The Hamilton Spectator 12 Apr 2023 JEFF MAHONEY

LINDA JOYCE OTT MEMOIR:
A woman in pieces and in full
Artist’s memoir recounts harrowing bouts with alcohol, self-defeat and near death, on way to creative life

Linda Joyce Ott has kept a meticulous diary since university, 1970, and has, beyond that, a vast fund of still-fresh memories of her earlier youth to draw on, such as being sent to the office for body odour in high school.

And so, in her new memoir, with those resources at hand — diary and vivid recall — she’s able to reproduce, in lively, often minute detail, the shape of experiences, feelings and thoughts that she lived on any given day; or even over the span of larger intervals in her life.

There is her first acid trip in the early ’70s. Several hour after dropping a dot of windowpane, nothing; so she feels ripped off but then it hits. “… looking in the mirror over the fireplace, I watch in horror as my face disintegrates and I frantically try to reshape it.”

There are, recorded in the pages of her diary, impressive achievements. A self-made career in corporate and Queen’s Park communications; novels, poetry, short fiction, art and photography shows; two children and, more modestly but indicative of the range of her curiosity and interests, a series of movie reviews for Hamilton Magazine. Movies like “Apocalypse Now,” Michael Apted’s “Agatha,” Herzog’s “Nozferatu: Vampyr.”

There are also, in the log of her personal voyage, in the syllabus of herself, many wine-soaked days and nights, battles with drugs, weight gain, anxiety, insecurity, social discomfort and self-doubt.

Throughout it all, creativity has been her immune system.

In her sometimes eye-poppingly candid book, “I AM — My Journey to a Creative Life,” Linda covers so much ground — and sky and water (she and her beau travelled aboard a freighter ship to Europe and saw the world in the mid-1970s) — that you are left with a sense of something large, like, well, a life. A life in full, from the abject to the triumphant.

A day that frames the story is Jan. 6, 2020, when, five times in the space of 24 hours, the author of “I AM” WAS NOT. She died, in effect. Not once but a handful of times. After suffering a broken leg she collapsed from a massive blood clot that travelled from the leg to the heart and into her lungs. Five separate heart stoppages.

“They (emergency medical staff ) revived me. I was dying each time,” Linda tells me in the lovely home in east Hamilton that she shares with husband Gunter, the beau back on the steamer.

“Basically they pumped me full of heparin (blood thinner) and I was pretty well given up for dead,” she says of the experience. Not many pull through such circumstances.

Ironically, it was only after she’d decided to give up the exhausting pace of working and business life in Toronto — hectic corporate and Queen’s Park schedules and deadlines, leading training sessions, travelling all over — that a health crisis caught up to her.

In 2008 she and Gunter had just moved back from Toronto to Hamilton where Linda grew up and went to Mac (where she met Gunter). “I wanted to finally devote myself totally to the creative life,” says Linda. It had always been her dream and she had made some time for writing, photography and art but career and creative paralysis got in the way.

Indeed, once in Hamilton, she flung herself into creative projects with wild energy.

But what she was doing was just transferring her workaholic habits from her jobs to her art. It was perhaps trying to do too much, too fast (art has deadlines too), that led to her broken leg, which led to the clotting.

“It’s an ongoing struggle to rein in my entrepreneurial bent,” she writes in her book. The workaholism, she believes, is one among several symptoms of an addictive personality, most pronounced being her drinking.

Much of it no doubt stems from the struggles of her early life. Her father was an alcoholic. She read voraciously and loved singing and art and storytelling but got little encouragement. Still she thrived, skipped a grade, and got top marks in high school.

“But my pride is destroyed,” she writes, “… when I learn that my classmates have complained about my body odour.”

The nurse suggests more showers but “I don’t tell her that we don’t have a shower or deodorant in the house.” Tall and gangly, she is also given to bouts of diarrhea and, all in all, could not feel more unbelonging, especially after everyone but her gets to go to Expo 67.

Through the rest of the book we see, in the vulnerable, often tormented woman we come to know, the poignant shape and shadow of this child-then-school-girl so painfully trying to fit in. We see it when she drinks too much in front of her future in-laws and embarrasses herself with writing coach Paul Quarrington.

But she does forge a peace with herself, perhaps aided by the example of her feisty mother, to whom, along with Gunter, she dedicates the book. She is certainly aided by her immersion in creativity.

“I AM” is interestingly structured around diary entries, larger thematic passages and, in bold, her contemporary self reflecting on the things her younger self is enduring.

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HAMILTON CITY MAGAZINE – MAY/JUNE ISSUE

HAMILTON READS BY JESSICA ROSE

I AM – MY JOURNEY TO A CREATIVE LIFE LINDA JOYCE OTT

After surviving five cardiac arrest in one night following an accident, Linda Joyce Ott makes a promise to herself. She vows to ditch her career and spend the rest of her life writing fiction and creating art, fulfilling a decades-long quest to live a fully creative life. Her new book, I AM – My Journey To A Creative Life, is one result of this promise fulfilled. In it, Ott searches her memory and sifts through decades of personal journals to better understand how her relentless pursuit of career success eclipsed her creative dreams. Illustrated with full-colour images of Ott’s art, I AM is the perfect read for anyone with a restless heart or creative ambition that can’t – or shouldn’t be – silenced.