Gwen Lamont Offers Unflinching, Diamond-Hard Memoir of A Childhood Exhumed
That she was able to transform such abiding sorrow, the terroir of her childhood, into brilliant storytelling is nothing short of astonishing.
Terroir (/tɛˈrwɑːr/; from terre, lit. 'lands') is a French term used to describe the environmental factors that affect a crop's phenotype, including unique environment contexts, farming practices and a crop's specific growth habitat.
Coffin Ridge Boutique Winery stands on a windswept promontory a few kilometres north of Highway 26, on the 2nd Concession of what used to be Sydenham Township, between Owen Sound and Meaford, ON. On a late summer’s evening, settled in one of the winery’s Muskoka chairs and gazing at the golden, lowering sun, you could be forgiven for thinking yourself lost in the Abruzzo region of Italy. It’s a place that makes you say: This doesn’t seem like here.
All the more surprising then to see a memoir appear, a first book by the winery’s co-owner, Gwen Lamont, that reads as though she’s been hammering out prose in a spartan garret all her life, obsessively polishing phrases like a character out of Albert Camus. The book is remarkable: Not only because of the author’s evident skill, but because of the shocking subject matter.
It is a harrowing, at times horrifying, account of Lamont’s impoverished childhood and early life. To read it is painful, albeit inspiring. To write it can only have required immense fortitude, discipline and ambition for truth-telling, no matter the cost.
The story of Lamont’s childhood in Toronto is one of brief moments of comfort and hope, against a backdrop of extreme poverty, family dysfunction and despair so embedded it is recounted as matter-of fact. Her father, an alcoholic, is a dreamer and con artist, always looking for the next score; her mother so worn down by disappointment that she’s incapable of warmth. Amid the family chaos, there are beautiful sketches of early-morning newspaper-delivery outings with her father in Toronto, long before the city became a wealthy metropolis.
Among the book’s most shocking sequences is a series of events Lamont suffered as a teenager – a scheme of her father’s to get her teeth fixed, free of charge – but with an enormous catch. The indictment of the Ontario mental-health and education systems of the era is more damning than anything imagined by American novelist Ken Kesey in his bestseller, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.
But the story doesn’t end there. Lamont flees into a very early and disastrous marriage. She suffers horrific spousal violence and barely escapes with her life. Here again, she describes her suffering with the clinical eye of a skilled prose stylist, but also the knowledge of a social scientist.
For, rather than simply seeking to escape and never return to the horrors of her youth, as many would, Lamont sought to understand it. Her Master’s of Social Work thesis was a study of men who murder their spouses or intimate partners. She later earned a Master of Fine Art in Creative Non-Fiction from the University of King’s College, Halifax.
Much is indelible about this book – both in the framing of Lamont’s story and the impact of her words. She has a keen eye for detail and a journalist’s ear for dialogue. The effect is that of reading, not a memoir, but a novel -- one that rings deeply, excruciatingly true.
The aspect that strikes me most powerfully, perhaps, is the utter lack of self-pity in Lamont’s account of an upbringing so marked by suffering that she buried the memories for years. That she was able to come to terms with her early life is, of itself, unusual. That she was then able to transform such abiding sorrow, the terroir of her childhood, into brilliant, diamond-hard prose, is nothing short of astonishing.
You can find Gwen Lamont’s book, published in 2024 by The Ginger Press, here. It is very much worth your time.