Memories of an Alaskan childhood fill the early pages and
we are warned that although outdoor lore is presented -
such as running away very fast from a grizzly encounter -
it may not ensure your survival. STILL POINTS NORTH starts
with Leigh, torn from Anchorage by her parents' divorce,
returning to her dad for the summer. She has unexplained rashes
and stress eating disorders, now she's expected to live in
a house with no furniture. But that's okay, because she's
going to be outside a lot. Her father is a surgeon, and
every afternoon he takes his daughter out fishing salmon.
In the 1980's oil pours money into the local economy with
the building of pipelines. Leigh, aged eight, spends her
days gutting, freezing and smoking salmon. She returns to
her mother, in Baltimore, and the boon of museums. Suddenly
her mother is glamorous, where in Alaska she wore a down
vest and jeans. Leigh's behind in schooling, friendless and
strange, and her parents view each other with acrimony.
Alaska seems perfect on her next trip - but Dad has a new
lady in his life, and Leigh isn't being asked.
Grown up, Leigh works in New York for a travel magazine,
taking trips and getting paid very little, and deters
friendships. She continually thinks back to her teen years
with new half-siblings and a father who ended up taking
anger management therapy, and mopes that she had such a bad
time. This does come across to me as self-determining,
since her stepmother seemed pretty decent to her and she
got to go to Cornell. While people do have difficult
childhoods, there is no rule that says they have to drag
that time around with them forever. Leigh and her mother
are also incapable of moving on to an adult relationship,
fighting over petty incidents from the eighties like a
broken hairbrush. Then again, her mother bought antiques
rather than pay for babysitting or new school uniforms,
complaining that the child support wasn't enough.
I was hoping for a vibrant tale of Alaskan life, but Leigh
Newman seems rather to be engaged in a therapy exercise.
Rather than celebrate her travel job by being interesting,
she uses it to deter men asking for dates - I'm going to be
in Canada, then Italy, she tells a nice man, then has a
panic attack on her wedding day. STILL POINTS NORTH is a
descriptive tale of the generational cycle of child-rearing
and relationships, and will be of interest to social
workers and anyone who's lived through a difficult
upbringing.
Part adventure story, part love story, part homecoming,
Still Points North is a page-turning memoir that explores
the extremes of belonging and exile, and the difference
between how to survive and knowing how to truly live.
Growing up in the wilds of Alaska, seven-year-old Leigh
Newman spent her time landing silver salmon, hiking
glaciers, and flying in a single-prop plane. But her life
split in two when her parents unexpectedly divorced,
requiring her to spend summers on the tundra with her
“Great Alaskan†father and the school year in Baltimore
with her more urbane mother.
Navigating the fraught terrain of her family’s unraveling,
Newman did what any outdoorsman would do: She adapted. With
her father she fished remote rivers, hunted caribou, and
packed her own shotgun shells. With her mother she memorized
the names of antique furniture, composed proper
bread-and-butter notes, and studied Latin poetry at a
private girl’s school. Charting her way through these two
very different worlds, Newman learned to never get attached
to people or places, and to leave others before they left
her. As an adult, she explored the most distant reaches of
the globe as a travel writer, yet had difficulty navigating
the far more foreign landscape of love and marriage.
In vivid, astonishing prose, Newman reveals how a child torn
between two homes becomes a woman who both fears and
idealizes connection, how a need for independence can morph
into isolation, and how even the most guarded heart can
still long for understanding. Still Points North is a love
letter to an unconventional Alaskan childhood of endurance
and affection, one that teaches us that no matter where you
go in life, the truest tests of courage are the chances you
take, not with bears and blizzards, but with other people.
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