Author: Charleen Touchette

Publishers: TouchArt Books: Santa Fe

ISBN# 0974654507

The follow review was contributed by Kathryn Atwood:

               There are a number of motivations to write a memoir: proximity to fame, a story that speaks to or is representative of an entire generation, or a life that simply has a fascinating angle.  In many ways, Charleen Touchette’s book, It Stops With Me: Memoir Of A Canuck Girl falls into both of the last two catagories. 

            Like many “baby boomers,” she was born into a picture perfect world, which in her case included a large extended Catholic French-Canadian family, two extremely handsome parents, and a lovely suburban home.  Touchette was a wide-eyed, perfectly coiffed, privately educated  little girl, who later attended Wellesley College and art school.  After  meeting her soul mate in college, they lived together, enjoying a Bohemian lifestyle in New York City, befriending inner city people as well as artists before settling down (in a manner of speaking), marrying and having four beautiful children together.

            Did she live happily ever after?  Well, yes and no.  Something was terribly wrong with this lovely picture.  Her father, an angry, controlling alcoholic, married because he was smitten with his wife’s beauty; she in turn, married him to attain a bourgeois lifestyle.  Her father’s abuse of Touchette is hinted at throughout the beginning of the book and gets a full-blown description later on, as well as being powerfully illustrated in full-color plates in the art section of the book.  Her mother, intent on maintaining a perfect facade, spent all her time on housekeeping while hiding or ignoring her husband’s ugly abuse of her daughter.  Touchette’s young personality was saved from total annihilation by two things: her wonderfully nurturing maternal grandmother Mimi, and her own artistic appreciation for her surroundings.

            The first section of the book reads in such a non-linear way, you realize very quickly that you are in the hands of a left-brained person.  Sometimes resembling a series of randomly placed snapshots rather than a story, it is at times confusing, but Touchette’s aching nostalgia for the beauties of her childhood world is delineated so movingly that the reader can’t help being drawn in.  This randomness, plus the occasional well-placed French word is what gives this section it’s charm; you feel that you are being dropped into Touchette’s past and that is quite an accomplishment for a memoirist

            Her development as an artist in New York City, after she narrowly escapes murder at the hands of some of her colorful inner-city neighbors, I found to be less compelling; I was confused by the plethora of artists she encountered,  both in New York and later, the indigenous artists she meets in Indian Country.  She curated many art exhibits and while I’m sure they were fascinating experiences, I found reading about them to be less so.  In a way, the length of this section detracts slightly from the main thrust of the book, which is recovery from abuse; her development as an artist isn’t nearly as compelling as is the unfolding of her emotional healing.

            And this healing is quite a roller coaster ride: as she tries to discover the root of an extremely debilitating illness, she must delve deeper and deeper into painful memories, until she uncovers more than she wanted to know.  Although painful to read, this section of the book is extremely compelling.

            Her art is surreal and quite reminiscent at times of Frida Kahlo, and like Kahlo, Touchette uses her art to exorcize her emotional pain.  The largest subject group presented is a series delineating the abuse she endured from her father.  These are simplistic, representational and in full color (although many are done in differing shades of black, white and gray with just an occasional touch of color, almost as if she was trying to replicate the look of ‘50's snapshots).  A smaller color plate group depicts the images she visualized during her psychoanalysis treatments.

            Although the visual power of the abuse and recovery work is undeniable, I found some of the black and white photos of her art to be more aesthetically pleasing; many of these illustrate some of her visions, fantasies and ruminations induced by the Indian rituals that she came to embrace.  I couldn’t help wishing that some of these intricate pieces had been published in color instead of the simplistic abuse work.  But as the book is first and foremost the story of a woman’s recovery from childhood abuse, it is most essential that this group receive the color treatment as it does.

            Although Touchette is quite far to the left of the cultural divide, there is no reason that those in the middle or even on the right cannot enjoy and benefit from this book on some level.  This reviewer has some strong connections to the right, and while Touchette’s sad descriptions of her family’s destructive loyalty to the Catholic faith and her unpleasant born-again cousins made me squirm, I was never tempted to put the book down.  Touchette doesn’t rant; she simply relates the steps of her spiritual journey that led her away from the Christian faith of her childhood to the Indian rituals of her ancestors, finally adding Judaism (her husband’s religion) to her belief system.

                                                                                                A very compelling read.