Vendor
	Liepman Literary Agency Marc Koralnik
Original language
English

NORTH OF NORMAL : A MEMOIR OF MY WILDERNESS CHILDHOOD, MY UNUSUAL FAMILY, AND HOW I SURVIVED BOTH

Cea Sunrise Person

Described as Wild meets The Glass Castle, North of Normal is an utterly compelling story of survival not just wilderness survival, but family survival as well.

Sex, drugs and bug stew? That was Cea Person's childhood. Brought into the Canadian wilderness as a baby and raised in a canvas tipi by her pot-smoking, free-loving, clothing-optional family, this is a coming of age story like no other. In the late 1960s, riding the crest of the counterculture movement, Cea's family left a comfortable existence on the West Coast to live off the land in northern Alberta. But unlike most commune dwellers, the Person family wasn't trying to build a new society they wanted to escape the trappings of civilization altogether. Led by her grandfather, an enigmatic and narcissistic character, they lived in a canvas tipi, grew pot, and hunted and gathered to survive. Living out her grandparents' dream with her teenage mother Michelle, young Cea knew little of the world beyond her forest. She spent her summers playing nude in the meadow and her winters snowshoeing behind the grandfather she idolized. For Michelle, however, there was one crucial element missing: a man. When Cea was five, mother and daughter hit the road, and in the ensuing years they experienced an array of ill-fated adventures in the company of a variety of spectacularly ill equipped men. It was during this period of insanity that Cea recognized how unusual she was, and began to hunger for a more normal life. From nature child to virtually parentless teen, Cea's astonishing story is one of extreme family dysfunction in an extremely unusual setting. It is also the story of one unusual girl's deep-seated desire for normality a desire that enabled her to risk everything, overcome overwhelming odds, and achieve her dreams. CEA SUNRISE PERSON, now a happily married mother of three, supported herself from age 13 to 31 as an international model, working primarily in Europe. She now lives in Vancouver, BC.

Available products
Book Published 2023-05-11 by HarperCollins Canada

Comments

Black Ink Publishing (Jeanne Ryckmans)

Read more...

"North of Normal contains so many jaw-dropping scenes it makes Jeannette Walls' childhood (The Glass Castle) look almost conventional.... [it] illuminate[s] family relationships that juxtapose love with torment, and illustrate the power of forgiveness."

"A former international model charts her unconventional childhood in the 1960s with a hippie-ish family. Written with stylistic clarity and studded with family photos, Person's lucid memories present a stirring scrapbook."

Read more...

"[An] affecting memoir."

"Warmly told with a strong, clear and funny voice, peppered with dramatic action, and full of quirky characters ... equal parts harrowing and convivial. ... The sense of survival in this book is multilayered ... there's survival of the wilderness, of child abuse, of incest, of addiction, of rape, of divorce, of mental illness, of mental handicaps and of abandonment. The author even does a quick tour through fashion industry and Internet dating. Mostly though, Cea has to endure the plain old stupidity and bad choices of her elders, who are either too doped-up, too confused or too single-minded to know better. She tells of survivors within survivors within survivors, generations of her family who simultaneously witness and torment each other, sometimes with their foolhardy intentions, and sometimes with their absence. Dysfunction and folly run deep, but she also conveys the sense of humour and openness that is key to the family resilience." National Post