Coastal Lives: A Memoir

This is an unabashed love story - a tale of two coasts, east and west, two writers, Marjorie Simmins and Silver Donald Cameron, and many definitions of home, evolving and complex. Among these, dogs and horses abound. You'll probably cry and you'll certainly laugh. Perhaps most of all, you'll cheer them on. She was a single and sad freelance fisheries reporter and writer living in Vancouver, on the West Coast of Canada. He was a widowed and heartbroken journalist and author, living in a small village on Isle Madame, Cape Breton. They met in Vancouver on a brilliant spring morning at a coffee shop. He was on a book tour and she was the reporter sent to interview him. "Hi, I'm Don," he said; "Hi, I'm Marjorie," she replied - and their lives changed forever. It took 800 e-mails, countless phone calls and three PFO letters, but in the end, she, age 37, agreed to start seeing him, age 59. But there was no way she was going to leave her beloved West Coast, and her family, friends, horses and dogs. That just wasn't going to happen. Or was it? Silver Donald Cameron was one "cussedly stubborn man," as she once called him. This is a tale of love and resistance written with humour and candour. There are times of overwhelming happiness and flattening grief. Simmins writes of these times and the gentler ones as well, all against the backdrop of an East Coast Canadian world so new to her, she said she'd found a trip to Turkey less foreign. After all, she had thought the two coastal worlds would be similar. To her surprise, the two coasts had little in common. Food, fish, music, language, history and cultures were all different. Even the ocean smelled different, the saltier Atlantic so much more pungent. To her greater surprise, she came to fiercely love those differences, in ways both expected and surprising. She also fiercely loves the man who told her she was brave enough to "jump off a cliff - and tell a damn fine story at the other end."