When other avenues didn’t take her to the dream life she imagined, Cea Sunrise Person sat down at her computer.
Nearly Normal, a sequel to her first book, North of Normal, was listed at No. 8 on the Globe and Mail Best Seller List for non-fiction books last week and retains the No. 8 position on the Toronto’s Star’s list of bestsellers again this week.
The author is happy now and living the life of those earlier dreams with a husband, three children, a secure home and successful writing career, along with all the stresses a “normal” life includes.
Person’s chaotic younger years would be considered normal by very few people.
In the late 1960s and determined to get away from civilization, her grandfather gave up the family’s comfortable California home in favour of life in a canvas teepee in Alberta’s Kootenay Plains.
There they lived a pot-smoking, free-loving, clothing-optional life without running water, electricity, or heat for bitterly cold winters.
Living out her grandparents’ dream with her teenage mother Michelle, young Person dwelt in a mostly happy world of summer meadows and winter snowshoeing. She knew little of the world beyond her forest.
In 1974, when she was five, Person, her mother and new boyfriend headed west to the North Shuswap, squatting in the Celista and Scotch Creek area.
“There was a cottage in Celista that we squatted in for three months; I remember what it was like,” says the author, who is excited to be presenting at the Word on the Lake Writers’ festival and plans to travel to the North Shuswap to see if the structure remains.
“The cottages were empty and my mother’s boyfriend stole food, etc. from whatever he could get into,” Person says. “Other times we slept in his old, red truck. We were like Gypsies.”
It was during a brief spell in a Celista classroom that the little girl began to realize her life was very unlike the lives of other kids.
Her mother parted ways with the man who, although he was a thief and a squatter, tried to be a father figure to the then seven-year-old.
The new boyfriend was a different story, molesting the young girl – with her mother’s knowledge.
Two years later, Person and her mom headed for the Yukon then returning to the family teepee for a while before heading to Calgary.
Her habits of smoking pot daily and bringing strange men home, made Person realize she had to escape the life her mom was creating.
At 13, she walked off the street and into a modelling agency that was hosting a competition. She did not win, but a photographer discovered her and a few months later, Person was in New York by herself.
Happy to get away, the 14-year-old modelled for two months before heading back to Calgary for the school year. She also made a solo trip to Paris when she was 15.
“When I graduated, I moved to Europe for over a decade,” says Person of her decade-long European modelling career. “It was a means to an end for me; I just really wanted to make enough money to lead a normal life. But I basically rushed into whatever I dreamed.”
Following one divorce, Person entered another bad marriage and discovered that she had built a dream that looked perfect only from the outside.
“I realized I hadn’t dealt with the past,” she says, something she did to a great extent by writing her first book, North of Normal. Her second book, Almost Normal, take readers through the process of writing the first book.
“It was obviously an emotional process to write it down,” she says of fulfilling her dream of writing a memoir, despite the challenges of getting a book published. “I went through six years of rejection until I got it published, and then it became a bestseller. The only reason I got published was because I kept at it.”
Person says she was writing North of Normal while her mother, marriage and business were dying.
Married again, happily, and the mother of three children, ages five, seven and 11, Person had to squeeze her writing into whatever free time she could snag.
“I learned to write in very crazy circumstances,” she says. “I made notes all day long on my iPhone: ‘I want to include this, add this scene, rewrite this,’ sit down, check notes and put ideas into the manuscript.”
Person will share her talent in a “Beginner’s Memoir” workshop” and an “Elements of Storytelling in Memoirs” workshop at the Word on the Lake Writers’ Festival in May, but is finished with putting her own life on paper.
“There is no way I could write another word about myself,” she laughs. “My life isn’t perfect but it’s definitely much happier than my childhood. I have a much more normal life, which is what I wanted.”
The only remaining member of her immediate family is her father, who was not around for her childhood. They have a good relationship and visit a couple of times a year.
While she is not planning any more memoirs, Person is using a scary memory from a hitchhiking trip she and her mother once took for the “domestic, noir thriller” she is currently writing.
“A little girl goes hitchhiking with her mother and her mother goes missing,” says Person of the child’s dogged determination to find her mom. “It’s definitely based on a scene from North of Normal when we got picked up by a very creepy guy. It still has an autobiographical bit, but it is completely fiction.”
Registration for the Word on the Lake Writers’ Festival, which runs May 19 to 21 is now open.
To register, or for more information on the festival and this year’s presenters, visit wwwwordonthelakewritersfestival.com.