NEWS RELEASE
GWEN LAMONT
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For over 30 years, the memories of Gwen Lamont’s childhood were buried beneath a protective gauze of forgetting. Her recently released memoir, The View From Coffin Ridge: A Childhood Exhumed, is a remarkable story about what happens when we are forced to reconcile with a long forgotten past and the characters who shaped it.
No one knew of her poor, chaotic family. No one knew she had been a child bride, or of her close brush with death at the hands of a man who claimed to love her. She had promised never to tell. As the years went by, the weight of her past became too much for her to bear and she began to write her young self home.
Part of Gwen Lamont’s memoir is set in New Dundee where she lived with her family, and in Stratford where she spent some of her teenage years.
Canadian author and activist Maude Barlow describes Lamont’s story as “one courageous woman’s memoir of overcoming violence and trauma that looks straight into the heart of darkness to find the light.”
Plum Johnson, best-selling author of They Left Us Everything says of the book: "This remarkable coming of age story is a Canadian Glass Castle."
Former senior communications advisor to the Prime Minister, Michael Den Tandt, reviewed the book and said, “It's an extraordinary story, shocking and painful, written in unflinching, diamond-hard prose."
Eight book launches have taken place since May 31; there were two sold-out book launches at Coffin Ridge Winery and six locations have been part of the summer and fall series; Goderich, Parry Sound, Kincardine, Lion’s Head, Southampton, Hanover.
On Wednesday, Oct. 16, the Stratford book launch takes place at the Stratford Country Club from 5-7 p.m. Tickets are available at gwenlamontauthor.ca. The final launch location this fall will be in London on Oct. 17.
The View from Coffin Ridge: A Childhood Exhumed is available for purchase at Fanfare Books in Stratford, or at Ginger Press Books and Coffin Ridge Winery, and at eight independent book stores listed online.
Lamont, who didn’t finish Grade 9, now holds a BA in Sociology, a BSW and MSW and a Master of Fine Arts. Her thesis, The Subjective Experience of Men Who Murder Their Intimate Partners, took her into prisons and into the minds of men who murder. In 2023 she was one of 30 writers long-listed from 2,300 submissions to the CBC Creative Non-Fiction Prize for Survivor’s Guilt which explores themes from her book.
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