Telling and Showing "Moments of Glad Grace"

As Writer in Residence at Green College in the fall of 2018, Alison Wearing completed a draft of her new book. Moments of Glad Grace will be published on April 7, 2020 by ECW Press (Toronto). This event is the official launch.

Alison Wearing is the bestselling author of Honeymoon in Purdah: An Iranian Journey and Confessions of a Fairy’s Daughter. She teaches, performs solo multimedia plays and leads writing workshops internationally.

“As a writer, Wearing is all luscious texture and running narrative.” ― The Globe and Mail

From the book jacket: Moments of Glad Grace is a moving and witty memoir of aging, familial love and the hunt for roots and belonging. The story begins as a trip from Canada to Ireland in search of genealogical data and documents. Being 80 and in the early stages of Parkinson’s Disease, Joe invites his daughter Alison to come along as his research assistant, which might have worked very well had she any interest ― any at all ― in genealogy. Very quickly, the father-daughter pilgrimage becomes more comical than fruitful, more of a bittersweet adventure than a studious mission. And rather than rigorous genealogy, their explorations move into the realm of family and forgiveness, the primal search for identity and belonging, and questions about responsibility to our ancestors and the extent to which we are shaped by the people who came before us. Though continually bursting with humour, Moments of Glad Grace ultimately becomes a song of appreciation for the precious and limited time we have with our parents, the small moments we share, and the gifts of transcendence we might find there.

“This is a wise, funny and tender book, beautifully written and perfectly executed from first to last sentence. It's about a daughter and her ageing father, it's about genealogy and identity, it's about Ireland, but actually it's about how we love the ones we love. Moments of Glad Grace is a travelogue of the heart. It's a road you'll want to travel.” ― Yann Martel