The fourteen chapters include: “The Little Girl Who Grew Up Next to Her Family” (a seminal story that informs all the rest); “Mom” (a towering and yet withholding force; “Our nickname for her was ‘The Sarge,’ for very good reason”); “Carter’s Hill” (an anchoring childhood civic topography effaced by ‘urban renewal’: “There’d be no more playing cowboys and Indians or Russians and Americans in Laundry Lane, the perfect place to play those games. Gone, too, were the beautiful houses in the garden, where Geraldine Mullins and her brother Tommy (“who worked for the Priestesses”) and sometimes her sister Kathleen (when she was drinking, it would take at least six policemen to get Kathleen in the back of the Black Maria) lived;” this is a brief excerpt from a long, evocative passage, illustrating how Walsh’s details and descriptions are often unerring and animated).

She delves a bit into CODCO and 22 Minutes – the working processes, successes and challenges are surely worth a book each themselves. She alludes to a few of her landmark theatre productions, like Molly Bloom and Makin’ Time With the Yanks, but again her involvement with RCA and collective theatre could fill many pages. She’s renowned for this work, but this memoir comes from a different kind of labour.

She lays this out clearly in “Taking Hostages”: “In recovery groups, people sometimes say that alcoholics don’t have relationships, they take hostages. Well, duh! Yeah, we may be drunk, but we’re not stupid. We take hostages in order to survive. We need to have someone on hand to look after us, because we are certainly not up to the task ourselves.” Walsh’s ructions and rampages nearly overtook her career, and constantly undermined any pride or worthiness she felt in that, or anything else. This isn’t a recovery memoir per se, it doesn’t quite have that arc – Walsh tangents off into asides about feminism, sexism, and fascism – op-edy pieces which are in some ways the least interesting part of the book. But still finger-snapped with wit: “I’m trying to remember what that columnist in the Toronto Star called me. Oh yes, a ‘big, loud, opinionated old bag.’ And I know he meant it in the nicest possible way.” 

She’s a polarizing – no that’s not quite right, galvanizing? – figure. She’s frank (sexually, often disturbingly). She can, no spoilers, be caustic. But she can also be warm (to colleagues, former PM Jean Chretien). Throughout she swears she has wisdom to share. Walsh states over and over that contrary to society’s relentless assessment of how women should act, look, and be like, that she gets happier as she gets older. In some ways this is a memoir from someone who’s picked up the pieces.