Not Guilty!

(by LeeAnne)

Women spend so much of their lives feeling guilty.

Guilty about working outside the house, guilty about not working outside the house. Over scheduling, under scheduling. It just doesn’t matter: we feel guilty.

But Debbie Travis, star and creator of The Painted House, a 14-season, 200- episode, world-wide phenomenon has a new book that advises women to cut out the guilt.

Not Guilty - My Guide to Working Hard, Raising Kids and Laughing Through the Chaos is part memoir and part how to succeed in business, but mostly just Travis relaying how she made it through with lots of chutzpah, tantrums (hers) and laughter.

Travis tells how, as a bored young mother, she started decorative painting, a trend that was popular in the UK but hadn’t yet hit North American soil. Her home became her canvas and clients start to ask for her services. Travis loved it but her husband wasn’t so sure. “Can’t you just buy wall paper like some normal person?” he pleads in frustration.

But continue she did. Painting led to workshops, then to video and, her biggest leap, to television. Working with her husband she created The Painted House and spun off books, newspaper columns and eventually, a product line.

Not Guilty is full of self-depreciating stories about Travis, her husband and two boys. Full of sage advice and always told for maximum humour, Travis is like your hilarious best friend regaling you with stories, such as the time she came home from work and found her boys sending their two miniature rabbits down the stairs in frying pans as if they were going down a toboggan run.

Never one to mince words, even with her kids, she screams, “What the hell are you doing!?”

“Mom, they’re happy, look at their little mouths,” they replied.

“That’s not a smile, that’s gravity!”

After declaring her sons will never, ever have another pet, Travis puts the miniature rabbits on the deck in a laundry basket.

Within five minutes, raccoons had eaten them.

Stories about her kids and her business ventures are woven together throughout the book. One of my favourites involves her sitting on the edge of a boardroom table with her team discussing a successful design event the previous night, only to look down and see a bulge in her right pant leg.

As she talks, she reaches down and pulls out the offending lump, which turns out to be her “knickers” from the last time she wore the pants. She laughs, but recalls her style interns could barely contain their absolute horror.

Unfortunately I can relate!

I was heading into a fancy restaurant to meet a client once when a sock somehow worked its way out of my pant leg. Just as I approached the table to shake hands with my client, the host came running up to me and handed me the dirty sock.

Great! I laughed (sort of) and tucked the offender in my purse as the client eyed me with suspicion and chose to wave hello instead of shake my hand. Opps. Guilty. Again.

I also enjoyed reading about the time Travis finds out her son has paid someone in his class to do his homework. When busted, her son declares, “But you said, “Hire the best.” So I hired Charles Wong, He’s the best. He even goes to school on weekends.”

Although she gave her son a stern glare Travis reveals that she and her husband privately laughed their heads off later that night.

If you have kids and are trying desperately to achieve that elusive life/work balance, thumbing through Not Guilty is a welcome respite. Travis ends the book with a top ten list for avoiding guilt. Number one is to treat you kids like a paint job. It’s all in the preparation. Take the time to sand and prime well and results will be as good as perfect. Don’t worry about the cracks or blotches-they will just add character.

These days the only thing that Travis feels guilty about is the amount of energy she spent feeling free-floating maternal guilt.

And I couldn’t agree more: what a waste of time.

Don Mills Diva is giving away a copy of Debbie Travis’s Not Guilty-My Guide to Working Hard, Raising Kids and Laughing Through the Chaos to three lucky Canadian (only, sorry!) readers. Leave a comment below to win. Comments will be closed Friday January 23rd at midnight and the winners announced shortly thereafter.

Believing in the extraordinary

A truly extraordinary book makes you believe things your logical mind knows are impossible.

A truly extraordinary book is a rare find. I used plow my way through dozens and dozens of books in search of one so magical that I would happily spend days lost in its thrall. But since Graham's birth and the resultant time crunch, I have discovered few.

And I have missed it.

I have missed the way in which an extraordinary book makes the world seem more exotic and full of possibility. I have missed being awestruck by the evocative power of a masterful wordsmith and the unfettered imagination of a gifted storyteller.

I have missed books like The Gargoyle.



The Gargoyle starts when the caustic protagonist, a morally bankrupt porn star, swerves to avoid a vision of fiery arrows and plunges his car into a ravine where it is consumed in flames. After awakening in a hospital abandoned by friends, financially bankrupt and essentially transformed into a human gargoyle by virtue of extensive and excruciating burns, he bides time and plots his suicide.

Until something extraordinary happens.

A beautiful, heavily-tattooed psychiatric patient and sculptress (of gargoyles, no less!) visits his bedside and claims to have been his lover some 700 years ago. Is she mad? At first the unnamed narrator thinks so . But eventually she draws him into her world and out of his despair with uncanny, historically- accurate accounts of their life together and mesmerizing tales of undying love from around the world and throughout the ages.

The Gargoyle is the debut novel by Andrew Davidson, a previously unknown Canadian who spent seven years crafting it full of illusions to myths and fables and great literature from the Bible to Dante's Inferno. It was the subject of a heavily-publicized bidding war for publishing rights and has received massive amounts of press since its release this past summer.

And for good reason.

It is impossible to characterize The Gargoyle. It could accurately be described as a mystery, a horror, a medical primer, a historical tome and a Gothic love story. Though at times overwrought, it is nonetheless one of the richest and most satisfying books I have ever discovered: truly extraordinary.

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The Gargoyle is published by Random House Canada and would make a treasured Christmas gift for any book-lovers on your list. I also have three free copies to give away to Canadian readers only (sorry to my American friends). Leave a comment below to win. I'll close comments next Wednesday and publish the winners' names shortly after.

Where humanity and hubris intersect

I have always been intrigued by Nepal and specifically by Mount Everest.

In June of 2001 Rob and I were on our way to a travel agency to discuss a flight to Kathmandu and a trek to Everest base camp when we heard over the car radio that Nepal's Crown Prince Diprendra had shot and killed his parents and seven other members of royal family before committing suicide during a dinner party.

Plan B was formulated on our (correct) assumption that the murders would throw the country into political turmoil and instead in October 2001 we trekked in the Andes Mountains in Peru where we hiked a 4,200 metre peak (13, 780 ft) and, incidentally, got engaged.

A trip to Everest remains a distant dream for both of us and when I say Everest, I mean Everest base camp, which at 5,208 metres (17, 090 ft) is the highest I would ever attempt to climb, remembering as I do the nausea, headaches and fatigue we experienced as a result of oxygen deprivation in Peru.

Everest stands 8,848 metres (29, 029 feet). Anything above 8,000 metres is considered the death zone: a place where the brain swells, blood vessels leak and fluid accumulates in the lungs. I am both fascinated and horrified by human compulsion to summit Everest and so when Random House offered me a review copy of Nick Heil's Dark Summit, The True Story of Everest's Most Controversial Climbing Season, I jumped at it.

Dark Summit is a detailed account of the 2006 season during which 10 climbers lost their lives attempting to conquer Everest. One of them, an Englishman named David Sharp, lay dying near the top while 40 other climbers walked past him on the way to the summit.

Nick Heil is a measured and restrained storyteller but he nonetheless manages to clearly show how the commercialism at the roof of the world encourages naked ambition over compassionate humanity.

He writes of the aftermath of that deadly season:

"Beyond the lurid spectacle of men and women suffering slow deaths at high altitude was the suggestion that the modern circus on Everest had exposed something essential about who we are as human beings...because Everest was such a grand stage, one on which players performed so close to the limits of self-preservation, it had the unique ability to magnify...basic drives and behaviours."

Heil, a former senior editor at Outside magazine, is guilty of being almost too detailed as he moves the reader through the cast of characters, from various teams and expeditions, who assembled at Everest base camp that spring. The writing is sharp and crisp, but it is still difficult to keep everyone straight: it is clear Heil has taken pains to be exhaustive lest Dark Summit be seen as just another one of the shrill and judgemental voices that flooded the media once the 2006 death toll became apparent.

Dark Summit really shines in the last few chapters when he uses his considerable gift for writing to best effect by indulging his inner philosopher. He asks, but refuses to answer, difficult questions of many people - the mostly affluent climbers, the commercial operators on the mountain, the people and governments of China and Nepal and even people like me who romanticize the achievements of early mountaineers like George Mallory and Andrew Irvine and, of course, Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay.

Fans of Into Thin Air, Jon Krakauer's book about the deadly 1996 season on Everest, will be similarly enthralled by Dark Summit. Long after the final page has been read climbers and non-climbers alike are likely to find themselves pondering, as I did, the mystique of a mountain where human achievement and hubris intersect with deadly results on such a regular basis.

Leave a comment to win your very own copy of Dark Summit. I'll close comments Thursday, August 14th at 6 p.m. and announce the winner on Friday the 15th.