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

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Cowan, Judith, author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Cowan, Judith.

Cowan, Judith--Childhood and youth.

Cowan, Judith--Family.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (338 p.)

Distribution:

Beaconsfield, Quebec : Canadian Electronic Library, 2014.

Place of Publication:

Montréal [Québec] ; Kingston [Ontario] ; London [England] ; Ithaca [New York] : McGill-Queen's University Press, [2014]

Language Note:

English

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 nature 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.

Contents:

1 A Fatalistic Gaiety

2 Light through Leaves

3 Gran and Granddad

4 Grandmother and Grandfather

5 The Kennedy House

6 The Substance of Fantasy

7 Going to School

8 Pride and Prudery

9 The Larger World

10 Literary Property

11 Danger Zones

12 The Master of the Cutting Monosyllable

13 North Kildonan

14 Resistentialism

15 A Long View

16 The Cracked Mirror

17 Isabel's Chalet

18 The Inescapable

19 Sylvan Avenue and the Bluffs

20 Abstractions

21 No Perfect Time.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN:

9780773596245

0773596240

9780773596238

0773596232

OCLC:

1078866801