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How Sarah Polley, Child Star and ‘Canada’s Sweetheart,’ Grew Up Way Too Fast

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By Meghan Daum

• March 1, 2022

RUN TOWARDS THE DANGER Confrontations With a Body of Memory By Sarah Polley

One of the most quietly accomplished films I’ve seen in recent decades is the 2006 independent feature “Away From Her.” Adapted from an Alice Munro short story, it depicts a long-married couple grappling with the wife’s advancing Alzheimer’s and the chasm of memories the dementia simultaneously dredges up and erases. Its writer and director is Sarah Polley, a Canadian artist who was 27 at the time and who had been a well-known child actor, appearing at age 8 in Terry Gilliam’s “The Adventures of Baron Munchausen” and then starring in the hit series “Road to Avonlea.” How “Canada’s sweetheart,” as Polley came to be known, had grown so quickly into a filmmaker whose creative vision was as far beyond her years as the characters she’d put onscreen (Julie Christie received an Oscar nomination for “Away From Her,” as did Polley’s script) was a question I asked myself more than once in the ensuing years.

Polley’s authorial debut, “Run Towards the Danger,” does as good a job of answering that question as anything probably could. In six sprawling yet meaty essays, Polley, now 43, recalls a life in which playing the roles of children was mandatory and nearly constant (her first acting job was at age 4) but actually being a child was regarded an unnecessary encumbrance for all involved. Born into a theatrical family, she was 11 when her mother died, after which her father, who “prided himself on ‘not being a father,’” retreated into a solipsistic funk. With her much older siblings long out of the house, Sarah decided at 14 she was grown up enough to leave home and, by 15, was living with her 19-year-old boyfriend. The following summer, she began a residency at the Stratford Festival playing the lead in a production of “Alice Through the Looking-Glass.”

The book’s opening essay, “Alice, Collapsing,” is about the misery of the Stratford production, one in which Polley, who is by now famous on television but new to theater, develops such debilitating stage fright that eventually the “fear turned to madness, and I myself went through the looking glass.” She is also suffering from scoliosis, a diagnosis she received shortly after her mother’s death and has been left to manage more or less on her own. Having put off an inevitable but not-yet-urgent surgery, Polley becomes so desperate to quit the show that she finagles a medical excuse and schedules the procedure as quickly as possible, leaving an understudy scrambling to take over her role.

Polley devotes several pages to the 10-hour surgery and lengthy recovery. It’s telling, however, that the most gut-punching detail of this essay is the fact that Polley’s departure from “Alice Through the Looking-Glass” caused a subsequent run of the show to be canceled. When Polley wins a $500 prize from the Stratford Festival for “best newcomer,” she leaves the cash in an envelope for a castmate who had been counting on the money to buy a carpet to cover the cold floors of her daughter’s bedroom. “I couldn’t look anyone in the eye,” Polley writes of her adult colleagues. “I had cost them their winter income.”

Even more burdensome than the financial pressure is Polley’s duty to dole out a steady stream of narcissistic satisfactions to various elders in her orbit. When she is cast in “The Adventures of Baron Munchausen” (a production whose special effects are later revealed to have posed serious safety hazards) she witnesses in her “Monty Python”-loving father “a pure, unmitigated elation. … The pinnacle of my success, and of my father’s pride, had been reached. I was 8 years old.”

Other essays recall more medical ordeals — the near-hallucinatory stress of her first pregnancy and her newborn daughter’s stint in the NICU, a yearslong journey treating a debilitating concussion — but the book is most interesting when Polley interrogates her own contradictions and manipulative instincts, many of which were a matter of survival. In what is arguably the collection’s best essay, Polley wrestles with the case of Jian Ghomeshi, the CBC radio host who in late 2014 and early 2015 was charged with multiple counts of sexual assault. Nearly 20 years before, 16-year-old Polley had a date with Ghomeshi, who was around 28 at the time. As she explains in rueful, almost deadpan bemusement, this date had generated two stories: a funny party story, with a few details left out, about a cringey encounter with a weirdo, and the story she kept hidden beneath the first, which was that Ghomeshi had violently assaulted her during sex. “Honestly, it didn’t occur to me to tell it,” Polley writes of the latter version. “For me, it wasn’t part of the story. It was the dark cavern in which my funny story happened.”

This is a pernicious and all-too-common form of self-gaslighting, and for all that’s been written about it in the #MeToo era, I have never seen anyone lay it out with as much precision and self-scrutiny as Polley does here. She describes how in the ensuing years she flattered and flirted with Ghomeshi when they crossed paths in professional settings because it seemed like good business practice. She even offers play-by-plays of interviews she did with Ghomeshi to promote her films, diffusing his meanspirited questioning by laughing uproariously, “as though he has just made the best joke of all time.”

Later Polley will agonize over whether to join Ghomeshi’s other accusers, but her years of concessions, not to mention countless retellings of her funny party story, are certain to undermine the credibility of the other women. In the end, Ghomeshi is acquitted on all counts. The little girl who carried the weight of Hollywood movie budgets and theater actors’ salaries on her shoulders is now a grown woman whose stolen childhood has made her at once a stunningly sophisticated observer of the world and an imperfect witness to the truth. Her willingness to embrace such paradoxes, in this book as well as in her films, is the mark of a real artist.

Meghan Daum’s most recent book, “The Problem With Everything: My Journey Through the New Culture Wars,” is just out in paperback. She is also the host of a weekly podcast, “The Unspeakable.”

RUN TOWARDS THE DANGER Confrontations With a Body of Memory By Sarah Polley 259 pp. Penguin Press. $27.

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Book Review: “Run Towards the Danger” — Grappling With Memories of Trauma

By Helen Epstein

Sarah Polley’s essay on sexual assault by itself is worth the price of the book, essential reading for anyone interested in the physical and psychological aftereffects of violence against women.

Run Towards the Danger: Conversations With a Body of Memory by Sarah Polley, Penguin Press, 192 pp.

Sarah Polley has been on our cultural radar most recently as the director of Women Talking ( Arts Fuse review ), but she has had an extraordinarily long and idiosyncratic career, beginning as a five-year old child actor in Toronto. At eight, she worked as Ramona in the TV series adapted from the books of Beverly Cleary. At nine, she starred in Terry Gilliam’s film The Adventures of Baron Munchausen . When she was 11, her mother died of cancer. Sarah lived alone with her bereaved father for a couple of years, then with a boyfriend. She continued to work in film, and was widely admired for her performance, at 14, in Atom Egoyan’s The Sweet Hereafter . Then, as a writer and director, she made the feature films Away From Her (adapted from a story by Alice Munro) and Take This Waltz , as well as the documentary Stories We Tell . She was barely 30, when she created this award-winning Rashomon-like documentary narrated by a group that included the father she knew, the biological father she discovered as a teenager, her four half-siblings, and assorted witnesses.

These films flit through Run Towards the Danger , a collection of six autobiographical essays about traumatic events and how she remembers them now that she is in her early 40s. During that time, Polley became a political activist, a wife, mother of three children, and friend and colleague to dozens of people — famous and not — who appear and reappear in these essays. Polley is quintessentially Canadian in her graciousness toward all of them and in her understated approach to memoir. “These stories don’t add up to a portrait of a life, or even a snapshot of one,” she writes in her preface to the essays, some of which she has been thinking about for decades. “They are about the transformative power of an ever-evolving relationship to memory. Telling them is a form of running towards the danger.”

That motto — “ Run Towards the Danger” — is the advice a Pittsburgh neurologist gave Polley after a fire extinguisher fell on her head in 2015, resulting in years of post-concussive syndrome. Unlike all the other physicians she consulted, he believed that “in order for my brain to recover from a traumatic injury, I had to retrain it to strength by charging toward the very activities that triggered my symptoms.” In this theme-driven book, Polley addresses experiences of physical and psychological traumatic injury, and the conclusions she draws from those repeated confrontations now.

Polley’s first memoir is as idiosyncratic as her films. She eschews a clear narrative arc and instead willfully digresses over long swaths of time and subject, following her associations as one does in psychoanalytic therapy. As in Stories We Tell , she relies heavily on the input of other people for her story line. All her chapters are set in Canada, and each deals with one traumatic situation in depth, reconsidered multiple times over many years.

The first and most intricate chapter is “Alice Collapsing,” set at the Stratford Festival’s staging of Alice Through the Looking Glass in the summer of 1994, when Sarah was 15 and cast as Alice. It addresses her theater debut, rehearsing and performing, while the scoliosis with which she was born becomes ever more painful. Polley has strong feelings and theories about the relationship between Alice Liddell (the model for Alice) and Charles Dodgson (aka Lewis Carroll), but she’s unable to persuade her director to allow her to probe them during the production. Instead, the production has one objective: to “delight” children. She speculates about Dodgson’s pedophilia and her own ambiguous relationship to her father. She also describes the practical ways of compensating for a crooked spine while performing, as well as the conflation of physical and psychological pain that, in her case, resulted in paralyzing stage fright. The essay is strewn with quotes from Alice in Wonderland and reads as though it’s bursting at the seams. There is enough material here for a novel and it could use several rewrites. I gave up twice and moved on to the other essays. Only when I circled back was I able to make more sense of this fascinating but not fully digested text.

“Mad Genius” is perhaps the most conventional chapter in that it is a reflection on the process of making a movie. Polley’s spin on this material is looking back on what it was like to work as a child actor under the direction of Monty Python’s Terry Gilliam in 1987. Monty Python had been a beloved part of the Polley family culture: both her parents were avid fans. In kindergarten she startled her teachers by singing, “I love to hear you oralize when I’m between your thighs you blow me away.” When she won the part of Sally Salt in The Adventures of Baron Munchausen , she writes, “I witnessed in my father a pure unmitigated elation.… the pinnacle of my success and my father’s pride had been reached. I was eight years old.” The family moved to Italy (for filming in Cinecittà) and then to Spain. Chaos and near-fatal accidents with explosives ensue. Sarah is left with lifelong PTSD, ducking when she hears a sudden noise. Years later, after Gilliam made controversial remarks online about the #MeToo movement, his carelessness in directing then-child Sarah Polley was recalled. Her costar Eric Idle tweeted, “She was in danger. Many times.” In 2018, more than 30 years after the filming, Polley writes gratefully, “Someone who was there was appearing out of nowhere to confirm my memories and verify my version of events.”

The importance of a witness to validate traumatic memory is nowhere more evident than in “The Woman Who Stayed Silent.” This compelling chapter alone is worth the price of the book: a long, unsparing examination of Polley’s own nearly three-decade-long silence regarding an experience of sexual assault at the hands of Jian Ghomeshi, host and co-creator of a popular CBC talk show. It happened in the early ’90s, at a time when Harvey Weinstein was blithely locking in NDAs from actresses he had assaulted while receiving over-the-top expressions of thanks from them at Oscar speeches. It was also long before reporters Jodi Kantor, Megan Twohey, and Ronan Farrow documented the story in 2017 and #MeToo hit the internet.

Polley’s quiet and self-contained essay moves from the ’90s to 2017, zeroing in on her flickering memories of assault, her reluctance to speak about it, her examination of that reluctance, her interrogation of other women in her situation, of lawyers, and her thoughts about all of it now. She is not a journalist and is not interested in providing a summary of what most of her Canadian readers already know, so here’s my American one:

Jian Ghomeshi was a hip, attractive CBC employee, more like a younger, feminist, Iranian-Canadian version of intellectual talk show host Charlie Rose than a Harvey Weinstein. Starting in 2007, when he was 40, Ghomeshi hosted a talk show called Q , airing twice daily on the CBC, and in the US. Though a nationally known figure, he lived and worked in the small cultural community of Toronto, where almost everyone knew him or knew someone who knew him. His and Polley’s paths had already crossed casually when he was performing with a Toronto band.

Polley’s essay begins as she discovers a tweet about herself online: “ Wonder why Sarah Polley never spoke out about being assaulted by Jian Ghomeshi. #HerToo. She was the woman who stayed silent. Ask her .” No one had “liked” or retweeted the post, she notes, but it rattled her and made her resolve to try once again to write what she had resisted writing for years.

Polley first met Ghomeshi directly at a party when she was a teenager. She wonders if her story should begin “twenty nine years ago, when I was around fourteen years old, and a man in his twenties tenderly brushed a strand of hair away from my face,” or two years later, when “something happened to me that I couldn’t understand, and so part of my brain hid it from me until years later.” She decides to start at the age of 35, when in the summer of 2014 her friend, freelance writer Jesse Brown, tells her he is reporting on four women who have accused Ghomeishi of sexual assault. He is set on pursuing the story but doesn’t know how best to do it while protecting himself from legal action.

Why does he ask her ? She is a filmmaker, not a lawyer, not a reporter, not even a memoirist at that point. Polley doesn’t explain. In fact, she spends little time establishing the context of what will become Canada’s most explosive media story of sexual assault. Nor does she raise key questions most nonfiction writers would identify and answer. Instead, Polley deliberately chooses to carefully lay out the predicament and thought process of an insider, one of the women whom Ghomeshi has “allegedly” (she puts the term in quotes for legal reasons) assaulted — in her case, as a minor. She follows the advice of her lawyer brother and her lawyer friends not to “come forward” and testify in court, but to bear witness as a memoirist. Her brother instructs her to write down every detail she remembers and finds relevant to the process of moving from silence to speech. Her achievement, I think, is significant and worthy of its own film. Nonetheless, I felt a need for more context and did some research.

Author and filmmaker Sarah Polley. Photo: Twitter

By the fall of 2014 most of Toronto’s close-knit media community had been hearing rumors about Ghomeshi for years. Some insiders knew that Q ’s female producer had complained to her union that Ghomeshi had sexually and emotionally harassed her for three years. Some were aware that journalism students at the University of Western Ontario were no longer allowed to apply for internships at Q because of Ghomeshi’s inappropriate behavior. Some knew that Ghomeishi had told his CBC superiors that an ex-girlfriend was alleging he raped her and that the CBC had hired a crisis management team. Some knew that yet other women had complained about Ghomeishi and had been harassed on the internet. In December, the New York Times op-ed page ran a story about them.

But Ghomeishi was, like his American counterparts, defiant and, as a successful minority media darling, all but untouchable. A profile in the glossy Toronto Life earlier that year gushed that his show was syndicated by 160 US stations; a weekly televised version drew 300,000 viewers; the Q YouTube channel averaged 1.5 million hits per month; the podcast, about 250,000 downloads a week. His memoir, 1982 , was number one on the bestseller lists when it was published in 2012.

Faced with this situation, Polley’s friend Jesse Brown tried to find institutional support. By the summer of 2014 he got it from the Toronto Star and one of its investigative reporters, Kevin Donovan. In October, Brown tweeted that he was working on a story that would be “worse than embarrassing for certain parties.” As Donovan reports in his 2017 book Secret Life: The Jian Ghomeshi Investigation , Ghomeshi’s legal team invited CBC executives to watch X-rated videos from the host’s private collection in an attempt to persuade them that Ghomeshi was no assaulter, just a guy into rough but consensual sex. They miscalculated. The CBC fired Ghomeshi and the Star published a long, widely publicized report. By November, more than 20 women alleged Ghomeshi had slapped, hit, punched, choked, or bitten them during sex, beginning in 1988. A Royal Canadian Air Force captain named Lucy DeCoutere was first to go on record and inspired the hashtag #IBelieveLucy. Ghomeshi was arrested and his trial set for February 2016.

In Run Towards The Danger, Polley keeps her narrative focused on her small, then private thread in this saga. “In the days following the Toronto Star story,” she writes, “more women came forward with similar stories including actor and Canadian Air Force captain Lucy DeCoutere, who was the first to identify herself publicly…. she encouraged other women to come forward and to tell their stories and to share their names if they could.”

Polley could not. In her polite, understated narrative, she points out that in October of 2014, she was married and had two children under three, one breast-feeding. She does not remind us that she was still suffering from postconcussive symptoms from the fire extinguisher episode. She does not say what she told her husband or her therapist. But she does describe her discussions with other Ghomeshi victims, with her siblings, and with friends. When she tells her older sister Jo she feels lucky that Jian didn’t choke her, Jo surprises her by replying, “But he did choke you, didn’t he?” It is only when her lawyer brother Mark recalls picking her up after her date with Ghomeshi that Polley starts to remember.

For years she had been dining out on the story of her “worst date ever,” but left out her age (16) and his (28). She left out what exactly had happened during sex, how she had told only pieces of what happened to her brother and sister, and how she had appeared on Q — friendly, self-deprecating, ingratiating — when publicity for her films had required it. She also maintained a friendly, flirty email correspondence with him. For the next few years, she asked many people whether or not she should “come forward.” Her brother and almost all the other lawyers she consulted told her not to. Too many people had heard that milder, less violent version of the encounter at dinner parties. Some of them were lawyers. She would be skewered. “Recovered memory” was suspect.

Ben Whishaw, Rooney Mara, and Claire Foy in scene from Sarah Polley’s film Women Talking .

Only a few people disagreed with the majority. “The advice you get from lawyers,” one friend told her, “isn’t necessarily going to be the same that you will give yourself as a woman, as a mother, as a political activist.” Only one criminal lawyer advised her to come forward and say everything and be clear that what happened was a sexual assault. “It was the right thing to do, he said.”

Polley decided to keep quiet. She does not mention reading the many articles in the Canadian press about Ghomeshi and/or sexual assault, or Kevin Donovan’s book. Her focus remains on the evolution of her thinking. She begins to make sense of her own cringe-worthy behavior. She explains her decision not to go public to a friend who had worked at the CBC, and quotes her as saying, “I think that at some point your moral compass is going to kick in and you won’t have a choice about what to do.”

The eight-day trial before a judge — no jury — took place in February 2016. Some of the allegations dated back a decade. Canadian weekly MacLean ’s wrote that two courts — the criminal justice system and the court of public opinion — collided with brute force on the morning of March 24. Justice William B. Horkins acquitted the former CBC Radio host on four charges of sexual assault and one count of overcoming resistance by choking. The judge’s plainly worded decision was unsparing in describing the three complainants’ lack of reliability and credibility: they were “deceptive,” “manipulative” and showed “a wilful carelessness with the truth,” he said. If a hashtag had been attached, it would have read: #IDoNotBelieveThem.

Sarah Polley does not tell the reader how much of this she followed or how it influenced her decision to ultimately write her own book about trauma, which includes her own belated testimony in the Ghomeshi case. I, for one, am grateful that she did it in her own time and her own way. Her essay deserves to become a classic, of interest not only to memoirists but to all those who are interested in the aftereffects of violence against women.

Helen Epstein is the author of the memoir The Long Half-Lives of Love and Trauma , Getting Through It and nine other books of literary non-fiction.

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Run Towards the Danger: Confrontations with a Body of Memory by Sarah Polley: struggle and strength

Book review: polley poses important questions about safeguarding, and the stability and instability of memory.

Writer Sarah Polley

This collection of essays by Oscar-nominated screenwriter, director and actor Sarah Polley are all interrelated, with her own body as a central focus and a site of struggle.

That struggle is elegantly, frankly and forensically explored, taking its energy from a reckoning: with herself, her parents, the film industry and the oppressive structures that injure. As a child actor, Polley was thrust into a very adult world, from her work on the beloved Road to Avonlea to Terry Gilliam’s The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, with the latter experience vividly relayed in the essay Mad Genius. Here, Polley poses questions that need to be asked, about safeguarding, and the stability and instability of memory.

This element is compelling, because Polley’s approach is so nuanced; even when she is disappointed, traumatised and diminished, she seeks to understand how certain things could have happened and why those involved might have different recollections of the same event.

This speaks to Polley’s empathy - as tough on herself as she is on others, there are many moving moments; trying to understand the complex nature of her father in the wake of her mother’s untimely death from cancer, and her own painful experience with scoliosis in Alice, Collapsing, to her life-altering accident and brain injury in Run Towards the Danger.

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In a sense, this essay frames the whole collection, its title taken from the advice she had been given by the pioneering concussion specialist Dr Michael Collins, who advised her to run towards the danger, leading her to a revelation: “Now in my forties, I have changed in ways that reach far beyond the limits of my concussion recovery. I know now that I will become weaker at what I avoid, that what I run towards will strengthen in me.”

Over the course of these six essays, she gains in strength and purpose, whether exploring her experience with sexual assault in The Woman Who Stayed Silent; to complications amid pregnancy in High Risk; and making peace with her early life on Road to Avonlea, both conjuring and vanquishing the ghosts that had haunted her. These brilliantly written essays are also about the resilience of the female body, so often a site of struggle but also a site of strength.

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Run Towards the Danger by Sarah Polley

A collection of personal essays by the beloved actor and filmmaker, social sharing.

Sarah Polley's work as an actor, screenwriter, and director is celebrated for its honesty, complexity, and deep humanity. She brings all of those qualities along with her exquisite storytelling chops to these six essays.

Each one captures a piece of Polley's life as she remembers it, while at the same time examining the fallibility of memory, the mutability of reality in the mind, and the possibility of experiencing the past anew, as the person you are now but were not then. As Polley writes, the past and present are in a "reciprocal pressure dance."

Polley contemplates stories from her own life ranging from stage fright to high risk childbirth to endangerment and more. After struggling with the aftermath of a concussion, Polley met a specialist who gave her wholly new advice: to recover from a traumatic injury, she had to retrain her mind to strength by charging towards the very activities that triggered her symptoms.

With riveting clarity, she shows the power of applying that same advice to other areas of her life in order to find a path forward, a way through. Rather than live in a protective crouch, she had to run towards the danger.

In this extraordinary book, Sarah Polley explores what it is to live in one's body, in a constant state of becoming, learning and changing. ( From Penguin Random House Canada)

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Sarah Polley is an Oscar-nominated Canadian actor, screenwriter and director. Her first feature-length film,  Away from Her,  was adapted from the Alice Munro story  The Bear Came Over the Mountain  and was nominated for the Academy Award for best adapted screenplay. Her other films include  Stories We Tell  and  Take This Waltz. 

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Run Towards the Danger: Confrontations with a Body of Memory

Oscar-nominated screenwriter, director, and actor Sarah Polley’s  Run Towards the Danger  explores memory and the dialogue between her past and her present

These are 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. 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. Sarah Polley’s work as an actor, screenwriter, and director is celebrated for its honesty, complexity, and deep humanity. She brings all those qualities, along with her exquisite storytelling chops, to these six essays. Each one captures a piece of Polley’s life as she remembers it, while at the same time examining the fallibility of memory, the mutability of reality in the mind, and the possibility of experiencing the past anew, as the person she is now but was not then. As Polley writes, the past and present are in a “reciprocal pressure dance.” Polley contemplates stories from her own life ranging from stage fright to high-risk childbirth to endangerment and more. After struggling with the aftermath of a concussion, Polley met a specialist who gave her wholly new advice: to recover from a traumatic injury, she had to retrain her mind to strength by charging towards the very activities that triggered her symptoms. With riveting clarity, she shows the power of applying that same advice to other areas of her life in order to find a path forward, a way through. Rather than live in a protective crouch, she had to run towards the danger. In this extraordinary book, Polley explores what it is to live in one’s body, in a constant state of becoming, learning, and changing.

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Run Towards the Danger: Confrontations With a Body of Memory Paperback – Feb. 6 2024

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• Print length 258 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Penguin Group USA
• Publication date Feb. 6 2024
• Dimensions 13.39 x 1.52 x 20.17 cm
• ISBN-10 0593300378
• ISBN-13 978-0593300374
• See all details

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"Sarah Polley understands that questions of conscience are inseparable from the terrors and tenderness of the body, and that courage--moral or physical--is not fearlessness but our relationship to fear. How we confront pain, how we determine what is safe, how we comprehend the depth and limits of our responsibility to others and to ourselves--these are exacting, keening questions. This is a powerful and moving book, both in its seeking and its wisdom." -- Anne Michaels, author of The Winter Vault

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Excerpt. © reprinted by permission. all rights reserved., product details.

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Penguin Group USA (Feb. 6 2024)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Paperback ‏ : ‎ 258 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0593300378
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0593300374
• Item weight ‏ : ‎ 204 g
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 13.39 x 1.52 x 20.17 cm

About the author

Sarah polley.

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A realistic portrait of romance on the other side of 50

Susan Coll’s new novel, “Real Life and Other Fictions,” tells the relatable story of a woman on the brink of freedom and joy — at last.

When dark clouds roll in, do you stay and weather the storm, or do you run toward blue skies?

For Cassie Klein, the main character in Susan Coll’s new novel, “ Real Life and Other Fictions ,” the answer has long been run. A creative-writing professor at a community college, Cassie is married to a meteorologist, and getting ahead of the weather is something she knows she’s supposed to do. So when she finds herself purposefully joining standstill traffic on the four-mile-long Chesapeake Bay Bridge in a weather event, it’s clear that she’s driving away from life as she knows it. As “a heavy grey slush” falls from the sky, the question becomes not what is Cassie running from — empty nest, difficult marriage, cheating husband are shared on the first few pages — but what is she running to.

Susan Coll’s seventh novel is all about that wild, unpredictable sprint to something else. As Cassie tells readers early on: “This morning, as I departed, I told him I couldn’t live like this anymore. But what, precisely, I hoped to achieve, I can’t say for sure.” She knows she’s driving to her aunt and uncle’s house on the Delaware shore, but it’s a temporary respite. Where she is going after that is determined on the bridge, when the universe sends her a sign.

As the world rains down, her puppy chases after something in the car: a moth, an insect that’s not just a nuisance to Cassie but a living, flying embodiment of pain.

In 1967, when Cassie was 2 years old, her parents were killed in the Silver Bridge collapse. Coll draws on the true story of the bridge that connected Point Pleasant, W.Va., to Ohio and broke during rush hour, sending cars into the freezing water and killing 46. In the book, Cassie’s parents are two of the victims. But unlike recent bridge collapses where questions focus on structural integrity and maintenance, the attention around the Silver Bridge collapse was heavily on the supernatural. For just before it broke, a Mothman (10 feet tall, giant wings, red eyes, all-around terrifying) was reportedly spotted flying over the bridge. The Silver Bridge tragedy and the Mothman became forever intertwined.

Cassie has been obsessed with the legend for years. What she doesn’t know are the facts. Why were her parents in West Virginia that day? Why do her aunt and uncle who raised her refuse to talk about it? Her aunt hosts a program on NPR called “The Storyteller” but won’t tell Cassie her own story. Now, the storm has blown the doors open, and at age 55, Cassie’s ready to drive away from family and find out on her own.

Her sharp turn toward Point Pleasant leads her to a cast of characters in town ready to help her — even if she keeps her motives to herself — and that’s when the going gets good. Coll has set a lot of her books in and around the D.C. area, but her writing feels fully at home in a small town, too. Cassie and her dog, Luna, find respite from the cold at the Point Pleasant Inn, where three old men with matching beards, identical sweaters and a lot of opinions welcome her in. She has her first meal at a hibachi steakhouse, where she strikes up a conversation with a man named Ingram who “looks like a country-western singer” and also “a college professor” but is actually a cryptozoologist, trying to validate mysterious animal/creature sightings. They start talking about storytelling, quoting the novelist John Gardner. “What are the odds,” Cassie asks herself. “Of all the hibachi joints in all the towns.” But it’s Point Pleasant, and conversation soon moves from crafting a story to the Mothman.

Summer reading

Among Coll’s strengths is her realistic portrayal of the emotions of people who have seen a few things in life. When Cassie meets Ingram, she doesn’t flush and feel faint, she simply warms to him. When Cassie’s marriage is fizzling out, she stays the course to keep the balance for her daughter. Only the affair — in her house, with her friend, and the discovery of a dental nightguard (the more responsible version of racy underwear?) — causes her to leave. It’s divorce, and romance, in real life, and on the other side of 50. Coll gets it right, the fireworks more like sparklers, the explosion of a marriage more conversations than screaming, but the potential for enormous joy is there.

“Real Life and Other Fictions” is quirky without being saccharine. It effortlessly mixes a journey around grief, reinvention and romance in midlife with the myth of a moth and the supernatural. Coll’s assured, literary writing and her controlled power around the present tense add whimsy within realistic boundaries. The result: a big blend of genres that is not just effective but delightful.

Karin Tanabe is the author of seven novels, including “ A Woman of Intelligence ,” “ The Gilded Years ” and, most recently, “ The Sunset Crowd .”

Real Life and Other Fictions

By Susan Coll

Harper Muse. 352 pp. Paperback, $17.99

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RUN TOWARDS THE DANGER Hardcover

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Purchase options and add-ons

• Language English
• Dimensions 5.94 x 1.26 x 8.82 inches
• ISBN-10 191461321X
• ISBN-13 978-1914613210
• See all details

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Product details

• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 191461321X
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1914613210
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.03 pounds
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.94 x 1.26 x 8.82 inches
• Best Sellers Rank: #5,690,668 in Books ( See Top 100 in Books )

About the author

Sarah polley.

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