Life / Relationships / News & Views / Sarah Hampson / Columnist
If you’ve ever despaired that your life is passing you by, that you’ll likely never accomplish the things you thought you might, meet Laurie Lewis.
She just published her first book at 80.
“I didn’t feel the need to nor did I have the time,” confides the slim, pretty author, whose memoir, Little Comrades, was released this summer. “I was always scrambling for money. As a writer, you can scramble for money all your life if you’re alone, but when you have children, you can’t.”
• Sarah Ferguson on picking up the pieces
She also didn’t feel free enough in spirit. “I was really quite frozen,” she continues, leaning over a table in a downtown Toronto café. Girlish is how one might describe her, the easy manner and quickness of laughter, the bright sparkle of her blue eyes. “It’s astonishing, amazing,” she says with a giggle about her new status as a writer.
In the acknowledgments of her book, she writes that the day her publisher, Tim Inkster of The Porcupine’s Quill, said yes to her manuscript “was the beginning of a new life for me.”
Does she feel liberated by the fact that so many people from her past are dead?
“Oh, yes, that helps,” she says with a broad smile.
Her childhood was unconventional, growing up in a Communist family in Calgary in the 1930s, when it was illegal to go to party meetings, pass out leaflets or organize workers as her parents did. “They were the vanguard for the working class. They were going to make everything better,” she says.
But the Communist party activity wasn’t all she had to keep hidden. Her father was an abusive alcoholic. Her late mother, Ellen Stafford, who figures largely in Little Comrades, spent most of her life as a frustrated writer. Her first book (Was That You at the Guggenheim?) was published at 80, too. But her formidable presence as well as the fact that many other members of Ms. Lewis’s family are writers – her late brother, her husband, a daughter and her son-in-law – made her feel that there was no room for her to express herself. “I thought I couldn’t write. They all did it, and it was pretty scary. And they were good at it.”
Her decision to write began about 14 years ago, when she and her husband moved with her mother to Kingston, Ont. Ms. Lewis, who worked as a designer and production editor for 30 years at the University of Toronto Press, commuted to Toronto by train to work twice a week. “It was the first free time I had and at the same time I was trying to work through some personal situations.” She began by writing “little pieces of my childhood.” A few years later, she attended a writing workshop in Banff, where one of her editors offered encouragement.
But then her home life got difficult again. Her mother, who lived with her, fell ill. And her husband developed dementia. In 2002, her mother died and her husband entered a nursing home. Her life became hers, and as she sat down at her computer to write, she marvelled at the loyalty and diligence of her memory.
“What is memory to our brain?” she says, leaning in again like an eager student. “It’s a chemical soup, so when you go there, all it does is assemble the chicken stock and then you go back again and it says, ‘Oh, I have some carrots, too.’ It’s like it’s putting it all together for you. As you search, it begins to grow.”
Continue reading here
© Copyright 2011 The Globe and Mail Inc
___________________________________________________________
Credit: Reports and photographs are property of owners of intellectual rights.
Seniors World Chronicle, a not-for-profit, serves to chronicle and widen their reach.
