No Letter in Your Pocket:
How a Daughter Chose Love & Forgiveness to Heal from Incest by Heather Conn
(Guernica Editions $25)

Review by Stephen McClure (BCBW 2024)

This can’t have been an easy book to write. No Letter in Your Pocket describes the long and difficult process by which writer and editor Heather Conn gradually realizes that she was a victim of incest, and how she comes to terms with that awful reality.

Nor is this an easy book to read. The subject of incest is obviously an uncomfortable one. While Conn spares readers most of the disturbing details, her story at times makes for a toe-curlingly intimate account of how her father abused her—physically and emotionally.

But Conn’s soul-baring honesty and writing skills compel you to keep reading and keep learning. The arc of her narrative—how she denied and masked her trauma, her attempts to find the human connections and love she needed, and how she was able to deal with the past and get on with her life—is one that anyone with the slightest amount of empathy will be drawn in by.

The first half of No Letter in Your Pocket recounts Conn’s travels through Asia with her father, and then solo. She is on a quest for self-knowledge, healing and love. Interspersed throughout her narrative are memories of growing up in a strict household dominated by her sexist, alcoholic, workaholic father, a leading Toronto anesthesiologist. At this stage of her life, Conn is still not consciously aware that her father committed incest with her when she was a child growing up in a comfortable, upper middle-class household, but she is increasingly aware that something in their relationship isn’t right.

Recounting her travels, Conn weaves her struggle with her inner demons and her search for a romantic partner to whom she can commit with evocative descriptions of the people and places she encounters
in India, Ladakh and Nepal.

The second half, titled “Healing at Home,” describes the long and harrowing process whereby Conn gradually realizes how she has repressed the memory of being abused by her father, and how she eventually finds the courage to confront him with that painfully acquired knowledge.

“To heal meant releasing my anger,” Conn writes, “but I had no idea how much debilitating grief lay beneath it …. On too many days, I found myself sobbing without prompt.”

Heather Conn tells a compelling, deeply emotional story—and a controversial one, because she decided that ending the trauma that had plagued her for decades meant forgiving her father.

“That wouldn’t work with a sociopath or psychopath,” Conn writes, “but at least it acknowledges the potential for good in someone … by denouncing my dad’s actions, I don’t have to hate or obliterate him ... Although I will never dismiss what he did to me, I can still choose to forgive him for it.”

Not all of us are victims of incest, but we all have our traumas and psychic wounds, which is why Conn’s book is so engaging and inspiring. 9781771837873

Stephen McClure is a freelance writer and editor who divides his time between Vancouver and Tokyo.

***
Now based in Roberts Creek, freelance writer/editor, blogger, writing instructor and coach, and communications consultant Heather Conn has freelanced for more than 50 publications including The Vancouver Sun, The Edmonton Journal, The Georgia Straight, Quill & Quire, BC BookWorld, The Vancouver Book.

In addition, she edited PeopleTalk magazine, Vancouver and worked as a Corporate Communcations Manager for BC Transit. She has co-written a short film Subway Duel (2004), funded by NFB and BC Arts Council, and written for the CBC children's TV show Hopscotch. She has taught at SFU at Harbour Centre, Selkirk College, Vancouver School Board, Kootenay School of Writing and Sunshine Coast Mental Health. Her photos have appeared in many publications.

A former columnist for Vancouver Parent magazine, Heather co-wrote the book Vancouver's Glory Years (Whitecap Books 2003) while working as corporate communications manager at BC Transit. It revisits 1890 to 1915 when state-of-the-art electric street cars and 'interurbans' helped 10,000 residents avoid the muddy streets.

Conn has also co-founded and co-facilitated a nature appreciation program for children called Oneness in the Wilderness.

Gracie's Got a Secret [See Press Release below] is the Heather Conn's first children's book with illustrator LILLIAN LAI of Vancouver. Lai works as an artist on social mobile games for Harmony Arcade and has worked in the animation industry on shows such as Rated A for Awesome. She has worked as a graphic artist and as a producer of short animation. Lillian has a certificate in 3D digital animation and a diploma in 2D commercial animation from Capilano University in North Vancouver.

Incest denial and sexual assaults disrupt a young woman’s solo spiritual quest and her two romantic adventures in India in 1990-91 in Conn's memoir No Letter in Your Pocket: How a Daughter Chose Love and Forgiveness To Heal From Incest (Guernica $25). Two decades later, after profound healing, she’s resilient at mid-life. Finding the love and intimacy she craves, she can, at last, forgive her dying father—and her mom, for her decades of silence. Unlike many stories of healing and spiritual discovery, this story avoids predictable recovery rhetoric and insular victimhood; instead, it is a testament to thriving empowerment.

CITY/TOWN: Roberts Creek and Vancouver, BC

PLACE OF BIRTH: Vancouver, BC

ARRIVAL IN BRITISH COLUMBIA: 1977 (grew up in Toronto)

ANCESTRAL BACKGROUND: Scottish/Irish

EMPLOYMENT OTHER THAN WRITING: Magazine & Book Editor/Photographer/Writing Instructor

AWARDS: 1998 Writers Union of Canada Prose Contest; 1995 Federation of BC Writers Festival of the Arts Competition; 1985 Southam Communications Lighthouse Award

BOOKS:

Vancouver's Glory Years -- Public Transit 1890 - 1915 (Whitecap Books, 2003) --co-authored with Henry Ewert; foreword by Vancouver mayor Larry Campbell 1-55285-517-1

Gracie's Got a Secret (MW Books, 2011) $9.95 978-0-9868776-0-5

Six Stinky Feet and a Sasquatch (Peppermint Toast, 2020) $18 978-0-9950-1277-6

No Letter in Your Pocket: How a Daughter Chose Love and Forgiveness To Heal From Incest (Guernica, 2023) $25 9781771837873

[BCBW 2024]