They Left Us Everything
Winner of the 2015 RBC Taylor Prize
#1 NATIONAL BESTSELLER
After almost twenty years of helping to care for her elderly parents, author Plum Johnson finally falls to her knees with feelings of grief and relief when they die. Now she and her three brothers must empty and sell the beloved family home. It hasn’t been decluttered in more than half a century. Twenty-three rooms bulge with kitsch, antiques, and oxygen tanks. The task consumes her, becoming more rewarding than she could have imagined.
As Johnson sorts through the household, items from childhood trigger memories of her eccentric family growing up in a small town on the shores of Lake Ontario in the 1950s and 60s. Her difficult parents could not have been more different: her father a disciplined, reserved British patriarch and her mother an extroverted, opinionated Southern belle. The surprising discoveries she makes gradually instill a more accepting perspective about who her mother and father were and what she inherited. Johnson realizes that much of the emotional baggage was hers, and what her parents left behind was love.
By turns humorous and touching, They Left Us Everything is an unforgettable memoir about family love, loss and legacies.
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Photography by MARK RAYNES ROBERTS
In The Press
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"A poetic meditation on aging, grief and filial responsibility."
- The Globe and Mail
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"At times heartbreaking and at others hysterically funny...The book's descriptive prose brings [the]places and people to life and poignantly conveys the quasi-spiritual journey that helps Johnson overcome her grief."
-Publishers Weekly
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"The kind of slim, unassuming memoir that hits you deep in the gut."
-National Post
The Trouble With Fairy Tales
A new memoir from bestselling author Plum Johnson
Plum Johnson’s eagerly anticipated second memoir is a wise and insightful reflection on romantic relationships, exploring how we so often sacrifice our independence and identity for love.
Ripe with humorous anecdotes, charming insights, and aching revelations, Plum looks back on her own lifetime of fairy tales. Bewitched by characters as various as Prince Charming, The Pied Piper, and Bluebeard, she reinvents herself along the way, from obedient child to rebel wife to successful writer and artist, proving that it can take many years and detours to fulfil the most important relationship - the one with ourselves.
The Trouble with Fairy Tales urges us to turn inward to reach a deeper understanding of our own tangled relationships. Funny and resonant, it is a striking personal narrative that will stir and inspire women of all ages.
About
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Plum Johnson is an author and artist living in Toronto. Her previous memoir, They Left Us Everything, was nominated for the Leacock Medal for Humour, the Kobo Emerging Writer Prize and was the winner of the 2015 RBC Taylor Prize and the 2016 OLA Evergreen Award.