Finished reading: Growing Pains by Emily Carr 📚

The bedtime book I read to Liz before lights out. We knew nothing of Emily Carr; this was a used book I picked up in Annapolis Royal and it proved to be wonderful. Carr’s descriptions of her early life and her times in San Francisco and London as an art student are brisk and readable. She exhibited such strong character, and withstood such vicious and determined opposition from her family and neighbors, that her occasional lapses of collapsing self-doubt are really heart-breaking. That she powered through so much opposition to make her work and suffered several bouts of what she calls nervous exhaustion (but were likely heart attacks) make it easy to understand why she stopped believing in herself. Until the pictures she’d made brought the world to her door. A remarkable life and this – her last memoir, finished just before her death – covers the sweep of it with unsparing anecdotes.