New Books In Biography

A Necessary Distance: Confessions of a Screenwriter’s Daughter (Wolsak & Wynn, 2024) by critically acclaimed author Julie Salverson braids together personal memoir, Canadian cultural history, international political history, to form an inter-generational story that is both personal and public. A Necessary Distance is a detective story, an excavation of clues and traces, an inter-generational encounter. Starting with her father’s notebooks of an epic around-the world journey, Salverson also uncovers other information that hints at the personal, cultural and social forces that shaped her father’s journey—his childhood among poor Icelandic immigrants and the force that was his Governor General's Award-winning mother, the reality of making a living in early Canadian radio and television. As Salverson writes: “The notebooks are on delicate paper. The daughter deciphers the scratches of pencil marks. Already they tell her this is not the man she thought she knew. She hopes they will lead her to her father.” Thought