No. 127: NAMES WITHHELD / At 15, Mark had to take his brother to hospital after a suicide attempt. Later that morning he was punished for showing up late for class. It then gets much darker.
In a chapter from a manuscript I'm working on, I recount a conversation with Mark, a kid in my year at UCC whose brother was sexually assaulted by a teacher who troubled me even back in Grade 9.
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A few years ago, I started to work on a memoir about the awful time I spent at Upper Canada College and my life as a teenage petty criminal. Yeah, my misspent adolescence doesn’t make for your standard bildungsroman. The working title is a tad overpowering and I’m not married to it: Crimes Punishable by Heartbreak. My goal was a simple one: writing a book, that at age 14, I would have shoplifted.
The memoir started out as a five-minute stand-up bit and later a longer story-telling deal. Then I wrote an essay about my time at UCC and entered it in the CBC literary contest—out of 2,000 entries it made the long list of 30. I reprinted “Child Hood” on this SubStack a few months back—loyal readers might remember it. You can access “Child Hood in my archive (link…
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