Arriving at the middle of her life, author and columnist Marilyse Hamelin dives back into the memories of her eventful childhood, her rebellious adolescence and the history of her family to meet the different women within her.
Like her family, it is a work that is both conventional and unusual in the form it offers. Born in Abitibi-Témiscamingue to parents who were struggling, Marilyse saw her childhood turned upside down after their divorce. It was the beginning of a series of trips back and forth, between her native region and the southern suburbs of Montreal, and changes of schools marked by her desire to integrate and the fear of being rejected. Over the years, she writes, she mutated into “a kind of maladaptive creature,” consumed by an “immense sense of guilt and inadequacy.”
To understand the woman she has become, she delves with courage and aplomb into her past and that of her family, going back to her grandparents’ generation. After directing collective works and participating in others, publishing an essay on motherhood and an illustrated story in poetic prose, Marilyse Hamelin signs an autobiographical story which oscillates between poetry and the narrative genre.
After the somewhat confusing style exercise of the first pages, the writing becomes simple, perhaps too simple. The themes covered are so rich – geographical instability, material and emotional precariousness, transmission of intergenerational violence – that we would, at times, have liked to see some of them explored more, in a less fragmented story.
Controlled distress
Hammock
216 pages