Familial Fragments

Martha Baillie recalls childhood days at Loon Island, north of Toronto: the way she’d wake up early in the morning, scurry into her parents’ bedroom, and jump onto her father’s lap, desperate to be tickled. The same game terrified her sister, Christina, who experienced their father’s teasing as an assault, one that provoked a deep sense of fear. “My father, her father, our father,” Baillie recites, lamenting two realities, diverse but inextricable. Martha and Christina Baillie never saw things the same way.

Baillie’s memoir in essays, There Is No Blue, emerges from a desire to collapse this distance between sister and sister. Written on the heels of Christina’s death, along with the deaths of their mother and father, the book is as much a survivor’s testimony as a homecoming to grief. In the opening essay, Baillie sits quietly by her mom’s sickbed as death takes hold. Once the...