The permanent nature of everything : a memoir / Judith Cowan.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Cowan, Judith, 1943- author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Cowan, Judith, 1943-.

Cowan, Judith.

Cowan, Judith, 1943---Childhood and youth.

Cowan, Judith, 1943---Family.

Genre:

Autobiographies.

Physical Description:

xiii, 310 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

Montreal & Kingston : McGill-Queen's University Press, 2014.

Summary:

At five and six years old, lying in the long grass and wildflowers near her family's house on the outskirts of 1940s Toronto, Judith Cowan was certain that what she experienced was the permanent of everything. Little by little, she comes to recognize threats: a leering neighbour asking strange questions about her gender, a lady who has died of an illness not revealed, the smell of something dead in the ditch. Her disapproving, resourceful, and frustrated mother, born to Methodist missionaries in China, tells frightening tales: how a pig will kill and eat a little girl, or how she herself as a small child was shot at by pirates on the Yangtze. Sharing memories from the nineteenth century, her grandparents recount their youthful follies, and she realizes that all of us are swept along in time's passing stream. But books seem permanent, and give access to a world of pleasure even if, because of her red hair, the boys torment her on the road to school, and she has to fight. A meticulous memoir of growing up in a Canada scarcely aware of itself as a country, The Permanent Nature of Everything rescues recollections from a vanished time and traces the emerging awareness in the emotional world of a child Book jacket.

Contents:

1 A Fatalistic Gaiety 3

2 Light through Leaves 13

3 Gran and Granddad 24

4 Grandmother and Grandfather 34

5 The Kennedy House 45

6 The Substance of Fantasy 62

7 Going to School 74

8 Pride and Prudery 87

9 The Larger World 98

10 Literary Property 116

11 Danger Zones 133

12 The Master of the Cutting Monosyllable 148

13 North Kildonan 163

14 Resistentialism 179

15 A Long View 194

16 The Cracked Mirror 210

17 Isabel's Chalet 225

18 The Inescapable 242

19 Sylvan Avenue and the Bluffs 257

20 Abstractions 276

21 No Perfect Time 291.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references.

Other Format:

Cowan, Judith, author. Permanent nature of everything.

ISBN:

9780773543997

0773543996

OCLC:

879528723