At the End of the Day

At the End of the Day
A Memoir

Carolyn Smart

6 X 9 inches, 182 pages

ANGUS SMART WAS BEST KNOWN as a chief economist for a Canadian merchant bank, but he wore many masks during a dramatic life set in Merseyside, London, Washington, Saskatoon, Toronto and Ottawa. Paradoxically, he ended his life on Thanksgiving weekend in 1983.

Carolyn Smart's first sketch of her father, entitled "A Careful Man," won the CBC Radio Literary Competition in 1994. In this long anticipated memoir, she traverses the minefield of an intense and difficult relationship. Written as a testament, as a direct approach to the mysterious, as an attempt to come to terms with the legacies of childhood and find the truth within an enigmatic and often deceptive personal history, At the End of the Day takes significant emotional risks. Yet Carolyn's art, honesty, and staying power carry you with her to reach a shore of solace.

"As Smart unravels her father's various disguises, she draws an unflinching picture of the mystery that is at the heart of any relationship. We are, she demonstrates, unknowable to each other until we can trust ourselves to another person. Her father could not do this. She has learned to, and the book is a celebration of that."
— Pic Press

Carolyn Smart

Author

Born in England in 1952, her family moved to Canada when she was a child. Carolyn Smart has since lived in Ottawa, Winnipeg, Toronto, and for the last 20 years in the country north of Kingston. She is the author of four collections of poetry — The Way to Come Home (Brick 1993), Stoning the Moon (Oberon 1987), Power Sources (Fiddlehead 1983) and Swimmers In Oblivion (York Publishing 1982). She teaches creative writing on-line for Writers In Electronic Residence, and since 1989 has been Director of Creative Writing at Queen's University.

U of T: Canadian Poetry