Twenty-five years ago I was new to Canada, a divorced, self-employed mother with ludicrous debt, no reliable childcare, family the other side of the Atlantic, a house I couldn’t afford, and twins — one of whom had a mysterious neurological disease that would devour her soul, her mind and her sanity, and take me to the brink of bankruptcy.
None of my previous lives in England — keener schoolgirl, research scientist, zoo PR officer, or freelance journalist — had prepared me for any of it.
This is the story of how we battled through to our version of triumph via a love-affair for the ages, a house off Bourbon Street, a second-floor brothel, a man who offered me a formal contract as his mistress, piloting a plane over Bill Gates’ house, a Chinatown foxtrot, eight property renovations, a guide dog who ate two couches, a 90-minute meeting in Paris, a cabin in the woods, a Pacific Ocean crossing on a freighter, and millions of science words written by clever humans before A.I. was a thing.
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