Growing Pains

Emily Carr is one of Canada’s most distinctive painters, known for her work depicting the totem poles and rainforests of British Columbia’s coast. Growing Pains is her autobiography, written late in her life, and it covers her early years in Victoria, her studies in San Francisco, London, and Paris, and the long stretch when nobody wanted what she was painting.

Carr writes the way she paints. Direct, specific, attentive to ordinary detail. She isn’t a self-promoter. The book mostly focuses on what she was learning at any given stage rather than on her eventual reputation.

The sections about her time among the Indigenous communities of the West Coast are written with respect that was rare among non-Native artists of her time. There are also the inevitable limits of her own period that modern readers will notice.

For readers who care about Canadian art, women’s autobiography, or simply want a clear-eyed memoir from a working painter, this is essential.