From the Ashes

This was such an intense memoir. Jesse Thistle had a rough life, and from him to go from where he was to where he is now is astounding. It's a short, easy read that will make you think about the people who slip through the cracks. I do wish that Jesse had been more introspective throughout, though. He got a little introspective at the end, but he spent most of the book being awful to his family, friends, and strangers. While it's obvious he regrets his behavior, he doesn't spend any time dwelling on any of it. I mean, his grandparents shun him and I honestly thought they went above and beyond trying to help him, and Jesse the teenager was being a huge ass to everyone around them, and he never really reconciles with his culpability with this. (I understand his childhood trauma is a BIG reason he was like this. But trauma doesn't give people an out to be consistently awful to the people who love them, and even though he was a teenager, Jesse the author never owns up to his end, either).

His writing style was a little rough, but highly effective. I personally dislike when memoirs do really early child years with very vivid detail, and this one did that too, but it worked better than normal because his childhood was pretty awful, making me think these specific instances were burned into his memory. But other than those early chapters, I thought he was brutally honest and Jesse is incredibly resilient to go through all that he did and decide to turn his life back around and graduate school.

My complaints, though, are nitpicks to an incredible story. Highly recommend.

I always feel weird rating memoirs...but this was an astounding story and a brilliant piece of writing. Absolutely gut-wrenching and beautiful.

Candid memoir of a Métis-Cree whose early turbulent childhood with a drug-addicted father and stints at foster-care, sent him down a path of drug addiction, crime and homelessness. A good reminder of how one is never free of the traumas of one's past and the traumas done to one's people. And how hard the struggle is to climb back up.

That image of the 3 small brothers desperately trying to feed themselves and locking arms to take on the world that seems all set against them, will stay with me.

Abandoned to the foster system, taken in by grandparents then thrown out in highschool, Jesse Thistle ends up homeless and addicted on the streets of Toronto, Vancouver and Ottawa.

Spoiler - Jesse Thistle is currently an Assistant Professor in Métis Studies at York University in Toronto, a Governor General's Academic Medal winner, as well as a Pierre Elliot Trudeau and Vanier Scholar. Knowing this, knowing that he makes it out alive, adds some much needed air to this memoir because on the page there is no shortage of circumstances that sees this ending in a far more grim, frankly more dead, way.

The memoir benefits from his clear prose and sharp editing as we jump from scene to scene. The matter of fact tone avoids easy sentiment - it never feels like misery porn or the nostalgic showing of scars. Thistle is nonetheless ruthless in his recounting; from a night consumed by the rhythm of the ragga jungle high on E and dancing for days until his nipples were open wounds, rubbed raw against his muscle shirt as if on a belt sander - to detoxing in solitary, bones vibrating in agonizing pain, shattering his frame until he felt like a pile of bloody talcum powder.

I don't know why I'm a sucker for these breathless memoirs of youthful indiscretion and tragedy, it feels almost like a genre unto itself from Nico Walker's Cherry, to the troubled Million Little Pieces (both being made into movies) and I feel a bit like a salacious voyeur into another's troubled past. But I also appreciated Thistle's slight nods to his indigenous background that coloured the edges of this work and brings a tiny bit of magic into this redemptive arc.

Jesse's writing is magnetic and his story's intense. Facing racism and bullying and dropping out of school in grief is the faint overlap I've lived. I thought about when a friend from Turkey told me that he was never bullied growing up—because the school system was so oppressive it was always students against teachers. Whether those in power are nakedly so or cloaked in misdirection, and while humans new and old haven't stopped scrabbling to be at the top of corrupt hills, there is healing power in sharing stories of rising up and breaking free of narratives of dominance. I am especially hopeful about new models of masculinity.

Incidentally I wasn't expecting a chilling link to Jagmeet Singh's family story.