Pluck: A Memoir of a Newfoundland Childhood and the Raucous, Terrible, Amazing Journey to Becoming a Novelist - by Donna Morrissey

Reviewed by Robin L. Harvey: Award-winning author Donna Morrissey makes a quick and compelling connection with readers in the prologue to her book Pluck: A Memoir of a Newfoundland Childhood. “If you were a bird flying over the most easterly fringe of Canada you’d see a great island broiling out of the Atlantic, its granite shores rollicking with fishing boats and flakes and fishermen,” the award-winning author writes, setting the stage for her life story.

“A sweep of coloured houses face the wind, smoke whirling from their chimneys, youngsters scrabbling after sheep and hens and grandmothers scrabbling after youngsters, hiding now within swaths of sheets billowing around them from clotheslines.” The book’s heart, like Morrissey’s, is firmly set in Newfoundland. It begins in Morrissey’s childhood and wraps up when she has become a published author. The author employs her hallmark mix of poetic prose and the lyrical dialect of Newfoundlanders in the 1950s and 1960s throughout the memoir.

It provides a great historical narrative of the harsh circumstances most working-class Newfoundlanders faced in the years after they chose to become Canada’s tenth province. Morrissey grew up in The Beaches outport, a tiny community of 12 houses near the water’s edge, isolated from much of the modern world, without electricity, telephones, or plumbing and far from supports like medical care.

Before her birth, Morrissey’s parents had already lost two babies - a boy and a girl. So she was deemed the lucky baby, even though she was born on Friday the 13th. The author launches Chapter One with the story of her baby brother Paul’s death when she was eight years old. Like many Newfoundland men, her father worked seasonally as a logger and fisherman, barely earning enough to feed his family. 

When his baby’s fever spiked, he begged the welfare officer for a $30 loan to pay the cab fare to hospital. The welfare officer refused, so later, the outport’s new doctor stepped up with the money.  But it was too late to save the child, who died of diphtheria.

As the eldest child in a boisterous, close-knit family, Morrissey was expected to be the responsible one, a role she resented, especially when it took her away from her flights of fancy into the world of books. “The fictive worlds grew bigger inside me than the world outside,” she writes. “I took to hiding and reading. Under beds, in closets, in the bathtub . . .”

When she turned sixteen, Morrissey, who had failed Grade 11, learned her family expected her to work in Corner Brook to help support the household. But the “saucy girl” had a rebel streak. Soon she was drawn into a life of drugs, drinking and petty crime. “Thus began two years of never-ending camp for big kids, and with no supervision or rules or bedtime,” she writes.“ Pot, pills, psychedelics and Mick Jagger was the heady mix dragging me through.”  

She chose another rebel misfit Dave Morrissey, to become her partner. The couple outgrew their wild living when Morrissey became pregnant. Eventually, they moved to Grand Prairie, Alberta when her partner found a job working on an oil rig. Before they left Newfoundland, Morrissey promised her favourite brother, Ford, if their parents agreed, she would send him a ticket to join her. 

It was a promise that would change her life. Shortly after her brother came to join them and started working with her husband, he was killed in a gruesome accident on an oil rig. He was just nineteen.  Morrissey had had a prophetic dream shortly before the accident.

“I was holding three white head lice in the palm of my hand,” she writes. “They were big and sluggish. Grandfather lice, I remembered Grandmother calling them. A sign of death.” Guilt over her brother’s death became unbearable and Morrissey started to drink heavily each night.

“Guilt, you see, doesn’t perch on one’s shoulder like a turkey vulture, proclaiming itself,” she writes. “ It doesn’t bloom in the night so that one can see its blight rotting like a winter’s spud within the dark cellar of one’s sleeping mind.  It creeps beneath reason, quietly feeding itself on the language of blame and ignorance.”

When another tragic accident killed a good friend’s husband, Morrissey started showing signs of Post-Traumatic Stress Syndrome. She describes living with trauma as like living with, “a violent upheaval of the soul. It changes how you see the world. It changes something within your DNA and puts you on permanent alert forevermore.”

By 1986, Morrissey had divorced her husband and was supporting their two children working at a fish plant back in Newfoundland. When a local quack misdiagnosed her saying she’d die within months from tetanus after she handled some bad fish, her world came crashing down.

“I now knew madness.… It was as though hole had been busted through  the side of my world and I was staring into a whole new realm of being I hadn’t known existed,” she writes of the paralysing fear and dread that crippled her life for years.

Many writers, for example, William Styron in Darkness Visible and Stephen King in On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft, have given riveting accounts of battles with mental illness and addiction. Morrissey’s story is equally honest. When she writes about her fears her PTSD will damage her children, she bares her soul. “It (mental illness) smothered my patience, blinded me, injected a rage inside my head that projected itself outwards,” she writes of fears she had burdened and lashed out at her children.

Eventually Morrissey found support in a group of strong women friends. Writing became the therapy that helped her tackle her fear and anxiety. Eventually she uncovered her storyteller’s voice. After that, there was no looking back. Those familiar with Morrissey’s work will enjoy learning the real-life origins of many of her remarkable characters. 

“Kit” in her first book Kit’s Law was inspired by a lonely and reclusive\neighbour who took in stray cats. The woman, Mae, had lost her mother at age five or six. When her father remarried, her step-mother drowned her beloved pet cat. Mae lived the rest of her life trapped in that early loss.

Fortunately, Morrissey found freedom from the “two ugly sisters, guilt and shame,” by finding the strength to forgive herself. “Oh, the paradoxes,” Morrissey writes. “Of having to leave home to find  it. Of having to go mad

to find a sane thought. Of becoming impoverished to find one’s riches. Of playing the devil’s game to find the angel at the table.”

There are few flaws in this work that covers almost six decades in a full and complex life. When Morrissey writes of her wild days of drinking and drugging, her desire to protect reputations is understandable. However, her author’s note reports some names in the memoir have already been changed. 

Readers may wish she had worked harder to flesh out this early section on her wild years. As well, though there is logic in ending the book after Morrissey’s first book is published, readers may want more insight into how her life changed after the awards and accolades came rolling in.

Pluck: A Memoir of a Newfoundland Childhood and the Raucous, Terrible, Amazing Journey to Becoming a Novelist - by Donna Morrissey, publisher: Viking, $24.95, 305 pages

Robin Harvey (robinharvey@live.com) worked on staff for The Toronto Star for more than 20 years. There she wrote book and theatre reviews. She was a reporter, editor and columnist as well as a News Editor, Assistant City Editor and Public Editor. As Deputy Sunday Editor she was supervisor of the books page. For a time, she ran The Sunday Star short story contest. She's been published in Sun Media, The Toronto Sunday Sun, the Southam news chain and the National Post. Ms. Harvey studied journalism at Metropolitan University, Fine Arts at York University, and is a graduate of the Humber School for Writers.