THE VIEW FROM COFFIN RIDGE: A CHILDHOOD EXHUMED by GWEN LAMONT

For over thirty years, the memories of Gwen Lamont's childhood were buried beneath a protective gauze of forgetting.  Once those years were over, she never spoke of them.  No one knew of her chaotic, poor 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.  No one knew about her rotten teeth, or how her father's grandest con had resulted in her new smile.  She had promised never to tell.

In time those years became like the 13th floor of a hotel: there but renamed ‘Happy Normal Childhood’ to make everyone comfortable.  But Gwen wasn't comfortable and, as the years went by, the weight of her past became too much for her to bear.  Even though she knew that to exhume the past would rip open her well-constructed life, she also knew that was exactly what she had to do.  

Gwen tells her remarkable story of resilience in The View from Coffin Ridge: A Childhood Exhumed, a memoir about what happens when we are forced to reconcile ourselves with a long forgotten past and with the characters who shaped it.  It is also about family secrets and memory and how, by breaking her promises and revealing her secrets, she was able to face the truth about her life and write her young self home.