Mother of the Grass

Born at the end of the first volume in this autobiographical trilogy, the little Jovette sets off on her journey across the Land of Permanent Sacrifice in Mother of the Grass. Wrenched from her childhood paradise on the banks of the St. Lawrence, she is plunged into the child-battering hell of working-class Montreal, then later into the despairing din of the factories where she worked as a teenager. Her spirit continues to yearn for the light and peace of her childhood by the riverside and this book chronicles her extraordinary journey through the artists’ cafes and gay bars, the bookstores, and the streets of Montreal in the 1950s and ’60s, sustained always by the memory of her grandmother, toward a place by the river where she can write and be. Mother of the Grass is at once a brutal portrait of a world dedicated to violence against women and children and a remarkable visionary account of the growth of a major Quebec feminist artist’s creative self.