Where it Hurts by Sarah de Leeuw

Paperback, read December 2017

This book hurts like a fist in the chest. I don’t read a lot of non-fiction, personally – not because I have anything against non-fiction, just because I heckin’ love novels and short stories, and there is more than enough out there to keep me occupied forever. But I’m professionally acquainted with Sarah, and I know she is a beautiful writer, so I picked up this book of creative non-fiction, and it killed me.

The essays reflect on the author’s youth in northern BC, on the women and people who have gone missing from her life, on the people who have gone missing in all of our lives. The writing is soft and sweet and flows like a river with a swift and deadly current. There is something about the writing that doesn’t match the content at all: how sweetly she can talk about breaking a breached baby’s clavicle, how soft. This dissonance is what makes this more than a heartbreaking and necessary collection of essays, and what makes it an unavoidable experience of hurt that we are forced to take away and do something with.