Toronto Book Awards 2002 short list:
Run Over: A Boy, His Mother and An Accident
by Douglas Bell
Published by Random House Canada
This biographical information and excerpt is posted courtesy of Random House Canada.
Run Over: A Boy, His Mother and An Accident
At fourteen, Douglas Bell was crushed under the wheels of a truck. Instead of spending his adolescence growing up, he spent it recovering, in and out of the Hospital for Sick Children and under his mother's anxious gaze. From his foot-thick medical record, from interviews with his many doctors, and from conversations with his parents and friends, Bell has reconstructed the boy who was run over, the scarred survivor driven by panic and masked by wit. This book is also a son's present to his mother, who protected him ferociously long past the point at which a mother normally should. As soon as he was able, he ran from her, and continued until his thirties, when she developed breast cancer. At that point he stopped, and began to work his way back.
Douglas Bell
Douglas Bell is a Toronto-born journalist, movie critic, book reviewer and broadcaster. While he's won National Magazine Awards for humour, he's also tackled difficult and mind-boggling subjects with flare and substance, producing a definitive piece on hospital restructuring for Toronto Life and a wild and colourful ride through the imposition of a capitalist free-market economy in Poland for Saturday Night, among others. He has also worked for The Globe and Mail, Shift, En Route and Canadian Business, CBC radio and television. Bell was run over by a truck on June 10, 1974. Run Over is his first book.
Run Over: A Boy, His Mother and An Accident - excerpt
"When I think of it now, I think of my mother receiving the news from a uniformed cop standing at the front door of our house describing how her only child has just been crushed under the wheels of a truck. At first she's looking at the cop thinking, "Oh, crikey, he's rawther a large creature." And then she realizes the severity of the situation and hurries away from the door back into the house to call my father. As she goes, she's probably biting down hard on her lower lip because that's what she always does when she's angry or nervous or both.
And I remember, many years later, as she lay dying of cancer, asking her if she could recall that exact moment, and she looked at me squarely, her prominent jaw set, and said, "Oh God, Douglas, I don't know, I'd rather not remember it at all. I'd just as soon not." And I thought I might prod her a bit in the fashion of my trade, but there was something in her eyes that stopped me, a glimmer of exhaustion.
And I could see that she really didn't want to remember her only son that way, now, at the other end of her life, she would really rather not. And that it fell to me to make sense of things, my accident, her death and dying, to stand up and be a writer, because in the end I will be judged and not her. So that's what I'm doing. That's my statement of purpose."
