Preview
  • Run Towards the Danger

  • Confrontations with a Body of Memory
  • By: Sarah Polley
  • Narrated by: Sarah Polley
  • Length: 7 hrs and 56 mins
  • 4.7 out of 5 stars (17 ratings)

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Run Towards the Danger

By: Sarah Polley
Narrated by: Sarah Polley
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Publisher's summary

#1 NATIONAL BESTSELLER * WINNER OF THE 2022 TORONTO BOOK AWARDS * SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2023 KOBO EMERGING WRITER PRIZE * NOMINATED FOR THE 2023 HERITAGE TORONTO AWARDS * A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice * Named a Most-Anticipated Book of 2022 by Entertainment Weekly, Lit Hub, and AV Club

“A visceral and incisive collection of six propulsive personal essays.” —
Vanity Fair

“[A] roving, psychologically probing memoir in essays . . . On the page, Polley turns out to be as brave, funny, and unself-serious as she is on the screen.” —
The New Yorker

From the Academy Award-nominated director of
Women Talking, Run Towards the Danger explores memory and the dialogue between her past and her present.

These are the most dangerous stories of my life. The ones I have avoided, the ones I haven’t told, the ones that have kept me awake on countless nights. As these stories found echoes in my adult life, and then went another, better way than they did in childhood, they became lighter and easier to carry.

Sarah Polley’s work as an actor, screenwriter, and director is celebrated for its honesty, complexity, and deep humanity. She brings all of those qualities along with her exquisite storytelling chops to these six essays. Each one captures a piece of Polley’s life as she remembers it, while at the same time examining the fallibility of memory, the mutability of reality in the mind, and the possibility of experiencing the past anew, as the person you are now but were not then. As Polley writes, the past and present are in a “reciprocal pressure dance.”

Polley contemplates stories from her own life ranging from stage fright to high risk childbirth to endangerment and more. After struggling with the aftermath of a concussion, Polley met a specialist who gave her wholly new advice: to recover from a traumatic injury, she had to retrain her mind to strength by charging towards the very activities that triggered her symptoms. With riveting clarity, she shows the power of applying that same advice to other areas of her life in order to find a path forward, a way through. Rather than live in a protective crouch, she had to run towards the danger.

In this extraordinary book, Sarah Polley explores what it is to live in one’s body, in a constant state of becoming, learning, and changing.

©2022 Sarah Polley (P)2022 Hamish Hamilton
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Critic reviews

2023, Heritage Toronto Award: Nominated

2023, Kobo Emerging Writer Prize: Short-listed

2022, PrizeName: Toronto Book Awar: Winner

“Sarah Polley understands that questions of conscience are inseparable from the terrors and tenderness of the body, and that courage - moral or physical - is not fearlessness but our relationship to fear. How we confront pain, how we determine what is safe, how we comprehend the depth and limits of our responsibility to others and to ourselves - these are exacting, keening questions. This is a powerful and moving book, both in its seeking and its wisdom.” (Anne Michaels, Giller-shortlisted author of Fugitive Pieces and All We Saw)

“In Run Towards the Danger, Sarah Polley does just that. She tells us the truth, even when it feels razor sharp - even when it feels dangerous. She rips away at painful past experiences that she’s never shared before, and in this way emboldens us to sharpen our gaze on the shadowed moments in our own past, to understand their provenance and to bring meaning to them. She shows us how, by doing this, we can begin to move towards that specific peace of mind - you might even call it joy - that comes with confronting our demons and knowing ourselves. These brilliant essays (and Sarah Polley, with her melioristic heart and empathic eye) urge us, by example, towards the examined life, the life worth living, and give us a jolt of energy to muster the courage and compassion needed to live it.” (Miriam Toews, best-selling author of Women Talking and All My Puny Sorrows)

What listeners say about Run Towards the Danger

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  • Overall
    4 out of 5 stars
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    5 out of 5 stars
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    4 out of 5 stars

Admirable

Excellent in so many ways
Admirable
Handled tough material with balance
Sometimes spent a little too long setting up her challenges, so it drifted a bit into wining.

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Great voice acting!

It’s rare that the story is good and the voice acting is good. I assume because Sarah Polley was an actress, her voice work was on point!
Great essays but I wish it were a bit longer!

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