Margaret Gibson; writer with demons (GREAT)
Hyfler/Rosner
Catherine Dunphy
April 10, 2006 Monday
She burst onto the '70s literary scene a fully formed
writer - huge, intense, black-rimmed blue/green eyes,
brown-wrapped Plus cigarette, telling the literary
journalists of the day in her low, husky voice how she
needed words, how she got a physical pain in her hands if
she didn't write, how she sometimes wrote for 32 hours at
one time, until her hands bled.
She also told them she was writing to finish before her next
mental collapse.
What she wrote was and wasn't fiction. All Margaret Gibson's
work was based on the central, singular fact of her life. At
15, she had been diagnosed with a mental illness - paranoid
schizophrenia - and institutionalized at Guelph's Homewood
Institute. At 26 she wrote The Butterfly Ward, a book of
short stories, all of them about madness.
That book blazed across the literary landscape, sharing the
City of Toronto literary prize with Margaret Atwood's Lady
Oracle. Quebec director Claude Jutra chose one of its
stories, "Ada," to be his first English language television
project. "Making It," her story about her surreal and very
real friendship with female impersonator Craig Russell, was
made into Outrageous, the movie that was the talk of the
1978 Cannes Film Festival.
She led readers into her world, which could be full of fear
and sharp edges but was also intense and thrilling, a
foreign place where the familiar glimmered and fractured,
strangely beautifully under her talent.
She wrote other short story collections, consulted on the
screenplay of For the Love of Aaron, a 1994
made-for-television movie based on her battle for custody of
her only child, and a novel, Opium Dreams, which won the
Chapters/Indigo prize for best first novel in 1997.
But she also battled her own demons, alienating friends,
family and many a literary mentor with her neediness, anger,
imperiousness and psychotic episodes. Reaction to her second
story collection - Considering Her Condition - was
underwhelming; in fact, some thought the title was actually
an apology for the quality of the material and it
precipitated a breakdown that resulted in a 15-year writing
silence before the 1993 publication of Sweet Poison.
Yet Gibson always said that writing was her lifeline, "the
one contact with the outside world, the one thread that
didn't snap" under her mental illness. "Certainly when one
is really feeling low, whacked-out-sad it is difficult to
set the words down," she wrote in this newspaper, "but if
one can manage the monumental task of lifting pen to paper
it is a catharsis and makes the blood sing.
"With me the words were all I ever really had - it was
enough."
She was a middle child of Audrey and Dane Gibson - a
solitary girl composing silent stories in the half-acre
garden behind the family's Scarborough home. Big sister Dana
was popular, bright, a leader; Deirdre and Lenore, younger
and twins, were in their own rambunctious world. They all
visited Gibson in the locked ward and they sold their
beloved home and acreage to move to Guildwood Village to
give her a fresh start when she came back to them.
"I think the family may have sold the property to pay for
Homewood. They went the distance for her," said Shirley
Flavelle, Gibson's friend since they and Russell all met at
West Hill C.I.
Flavelle said Gibson was her "lifesaver," someone else who
felt "marooned" in the high school culture. So one day in
Grade 10, when Gibson rolled up her sleeves to show the
self-inflicted cut marks up her arms, Flavelle decided the
two would quit school and get an apartment together.
"She said it wasn't a suicide attempt but that she did it
because she was numb and was so desperate to feel," Flavelle
said. "I was so desperate for her to survive I said 'This is
it, we're going.'"
Flavelle got a job and supported them both - Gibson's
parents looked after the cost of all her medications. It
meant going days without sleep if Gibson was on a creative
jag, (Gibson never wanted to be alone) and riding transit
for hours at night to teach her how to get to her
psychiatrist's office. (No matter where she lived, Gibson
couldn't go more than six blocks from her home without
getting lost.)
As autocratic as she was needy, Gibson was often caustic and
cruel. "You had to be smitten and I was totally devoted to
her," said Flavelle, but after three years, Flavelle asked
her to leave and Gibson moved in with Russell. Two years
later she married Stuart Gilboord; it was he who took his
wife's writings to a script supervisor at his workplace,
TVOntario, who in turn took them to Oberon Press.
Gibson had divorced Gilboord and was living with their son,
Aaron, born in 1972, when The Butterfly Ward hit bookstores.
On a downward spiral, she still managed to successfully fend
off Gilboord's attempt to gain sole custody of his son.
"She loved Aaron, absolutely loved him," said her sister,
Deirdre Gibson, "so she marshalled all kinds of letters and
support for the trial."
Looking back, "it wasn't all negative. She did the best she
could; she loved me like crazy," said Aaron, married, living
in Manitoba and proud to be raising his three boys in an
"average household."
Her sister Deirdre located rent-geared-to-income housing in
a complex on Coxwell Ave., where Gibson met her second
husband, Juris Rasa, to whom she dedicated Opium Dreams.
Again, after her book was published, Gibson began another
psychotic spiral and left Rasa, staying with friends, in a
succession of apartments and on the streets.
Diagnosed with breast cancer three years ago, she had a
lumpectomy and refused chemotherapy treatment, telling
everyone she was cured.
In February, she was told the cancer had metastasized into
her bones and her family arranged for her to go to St.
Mike's palliative care unit. "I set up her room with her
photo and all her books. I wanted people there to see her as
she was," said Deirdre. By this time Gibson couldn't walk or
use her hands, but she asked her friend Morris Wolfe to help
her write. He brought a tape recorder to her bedside, but
she had trouble forming the words.
Gibson died Feb.25 at 57.
cdunphy @ thestar.ca
GRAPHIC: Margaret Gibson's story "Making It," about her
friendship with female impersonator Craig Russell, was made
into the 1978 film Outrageous. She won a prize for best
first novel in 1997 for Opium Dreams.
robertc...@yahoo.com
Hyfler/Rosner wrote:
> The Toronto Star
> Catherine Dunphy
> April 10, 2006 Monday
>
>
>
> She burst onto the '70s literary scene a fully formed
> writer - huge, intense, black-rimmed blue/green eyes,
> brown-wrapped Plus cigarette, telling the literary
> journalists of the day in her low, husky voice how she
> needed words, how she got a physical pain in her hands if
> she didn't write, how she sometimes wrote for 32 hours at
> one time, until her hands bled.
>
> She also told them she was writing to finish before her next
> mental collapse.
I'd never heard of Ms. Gibson before this obit, so thanks. I'll have to
look her up. Her story sounds similar to Janet Frame's, whose battles
with madness and people who thought they knew how to cure her also form
the crux of her books. (Frame's _An Angel at My Table_, both in its
literary and cinematic incarnations, is an old favorite.)
It's a sad fact that writers are often saddled with mental illness. I
recently read a story about Franz Wright, the son of James Wright, and
a prizewinning poet. When he showed his writings to his famous father,
the latter replied: "Congratulations! You are a poet. Welcome to hell."
American writers in particular seem to be afflicted with mental and
emotional problems, but, as this story shows, the situation is far from
being a peculiarly American reality.
I hope that Ms. Gibson has finally found peace.
Bill Schenley
> writer - huge, intense, black-rimmed blue/green eyes,
> brown-wrapped Plus cigarette, telling the literary
> journalists of the day in her low, husky voice how she
> needed words, how she got a physical pain in her
> hands if she didn't write, how she sometimes wrote for
> 32 hours at one time, until her hands bled.
> She also told them she was writing to finish before her
> next mental collapse.
> What she wrote was and wasn't fiction. All Margaret
> Gibson's work was based on the central, singular fact of
> her life. At 15, she had been diagnosed with a mental
> illness - paranoid schizophrenia - and institutionalized at
> Guelph's Homewood Institute. At 26 she wrote The
> Butterfly Ward, a book of short stories, all of them about
> madness.
Photo: http://www3.sympatico.ca/jrasa/mgfrl.jpg