Good as Gone - Dundurn

Good as Gone

My Life with Irving Layton

Published March 2015

Description

After falling in love with and marrying a man two lifetimes older than her, Irving Layton’s last wife shares the story of her life with the acclaimed poet.

While a student at Dalhousie University, Anna Pottier attended a poetry reading featuring Irving Layton. Walking out of the auditorium that night, she knew two things: she wanted more than ever to be a writer, and she wanted to be with Layton.

At the age of twenty-three she became Layton’s fifth and final wife; she was forty-eight years his junior. She shared the entirety of his world and was intimately involved in the writing and publication of such books as The Gucci Bag, Fortunate Exile, and Waiting for the Messiah. She accompanied Layton on his last major overseas reading tour, broke bread with Pierre Trudeau and Leonard Cohen, met other luminaries, and watched Layton write his very last poem.

But slowly, Layton was changing. In 1992, a doctor put names to these changes: Parkinson’s disease and early-stage Alzheimer’s. Life carried on, but once-easy things grew more difficult, and then the day came in 1995, after nearly fourteen years, when Pottier had nothing left to give.

Good as Gone is a startling, at times searing, account of one of the most unusual love stories of the twentieth century.

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Contributors

Anna Pottier

Anna Pottier is a Nova Scotian Acadian, a writer, and a painter. She attended Dalhousie University where, in 1981, she met Irving Layton, whom she married at age 23.

Book Details

ePub
March 2015
-
336 pp
9781459728547
PDF
March 2015
-
336 pp
9781459728554
Paperback
March 2015
6x9 in
336 pp
9781459728561