Kelley Library

Jennie's boy, a Newfoundland childhood, Wayne Johnston

eng

autobiography

portraits

no index present

non fiction

Jennie's boy

Wayne Johnston

a Newfoundland childhood

"Consummate storyteller and bestselling novelist Wayne Johnston reaches back into his past to bring us a sad, tender and at times extremely funny memoir of a Newfoundland boyhood few thought he would survive, including him. For six months between 1966 and 1967, Wayne Johnston and his family lived in a wreck of a house across from his grandparents in Goulds, Newfoundland, which was not so much a place as a scattering of houses along an unpaved road. At seven, Wayne was sickly and skinny, unable to keep food down, unable to sleep, plagued with a relentless cough that no doctor could diagnose, though they had already removed his tonsils, adenoids and appendix. Heart murmur, pleurisy, a tapeworm? All were suspected, and none confirmed. To the community he was known as 'Jennie's boy,' and his tiny, ferocious mother felt judged for Wayne's condition at the same time as worried he might not grow up to be his own man. While his brothers went off to school, and his parents to work, trying to stave off the next eviction, Wayne spent his days with his witty, religious, deeply eccentric maternal grandmother, Lucy, who kept a statue of the Blessed Virgin in one of her bedrooms along with a photo of her son Leonard, who had died at seven. During these six months of Wayne's childhood, he and Lucy faced two life-or-death crises, and only one of them lived to tell the tale. Jennie's Boy is Wayne's tribute to a family and a community that were simultaneously fiercely protective of him and fed up with having to make allowances for him: grandparents, parents and siblings, aunts and uncles, and the people of the Goulds, whose pet and nuisance he was. He recalls a boyhood full of pain, yes, but also laughter, tenderness, and the kind of wit that is peculiar to Newfoundlanders. By that wit, and by their love for each other--so often expressed in the most unloving ways--he, and they, survived."--, Provided by publisher