achievements makes for interesting reading, it’s her private struggles and how she learned to live a meaningful life in the midst of trauma and chaos (and concussion!) that makes this feel essential. I wish her the best and much success in future projects.
