A Story for Sadie
Haunted by the grandmother she never met, Donna Langevin never ceased questioning a family taboo. A Story for Sadie delves into her grandmother’s incarceration and abandonment in a Montreal lunatic asylum after the death of her child. Langevin’s taboo-busting fictoire is vulnerable, imaginative and passionate. It vividly brings Sadie back to life and restores her place in the family that had once excluded her in the worst possible way.
~ Donovan King,
actor, teacher, and founder of
Haunted Montreal Ghost Tours
Donna Langevin writes with extra- ordinary empathy and forgiveness, tracing the imagined life of her paternal grandmother, incarcerated in a mental asylum after the death of her infant son George. “I’m here because I pulled out my plumage and clawed myself after my fledgling died.”
Sadie’s granddaughter’s book is a courageous and beautifully written work weaving the imagined horrors of daily life in a mental ward and letters of hope to the outside world with real family reactions to the event. It is a painful and wonderful read.
~ Dr. Anne Shepherd,
Psychiatrist, Psychoanalyst
$25.00 if purchased in Canada (includes shipping and taxes)
$35.00 if purchased outside Canada (includes shipping and taxes)
REVIEWS of A Story for Sadie
Please follow this link to read the review of A Story for Sadie written by Kate Rogers on July 23, 2024, on the LEAGUE OF CANADIAN POETS website.
… Donna Langevin’s A Story for Sadie demonstrates great empathy and compassion for Sadie, the grandmother she never met. Sadie was incarcerated in a Montreal insane asylum following death of her infant son, decades before Donna Langevin was born. …
REVIEW by Blaine Marchand of A Story for Sadie published in Verse Afire (January, 2024)
by Donna Langevin
Piquant Press, 2023 156 pp ISBN: 978-1-927396-30-8 (book) 978-1-927396-31-5 (e-book)
Every family has ghosts whose spectres haunt subsequent generations in different ways. Donna Langevin’s sixth book of poetry, A Story for Sadie, explores the life and incarceration of her paternal grandmother, Sarah (Sadie) Ellen Page King. It is divided into two parts – the first section deals with the years that Sadie spent in the Saint-Jean-de-Dieu Asylum in Montreal; the second captures the lasting impact this had on the poet and her family.
Although she never knew her grandmother, with this collection, the poet makes good on a promise made when she and her siblings finally discovered their grandmother’s unmarked grave. Compellingly and imaginatively through poems and letters to an unnamed friend, the first section imagines and captures the raw emotions and terrors of a woman suddenly committed to a Quebec asylum when she does not speak French and does not fully understand the reason why she is there. It is a brutal place where nuns are harsh demanding wardens, while the guards prey upon the women inmates. Food is meagre, prayer is obligatory and manual labour is compulsory. Eventually Sadie overcomes her feeling of abandonment and learns to manoeuvre in this netherworld, befriends a soft-hearted nun and builds a new family by becoming a surrogate mother to Josette, a so-called “imbecile”, who ”with no more than her fingertips/… restores me”.
The poems are told in a straightforward conversational way which captures the voice of a woman of her generation and time. The family narrative is a complex one. Sadie has married a non-Catholic and he must convert. While the marriage starts full of promise, it deteriorates as the husband deadens his grief “with brown-bagged medicine”. Their eldest son, Donald (the poet’s father), is born with an inverted chest and as Sadie says “his chest, a crater/filling with rage and shame “. The middle child, Mary, is a tomboy who eschews anything feminine. Their youngest son, George, dies suddenly as an infant. Desolate and perhaps in a postpartum depression, Sadie is committed.
Like her granddaughter in the second part, Sadie wants to know more about the family that abandoned her and how her imprisonment came to be. In this section, the poet explores her own family’s history and the secret shame they carry within them. Her father, burdened by his mother’s illness, refuses to speak about her and seeing, he feels, his mother in his daughter, pushes her away when he is not verbally scorning her. Interwoven with poems, at times tender and other times sore to the touch, are snippets of conversation with her mother and her siblings as the poet tenaciously attempts to unravel Sadia’s life and death to bring weft and weave to her own life and being.
Donna Langevin’s collection recaptures the past and reaffirms the truth at the heart of family difficulties. Reading it uncovers past horrors that were justified by phrases like “the best cures happen in solitude/ where a patient is stripped of their past”. This forceful book underscores this lie and brings to life the struggles of both past and present generations. It asks “why should you let sorrow shroud you.”