Advance Praise
“Julie Salverson’s fascinating memoir, A Necessary Distance: Confessions of a Scriptwriter’s Daughter documents her study of travel kept by her father when he was compiling research for a film about world hunger in 1963. George Salverson wrote scripts for radio and television, and documentary films for the CBC, as well as being its first television drama editor. In turn, his mother Laura Salverson won the Governor General’s Award twice for her work writing about women, poverty and the immigrant experience. From these sources, Julie Salverson has inherited a rich legacy of story-telling, and in this memoir, she interrogates the historical, political and cultural moment that her father documented, as he struggled to reconcile his values and understanding of the world with the people and experiences he encountered. As Salverson probes his notes, she endeavours to filter out his privilege in an attempt to reach a deep understanding of who he really was and how he chose to move forward. Salverson manages to balance her own experience of family history with her father’s accounts in a way that celebrates his contributions while acknowledging the importance of thinking critically about the issues that define and challenge us. Highly recommended.” – Lucy Black, author of A Quilting of Scars
“This meticulously crafted, funny and provocatively moving book concerns a talented writer’s far-flung project in the historical context of early Canadian radio and television. To interrogate the past is a perilous undertaking, more fraught when the examination investigates and questions family history. In a remarkable cross-genre study, the intrepid character of the author’s father is revealed, as is Julie Salverson’s courage in her ongoing ethical search for truth and clarity.” – Carolyn Smart, author of Careen and Hooked
“A Necessary Distance is a fascinating look at the way time and place affect perspective. I especially loved Salverson’s encounters with her father’s journals and her recreation of his global adventures while working on a CBC documentary on world hunger. It’s an absorbing, multilayered read and a wryly amusing excavation of family and cultural assumptions, past and present.” – Allan Stratton, author of The Resurrection of Mary Mabel McTavish and The Way Back Home
“A Necessary Distance is a strange and beautiful book. It is a sustained and barely-ever-flinching piece of writing and investigation navigating the topographies of history, memory and experience in a daughter’s journey to understand her father through the written remains of his life’s work – his film and radio scripts, his travel journals. Like a tracker on a path gone cold over the decades, she follows the signs, piecing together her narrative from fragments and unheard stories. Salverson has the capacity to produce a sense of active wonder through her writing; to derive from intensely personal experience a reader’s awareness of wider contemporary significance, and perhaps foremost, to take a digression and show it to be integral. To read not just her father, but the man himself - with generosity and forgiveness, with love and not judgement.” – Peter C. Van Wyck, author of The Highway of the Atom
