Projection: Encounters with My Runaway Mother

by Priscila Uppal

Overview

2013 Governor General’s Literary Award — Shortlisted, Non-Fiction
2013 Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust — Shortlisted, Non-Fiction

Projection is the story of this mother-daughter meeting in Brazil, of how two strangers, connected by little more than blood, spent ten days together trying to build a relationship.

In 1977, Priscila Uppal’s father drank contaminated water in Antigua and within 48 hours was a quadriplegic. Priscila was two years old. Five years later, her mother, Theresa, drained the family’s bank accounts and disappeared to Brazil. After two attempts to abduct her children, Theresa had no further contact with the family.

In 2002, Priscila happened on her mother’s website, which featured a childhood photograph of Priscila and her brother. A few weeks later, Priscila summoned the nerve to contact the woman who’d abandoned her.

The emotional reunion was alternately shocking, hopeful, humorous, and devastating, as Priscila came to realize that not only did she not love her mother, she didn’t even like her.

Projection is a visceral, precisely written, brutally honest memoir that takes a probing look at a very unusual mother-daughter relationship, yet offers genuine comfort to all facing their own turbulent and unresolved familial relationships.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781771022743
Publisher:	Dundurn Press
Publication date:	09/02/2014
Edition description:	None ed.
Pages:	288
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Priscila Uppal is an internationally acclaimed Toronto poet, fiction writer and York Universityprofessor. Among her publications are eight collections of poetry, including Ontological Necessities (shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize); and the novels The Divine Economy of Salvation and To Whom It May Concern. Time Out London dubbed her "Canada’s coolest poet."

Editorial Reviews

This beautifully written memoir goes far to explode many of the myths of family, often made of fantasy.

Owen Sound Sun-Times

...deeply thoughtful and carefully constructed...

Literary Review of Canada

Uppal's carefully crafted memoir illustrates the way art and life mesh in our mental fabric.

Globe and Mail

Projection is fascinating, compelling, as beautifully written as it is honest. Honest too that there is artifice at work here, that this book is so consciously art instead of a factual record. And yet there is documentation, notes and paragraphs. A fantastic blurring of art and reality, which is the book's very point, how we all do this to suit our own purposes, Uppal's mother escaping to movies in order to justify her own choices.

picklemethis.com

...Projection is no weepy Hallmark flick of the week. It doesn't lend itself to a Peaches & Herb sound bite. It's a gritty, insightful, honest and sometimes infuriating read that probes the often messy reality of family ties and mother-daughter relationships.

Winnipeg Free Press

Uppal immerses us into her complicated world, her strong emotions of resentment and her determined search to overcome her sadness.

From the Publisher

The rigorousness of the structure and the sentence-to-sentence quality of the writing here is borderline-heroic considering the rawness of the scenario. The 10 years it's taken Uppal to write this book have done so little to diminish its intimacy and immediacy. Projection is a book that's simultaneously cerebral and visceral, and its ardent refusal of any sort of mind-body split – to sacrifice sophistication for sentiment or vice versa – is the sign of an author who has thrown herself wholly into her work. We're exhausted and relieved when Uppal emerges from her brief encounter in one piece; happily, her volatile, pressurized book holds itself together as well.

National Post

I highly recommend this book to be read, especially by mothers and daughters across the world. I cannot stress enough on how much you realize what you have after finishing this.

South Asian Woman

Projection is a raw, passionate memoir, a fierce exercise in family exorcism...

The Gazette