A Life Consumed: Lilly Samson's Dispatches from the TB Front, by Diane Sims
Sims arrays a variety of constellations around Lilly’s letters. There is the national, where the 22 sanatoria across the country embraced all classes of Canadians, including Mackenzie King’s brother MacDougall who compared fighting TB to surviving on the front lines. There is the medical/political, where provision of TB care for all its citizens was Saskatchewan’s precursor to medicare. There is the social, where Lilly gets to know Dr. Norman Bethune, himself a patient at the Gravenhurst sanatorium, their isolated community within a community. There is the personal, where Lilly, by turns hopeful and deeply angry at this theft of her life, enters into a relationship with another patient.
The genre of A Life Consumed is a compound, comprising elements of letter collection, memoir and biography. It is perhaps best categorized as creative non-fiction. While Lilly’s letters are clearly historical, the life narrative that links them emerged from both Diane Sims's memory and imagination, as guided by the letters themselves.
“Prisoners of hope inhabited the tuberculosis sanatoriums. They were intelligent, artistic and determined, too, as I discovered when setting type years ago from articles they had written for the Gravenhurst San’s monthly magazine The Sanitarium Sun which our family printed at Bracebridge. Diane Sims sensitively takes us inside this institution and into the lives of these remarkable men and women, Lilly Samson and her friends at “the San,” who lived out their hopes a-half century or more ago, but whose stories again come to life now across the pages of A Life Consumed. Only a woman who has travelled courageously along the uncertain edges of a life threatened with illness, as author Diane Sims has, could so superbly translate the Lilly Samson story into the compelling human drama that it is.” – J. Patrick Boyer, author
“A Life Consumed is a journey back to a time and deep into the mind of a sensitive and determined woman struggling with the scourge of consumption. It is the 1920s, only two decades after the development of the first tuberculosis vaccine, and the ancient disease is still ravaging the population. Lilly Samson is one of millions, but one of a kind. Her only link to life before TB—her comfort—is a pen and notepad. Writing letters home is ‘part of her battle plan.’ Author Diane Sims has adopted the spirit of her late Aunt Lilly, adapted her letters, and transformed her tragic, heartbroken life into a delicately narrated homage to the human spirit. With attention to the language of the period, to the quiet atmosphere of desperation within the sanatorium, and to the spirit and stoicism of the protagonist, Sims has produced a literary labour of love, a tribute to a past generation with relevance to any and all who live with disease in the present.”—Eric Harris, Executive Editor, Canadian Geographic
Now Available!
To read two sample chapters, click here.
Book Details
October, 2008
ISBN 978-1-896350-30-1
210pp. softcover
17 b/w photographs
Price $19.00
About the Author
Diane Sims, now living in Stratford, grew up in Sault Ste. Marie. She has worked as a journalist/editor for newspaper and magazine media, as a writer/broadcaster for CBC radio, and as corporate editor for a Crown corporation. She has been living with MS and ovarian cancer for far longer than anyone expected possible, and her previous writing has reflected this. Gardens of our Souls: A Correspondence of Gardening, Friendship and Healing, with Marla Fletcher (Macmillan, 1998; “I rejoice in your book.”–Jean Vanier), was translated into Chinese and Japanese for distribution in those countries; An Ovarian Cancer Companion (General Store Publishing, 2003), was translated into French for distribution in France; and Solace (Novalis, 2005; “Sims and Fletcher understand why the garden is a powerful motif in so many spiritual traditions.”–Mary Hynes, Tapestry, CBC Radio One) continues the correspondence begun in Gardens of our Souls. Rider of the Clouds: Faith, Survival and Just Plain Hanging On (General Store Publishing) appeared in spring 2008.