For over 30 years, the memories of Gwen Lamont’s childhood were buried beneath a protective gauze of forgetting. Her memoir, The View From Coffin Ridge: A Childhood Exhumed, is a remarkable story about what happens when we are forced to reconcile with a long forgotten past and with the characters who shaped it.
No one knew of her poor, chaotic family. No one knew she had been a child bride, or of her close brush with death at the hands of a man who claimed to love her. She had promised never to tell. As the years went by, the weight of her past became too much for her to bear and she began to write her younger self home.
Canadian author and activist Maude Barlow describes Lamont’s story as, “One courageous woman’s memoir of overcoming violence and trauma that looks straight into the heart of darkness to find the light.”
Plum Johnson, bestselling author of They Left Us Everything, said of the book, “This remarkable coming of age story is a Canadian Glass Castle with a chilling twist, one that will haunt you long after you have been spellbound.”
Two sold out book launches will take place Friday, May 31 from 7-9 p.m., and Sunday, June 2 from 3-5 p.m., at Coffin Ridge Winery. The View from Coffin Ridge: A Childhood Exhumed will be available for purchase in person or online at Ginger Press Bookstore https://gingerpress.com/ and Coffin Ridge Winery https://www.coffinridge.ca/, starting May 31.
Lamont, who didn’t finish Grade 9, now holds a BA in Sociology, a BSW and MSW, and a Master of Fine Arts. Her thesis, The Subjective Experience of Men Who Murder Their Intimate Partners, took her into prisons and into the minds of men who murder. In 2023 she was long-listed for the CBC Creative Non-Fiction Prize for Survivor’s Guilt, which explores themes from her book.
