PARTING SHOT
WILL POWER: The Most Baffling Bequests, Ludicrous Last Wishes, and Daft Declarations in Final Testaments
By Susan Goldenberg
“WILL POWER” is my eleventh published book.
“Will Power” – two words because my book is about the power of wills. I wrote it to inform, entertain, amuse, and sometimes shock and horrify. Will Power is a collection of recent and past unique world firsts, funny, eccentric, vindictive, family dividing, precedent- setting, dead hand–controlling, and provocative instances of wills that were unknown of before, except for brief mentions of a couple. To the best of my knowledge, Will Power is the first book of its kind in Canada.
As I say in it: Wills don’t have to be a morbid topic.
I found that Canadians write distinctive wills and that they provide a unique look at Canada’s history and changing customs, attitudes, and values over the years. There are wills of well-known figures and “ordinary” people. I made a point of including examples from all the provinces and territories. I included some wills from other countries for comparison.
I’m pretty sure that the origin of my book Will Power is unique because the inspiration came from a parrot. I had read a nineteenth-century book by an English author on British eccentrics and wondered if there were Canadian versions. I found that a rich Victoria, British Columbia recluse had willed her yellow and blue macaw parrot, the love of her life since she was a child, her mansion and its grounds, which greatly upset developers who had wanted to get their hands on them after her demise. I wrote about this unusual will for Canada’s History Magazine and subsequently explored if there were additional unique instances that I could write about in a book. It took considerable time and extensive research into primary and secondary material including locating and reading wills and going through court cases as well as archival records and putting the wills into the context of their time. I love researching and finding strange twists and turns as I did with this book. The wills show the good and the awful of human psychology.
Some stories arose from my wondering about a well-known place or person. That led to my writing about the odd bequests that founded McGill University in Montreal, and the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto. In Will Power I delve into the many peculiar ramifications of Toronto-born legendary silent screen superstar Mary Pickford’s will. I provide examples of race, gender, and religious discrimination wills and the resulting court cases.
I explain the legal principles regarding wills and the difference between formal and holographic wills in easy-to-understand language.