Camilla Gibb has done an unusual thing. She’s published four novels: Mouthing the Words, The Petty Details of So-and-So’s Life, Sweetness in the Belly, and The Beauty of Humanity Movement. The third of these was shortlisted for the star-making Scotiabank Giller Prize and the others were either nominated for or won an assortment of municipal, provincial, and national awards. But now she’s given up fiction to write nonfiction.

The first example is This Is Happy: A Memoir, a work whose title hides a gut-wrenching tale of the most extreme forms of unhappiness. At the moment it’s probably the most widely reviewed new Canadian book and its author the most interviewed writer in the country. People are riveted by her story of unrelenting horror, fear, abandonment, mental illness—and her particularly thoughtful brand of courage. To all of which one must add the appealing incongruity of such a tale being told by a woman with so many high-status accomplishments in various fields.

Gibb, who’s 47, came to Canada from the U.K. as a young child and did her undergraduate work at the University of Toronto, where she taught after getting a PhD at Oxford. She was an anthropologist who learned Arabic and other languages, lived in Ethiopia for an extended period, and travelled much of the world—and who, having once given up her position at the U of T, has now returned there in a different post.

Put that way, it all sounds lovely. But she was the victim of a secretive, uninterested mother and a violent and disturbed father who deserted his young family, only to reappear in her life but once—in Calgary, in 2002, when he approached her at a book signing and asked for her autograph. By then, she had been wrestling for years with bipolar disorder and suicidal impulses and was exhausting various therapies and pharmaceutical remedies that were failing to keep her on track.

Gibb entered what she believed was a solid relationship with another woman, but the partner abruptly dumped her, leaving Gibb to raise a daughter. The daughter, Gibb told the Georgia Straight by telephone from Toronto, “is now in what we call SK in Ontario—senior kindergarten”. The “glow” she feels “in my daughter’s presence can help me momentarily overcome what ails me. It is a gift to be unexpectedly alerted in this way, late in life.” She is now with another mate. Her book makes liberal use of pseudonyms, but she says that “anybody who Googles can figure out who some of them represent.”

The above gives only the merest hint of her remarkable book, which is etched in short, sharp declarative sentences, a kind of prose that “I previously always put down, but that’s the way it came out in this case. I was moving towards a new clarity. I thought this style was more authentic.” She has been working with the material for a long time.

The first part of the book incorporates excerpts from various magazine pieces and essays she has written about her absent father. Other parts, although undated, draw heavily on journals she has kept intermittently—and which she alludes to teasingly in the book. But the point is that all the various constituent elements add up to something far greater than the sum of its parts. She was writing with a newborn in the room. “I had to look back at myself. I had to define the past. I had to look at the broader context and ask, ‘What inheritance do I have in the things that make up a family?’ ” This set of questions and answers is one to which large numbers of people appear to respond. “It’s as though there’s been a big backlog of people wanting to get their own stories of this kind out there. Their stories are coming back to me.”

In the book, one sometimes forms a picture of the author as an unemployed depressive, a loner by choice as well as necessity, stretching her pennies and assembling IKEA furniture with those awful little chrome wrenches. When I bring this up, she laughs reassuringly (in a way I imagine she could not have done only a few years ago). “I had a good [academic] career and a marriage to someone who had a good career.”

In addition to writing nonfiction, she now teaches a first-year seminar at Victoria College, University of Toronto, on social justice. “When I was asked to do this, I said, ‘Are you sure?’ Even though I had worked with PEN and other groups over the years. But the university was very open to my suggestions,” probably because her four novels have had human-rights issues running through them.

So all’s now well in the Gibb clan? Not exactly. Her younger brother is distressed by what he reads about his sister’s new book. “He is unhappy all over,” she says. He is a recovering and re-recovering Vancouver drug addict. In This Is Happy, his sister puts it this way: “For all its gloss and glorious scenery Vancouver is the last stop for many and not just because it doesn’t have the punishing cold of the rest of Canada. When you have drifted from place to place, you suddenly find yourself at the edge of the continent. There is nowhere left to go.”

Terminal City, indeed.

Camilla Gibb will make two appearances, on October 23 and 25, at this year’s Vancouver Writers Fest. See the Vancouver Writers Fest website for details.