More deeply it asks questions about family and identity. Johnson’s memoir is, on the surface, about cleaning out the 23-room family home left behind when her mother died. Eliot’s lines: ‘We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.’” The jurors - Kevin Garland, former executive director of the National Ballet of Canada Martin Levin, editor, columnist and playwright and Andrew Preston, winner of the 2013 RBC Taylor Prize - noted of Johnson’s book that it is “a story of love, loss and legacy, written with compassion and humour. Johnson is an award-winning author and a visual artist she is also the founder of KidsCanada Publishing Corp.
That winner will be announced later this month. In addition, she selects the RBC Taylor Prize Emerging Writer Award, which is worth $10,000 and the opportunity to be mentored by the winner. The announcement was made at a gala luncheon at the Omni King Edward Hotel in Toronto on Monday by Noreen Taylor, the prize’s founder. ” They Left Us Everything” is a funny, touching memoir about the importance of preserving family history to make sense of the past, and nurturing family bonds to safeguard the future.Plum Johnson has won the RBC Taylor Prize for literary non-fiction for her memoir titled They Left Us Everything published by Penguin Canada. Items from childhood trigger difficult memories of her eccentric family growing up in the 1950s and ’60s, but unearthing new facts about her parents helps her reconcile those relationships, with a more accepting perspective about who they were and what they valued. Plum thought: “How tough will that be? I know how to buy garbage bags.”īut the task turns out to be much harder and more rewarding than she ever imagined. Now they must empty and sell the beloved family home, 23 rooms bulging with history, antiques, and oxygen tanks. A warm, heartfelt memoir of family, loss, and a house jam-packed with decades of memories.Īfter almost twenty years of caring for elderly parents–first for their senile father, and then for their cantankerous ninety-three-year old mother–author Plum Johnson and her three younger brothers have finally fallen to their knees with conflicted feelings of grief and relief.
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