Tall Tale

Life writing is a compelling and curious literary form. Under the veneer of honesty, autobiographers often depart from the rigours of candid self-revelation to adjust their lives to their own desired framework, introducing unverified reports or leaving out questionable material.

Canada has a long history of political autobiographies. Judy LaMarsh’s Memoirs of a Bird in a Gilded Cage, from 1969, and Brian Mulroney’s Memoirs, from 2007, are among those that reveal the politico’s penchant for narrative disclosure and selective expurgation. By comparison, our country has seen few literary autobiographies. Northrop Frye and Marshall McLuhan certainly did not relish the mode. Deeply suspicious of it, Frye demurred when approached by his eventual biographer, John Ayre, for “he was uncertain about his suitability for a full-length book.” As Ayre recalled, Frye had “already warned off biographers by claiming that he had led an uneventful life.” McLuhan too abhorred the intrusion of the personal in his writings.

The literary landscape is changing, however. The novelist Miriam Toews has just published A Truce That Is Not Peace, for example, and Margaret Atwood will soon unveil Book of Lives: A Memoir of Sorts. Susan Swan is yet another among our literary voices who has decided to engage in the form with Big Girls Don’t Cry: A Memoir About Taking Up Space. Unlike many political figures, Swan leaves nothing hidden.

For Swan, an autobiography was initially an attempt to understand her size. The daughter of a family doctor who stood six foot five and a mother of five foot ten, she reached her full height of six feet, two inches by the age of twelve — at a time when the average Canadian woman was closer to five three. Ultimately, her account of her early growth and distinguishing stature has become a self-portrait of her gradual acceptance among unapologetic feminists.

Born in 1945 and raised in the Presbyterian world of small-town Midland, Ontario, Swan roamed through her comfortable brick house and tried to adapt to the dreams other people had for her. Among them was her busy father, who had no time for his family and was the only person who never had a crisis, “consumed by his self-image as a strong, giant-like healer.” And there was Susan’s overbearing mother, who always wanted the best for her daughter, provided the two agreed about what was best. “In a moment of confidence,” Swan recalls, “she once told me in all seriousness that the world would be better off without religion, sex, and the male sex.” Swan struggled with the prototypes of womanhood fostered by such figures as well as by her headmistress at Havergal College, in Toronto, where she was “encouraged to walk around the court” before basketball games “to intimidate the other team.” But she intended to live humbly in order to rebel against what she considered her privileged background.

Swan was also determined to be a writer, though such determination did not lead to early success. Married young to a conservative businessman who did not appreciate her ambitions, she had escaped the rigid confines of her family only to walk into another set of conventions as debilitating as those of her childhood home. “I had to find a solution,” she writes. Leaving her failed marriage, she chose to be a single mother, and, for the first time in her life, she began to explore a more liberal world.

Instead of resuming her earlier career as a journalist, she became a performance artist, but the work left her less than satisfied. Feeling unmoored, she did not yet “understand that writing fiction required long uninterrupted blocks of time that let you daydream your way into a novel or short story.” As she learned the craft, she also recognized that “my size is a bonus, not a drawback. It’s part of who I am, and the mythic spell cast by height, plus the power of words, sets me apart as a writer.” The lesson? “Make use of everything that’s yours, in other words, because it’s unique to you.”

While preparing her first book, The Biggest Modern Woman in the World, published in 1983, Swan began to understand her own relative importance. No longer the character in other people’s visions, she came to know herself as a unique and complex human being: “It only took me to my mid-forties to discover that it’s easier to be my own norm.” Before that, Swan suffered from hopelessly idealizing romantic partners. She tried to act and think as she imagined a typical man would want her to act and think. Even now, she is convinced, women live with norms that straight men have fashioned — in “a world where femininity is an adjunct to a hyper-masculine definition of masculinity.”

Swan believes the female desire to please others is deeply rooted. Only by venturing inwards can a woman acknowledge her core tenets. Many of the men Swan met in life saw women’s bodies as a version of their own and appeared uninterested in knowing the difference. She wants women to understand their own personal power. “I know the answer. I’ve always known,” Swan came to realize by the 1990s. “I’m too independent now to limit myself to being a man’s helpmate.”

From Midland to Toronto, from New York City to the fabled contours of Corfu and Crete, Big Girls Don’t Cry examines one Canadian novelist’s fixation on her size, which blossoms into a detailed understanding of her personal growth as a resilient feminist.