Run Towards the Danger

Sarah Polley

Oscar-nominated screenwriter, director, and actor Sarah Polley's Run Towards the Danger explores memory and the dialogue between her past and her presentThese 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 decades of 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. She beautifully captures her experiences, and in so doing, she finds a path forward, a way through. After a head injury, Polley struggled for years in a concussion induced-fog until she 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 which triggered her symptoms. 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.Story Locale: Toronto, Canada

PORTRAIT OF A BELOVED ARTIST Polley is an Oscar-nominated screenwriter, director and actor, known for films including Away from Her, Stories We Tell, and Take This Waltz. She is beloved both here and in Canada, where we're co-publishing with Hamish Hamilton. GORGEOUS WRITING Polley beautifully captures her experiences, both viscerally and intellectually. She has an actor's deep knowledge of her physical self, but she also has a director's sense of structure.SHARP LENS ON TRANSFORMATION AND TRAUMA Polley writes powerfully about the relationship between past and present, how "the meaning of long-ago experiences transform, in the context of the ever-changing present."