[ARETE] Felicien, My Mother's Daughter

[Duncan Jamieson]

All,
Please find attached and below Ceala Fenton's review of Perdita Felicien's
sport biography *My Mother's Daughter: A Memoir of Struggle and Triumph.*
Thanks
Duncan

*Felicien, Perdita. My Mother’s Daughter: A Memoir of Struggle and Triumph.
Doubleday Canada, 2021.*

*Reviewed by Caela Fenton, University of Oregon*



“Sport mimics everyday life. It can be rewarding, and it can be entirely
unfair. What we believe we deserve, what we have worked hard to attain,
isn’t always what we get.”



With these words, ten-time Canadian national champion, four-time world
championship medallist and Olympic hurdler Perdita Felicien rebuffs the
pervasive cultural narrative of sport—a powerful act by a notable athlete.



Oprah Winfrey has a popular quote along the lines of: “Running is the
greatest metaphor for life, because you get out of it what you put into
it.” And this quote represents the pervasive cultural narrative of sport,
which sport psychologists refer to as the “performance narrative,” the
stories we see about going all in, hard work being unstoppable, and the
requirement for athletes to exclude or regulate all other areas of their
life to focus on sport. The performance narrative tells us that when we
dedicate ourselves entirely, we’ll win, top the podium, break the
record—and that those things are what make us important.



Perdita Felicien is an athlete that has, in many respects, been publicly
defined by a failure. So how does she personally define herself in her
memoir? Well, it means throwing out what we expect of a “sports story” and
demands that we look for meaning beyond winning and identity beyond the
singular figure of “the athlete.”



Felicien began writing what would become *My Mother’s Daughter* (Doubleday
Canada) after retiring from professional sport in 2013. Determined not to
work with a ghost writer, as many athletes do, Felicien worked through a
creative writing certificate at the University of Chicago to hone her
style. It was there that she decided to, in her words, “break the rules” of
self-life-writing by starting the story before she was born. *My Mother’s
Daughter* begins with her mother Catherine’s childhood selling seashell
necklaces to tourists on the beaches of St. Lucia.



Felicien frames this decision by stating, “I could have just told you my
sports story...but I could never just write a sports story...the foundation
of my life is my mother’s story. How could I tell the sports story if you
don’t know how I got here?” As such, *My Mother’s Daughter* is a sports
story in a refreshing light, one that communicates how sport does not exist
in a vacuum, no athlete is just “an athlete,” that sports stories are also
intergenerational stories and immigration stories, and that they can
contain domestic abuse, racism and financial instability.



For those expecting details of a collegiate and professional training
program, workout descriptions, or advice about how to improve their
hurdling, this is not your book. Felicien doesn’t even get to her first
experience with track and field until about halfway through the memoir. But
what comes before that experience is foundational to understanding her as a
person and as an athlete—charting her mother’s struggles as an underpaid
domestic labourer and Felicien’s complex relationship with her father and
his treatment of her mother. The women’s shelter, The Denise House, that
Felicien and her family stayed in for a period of time in 1987, is
receiving a portion of all proceeds from *My Mother’s Daughter*.



The performance narrative is almost universally identifiable in mainstream
athletic memoirs. Media columnist Bryan Curtis pithily describes the
formula for the “jockography” as 1) beginning with the athlete’s most
memorable performance; 2) charting how sport got them through their unhappy
childhood and; 3) follows their trajectory to stardom. This formula is
uncannily similar to the “athlete hero narrative” that literary scholars
have identified, in which the underdog experiences some success, faces a
series of difficult setbacks, goes all-in, rallies, overcomes, and then he
(as Angie Abdou and Jamie Dopp note in their anthology of Canadian sport
literature “yes, it is almost always a he”) wins. (*Once a Runner*,
anyone?).



Felicien, conversely, does not just chart her rise to success (in fact, she
seems to frame her incredible athletic talent as the least interesting
thing about her), but also intimately details the heartbreaking experience
of falling in the 2004 Olympic Finals when she was the gold medal
favourite. In the book, she gives herself some of the space to grieve that
loss, which is not something athletes are encouraged to do, in part because
of the enculturation of the performance narrative, which means experiences
of failure have to be immediately framed as reasons to “stage a comeback”
or “overcome.” Felicien writes: “Looking back, what I needed wasn’t someone
to help me get back on the horse—at least not initially. What I needed was
someone removed from the pursuit of sporting excellence, who was simply
there to help me deal with my broken heart.”



And then, during training for the 2008 Olympics, or “the comeback,” a
terrible accident occurs during training. During a practice, Felicien and a
training partner’s hurdles were placed on the wrong marks, a small mistake
with the major consequence of Felicien fracturing her foot. It is pretty
hard to frame an experience like that as: “you get out of it what you put
into it.” Felicien ultimately ends up attending the 2008 Olympics, not as
an athlete, but as part of the broadcasting team.



*My Mother’s Daughter* is not a story of overcoming the origins of one’s
birth, or overcoming injury, but rather one that affirms that you do not
have to stand on the top of the podium to be worthy of love, respect and
safety. Running, and the broader sport community, could use more of such
narratives, those that provide counterstories to a singularity in focus on
performance, and place athletes not as icons of rugged individualism, but
within their relational networks of kinship.



The ultimate message of the book is delivered by Felicien’s mother to her
in the aftermath of her 2004 fall: “*You* are the gold, my darling.”


Remember to smell the roses as you recumber past

Duncan R. Jamieson, Ph. D.
Professor of History
Book Review Editor
*AETHLON: The Journal of Sport Literature*
Ashland University
Ashland, OH  44805
USA
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