4 - Sunday, August 13, 1989 - North Shore News TRE FIRST time I saw Sylvia Fraser, she was wearing a toga with a Roman wreath around her head, and being car- tied on an ornate litter by two superstud bearers, also in togas. It was a literary launch party, intended as a promotional blockbuster, being orchestrated by the effervescent Jack McClelland, then at his peak as THE Canadian publisher, long before he had to sell the family publishing firm. Sylvia had written a book about the Roman empire. Thus the hype. Thad just been passing through Toronto, hustling editors, ran into an old friend, and was hustled, ia turn, off to Jack McCleliand’s big launch for Sylvia’s new book. To me, the spectacle of the Toronte literary elite all decked out in togas was a confirmation of my worst suspicions about de- cadent Easterners. The fact that Jack himself has the most incredi- ble bags under his eyes you've ever seen enhanced the effect wonder- fully. Poor Sylvia! Here was this pale, blonde, fragile-looking, tormented woman writer, looking like nothing so much as 2 prisoner in thet silly litter, being hauled forth to be gawked at by her captors. What a price to pay for writing a book! Serves her ego right, I thought. I’d never stoop to such depths just to sell books! Would I? But, of course, the truth was that I, too, would stoop to almost any depth imaginable to sell books. The writer’s strength is the writer’s weakness: bottomless vanity. . Sylvia, it turned out, had several redeeming features. One, she was smart, Maybe even smarter than me. (Gasp!} Two, she had read my one novel, and thought it was great. Bellevue wiring contract awarded ALTHOUGH THE bulk of the underground hydro, telephone and cable wiring for Ambleside in West Vancouver has already been tendered and let, a separate con- tract for underground work on Bellevue Avenue has been awarded to Cicuto and Sons Contractors td. The company’s bid of $502,130 has been reduced by the $87,000 that Shaw Cable has agreed to contribute in cable installation, Minus the $50,000 allowed for contingencies, the cost of the job should actually be around $365,000, municipal manager Terry Lester told West Vancouver District Council at a recent meeting. Although a lower bid was actu- ally put in by West Vancouver Public Works (lower by about $23,000), council decided to go with the Cicuto bid because of the company’s familiarity with B.C. Hydro and B.C. Tel requirements. Public Works would also have had to defer a Iot of its scheduled capital and focal improvement programs if it had taken on the job. The Bellevue contract was removed freza the main revitaliza- tion contract because of the sub- contractors’ high price for the un- derground work ($501,715 without contingencies.) At the following council meeting, Ald. Mark Sager released a rough schedule for this year’s Ambleside revitalization project, which is expected to begin between Aug. 18 and 20 and finish up with paving in October. : Further work details are avail- able through municipal hall. So naturaliy I thought she was great too. Fabulous literary taste, obviously. Somehow, traitor that ' am, I never got around to readin, her Roman novel. The reviews were cruel. Several ycars later, she published another novel, an epic thing about Germany just before the war. I read an interview with her after that in which she described how much it had cost her in terms of time and energy to write her novels, and how casually they were brushed aside, and how broke she had gone trying to be a writer. Uh huh. Yep. That’s the way it is Sylvia, thought I. Give it up. Get into freelancing. And then she came out with My Father’s House. It wasn’t fiction. It was autobiography. It was the story of how her father had sexually abused her as a child. Tacest. [t’ll never sell, I thought. Too painful a topic. Who wants to know? Of course, it became a runaway bestseller. It’s now being made in- to a movie. When I ran into Sylvia recently, I couldn’t bring myself to admit that I had only been able to read one page of My Father’s House — the first page. In it, she simply tells how her father used to tell her he *loved’’ her. Against the context of what I knew was to come from the blurb on the cover, I choked up. And decided this was a book I didn’t want to put myself through the experience of reading. I’ve got two daughters. The idea of a father violating his own daughters is about as sickening a thought as exists. Thinking about some jerk doing such a thing br- ings out an urge to do violence to the guy. Ail normal males are af- fected this way. Sylvia talks about how she en- dured the ordeal. She did it, she says, by becoming a princess in her mind, who was being treated ina very special manner for some great and noble, if mysterious, reason. It drove her mad, of course. She became a functioning schizophrenic, with the entire ex- perience effectively blanked out at the conscious level. Subconscious- ly, the ‘‘princess”’ lived alone. Her entire adult life was lived this way _ until the death of her father. At his funeral, something inside her changed. She believes it was a psychic event, a matter of her fa- ther’s spirit releasing its hold on her own. Whatever the case, 10 years of therapy lay ahead before she could bring herself to the final therapeu- tic act: the writing of the book that would exercise the demon once and for all. Today, Sylvia’s f:.. 2 bears the marks of deep suffc ag. There is something permanently pained about her eyes. Yet at the same time she is radiant. It is, J believe, the healthy glow that comes from personal triumph. 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