Sarah Polley Is OK With Oversharing

It’s been more than six years since Sarah Polley was struck on the head by a fire extinguisher, one that was unwisely hung over a lost-and-found box at her local community center, leaving her with a debilitating concussion.

When its symptoms were at their worst, Polley, the preternaturally poised actor (“The Sweet Hereafter”) and filmmaker of probing dramas (“Away From Her,” “Take This Waltz”) could not concentrate on her family or her screenwriting. She suffered headaches and nausea, brought on by everyday levels of light and sound.

But over a period of nearly four years, she recuperated, emerging with restored focus — and with an upgraded philosophical outlook that has infused nearly every aspect of her life.

“When people say, ‘Are you better?,’ I’m like, I’m better than I was before the concussion,” she said last month, almost in disbelief at her own words.

Her newfound perspective arises from her work with a doctor who instructed her not to retreat from the activities that triggered her symptoms but to seek them out and embrace the discomfort they caused.

That guidance provides the title for Polley’s first book, “Run Towards the Danger,” a collection of autobiographical essays that Penguin Press will release on March 1.

The essays often link moments from her childhood, adolescence and adulthood, spanning her experiences as an artist and entertainer, a mother, a daughter and a woman. What they have in common, she said, is that they chronicle events “from the past that have been fundamentally changed by my relationship to them in the present.”

“They were things I didn’t talk about, because I didn’t know what the stories even were,” Polley, 43, added. “Part of this is figuring out, what the hell happened?”

That includes her account of the concussion and her recovery, and while that accident was not her inspiration for writing “Run Towards the Danger” — “It’s a bit messier and more complex than that” — Polley said the book’s contents were informed by the paradigm-shifting worldview her treatment yielded and its exhortation to confront sources of pain.

“The thing that will get you better is moving towards the things you’re avoiding,” she said. “But it’s kind of exhilarating, realizing that whatever story you’ve been telling about yourself — and everyone tells those stories — isn’t you. That got exploded for me as this prison I was living in.”

On a Saturday morning this past January, Polley was speaking in a video interview from her home in Toronto. She sat in a brightly lit room, undaunted by the prospect of staring into a computer monitor for an hour or so and putting herself under a microscope.

“I thrive on too-intimate conversations with people,” she said. “I don’t have this need for secrecy around almost every part of my life.”

In its first chapter, “Run Towards the Danger” offers a melancholy reflection on Polley’s teenage struggles with scoliosis, her body horror juxtaposed with several anxious, frustrating months spent playing the lead in a Stratford Festival production of “Alice Through the Looking Glass.” Her mother died of cancer when Polley was 11; her father sank into a depression and by age 14 the author had left home to move in with an older brother’s ex-girlfriend and largely figure out the world for herself.

This entry, titled “Alice, Collapsing,” is one that Polley said she’d made multiple attempts at completing since she was 19. “That essay’s written by four different people,” she said.

Polley also revisits her work as a child actor in an essay called “Mad Genius,” about the making of Terry Gilliam’s 1988 fantasy “The Adventures of Baron Munchausen.” That film, for which she was cast at the age of 8 to play the Baron’s young companion, Sally Salt, left her deeply traumatized.

For one battle scene, she was repeatedly made to run a terrifying gauntlet of explosives and debris. She jammed cotton balls into her ears to drown out the noise. Another action sequence sent her to the hospital when a detonation startled a horse, causing it to thrust an explosive device in Polley’s direction.

In the essay, Polley reproduces an email exchange she had with Gilliam several years later, writing to him that “i was pretty furious at you for a lot of years,” though she says “the adults who should have been there to protect me were my parents, not you.” (Gilliam replies with an apology for the chaotic film shoot, writing, “Although things might have seemed to be dangerous, they weren’t.”)

Yet a few pages later, Polley finds herself regretting that she absolved Gilliam too easily, having bought into the archetype of “the out-of-control white male genius”: “It’s so pervasive, this idea that genius can’t come without trouble, that it has paved the way for countless abuses,” she writes.

To this day, Polley told me her emotions surrounding “Baron Munchausen” are not easily categorized.

“Was it worth my feeling like my life was at risk and people didn’t care enough about it?” she said. “Probably not.” But when she contemplates Gilliam, “it doesn’t help me particularly to think of him as a villain.” (A press representative for Gilliam said he was unavailable for comment.)

In another chapter, “The Woman Who Stayed Silent,” Polley revisits what she used to call “a funny party story about my worst date ever” with Jian Ghomeshi, the musician and former CBC radio host who in 2016 was acquitted of five charges related to sexual assault.

Describing the episode now without euphemism, Polley says that when she was 16 and Ghomeshi was 28, she left his apartment after he became violent during a sexual encounter in which he ignored her pleas to stop hurting her.

Polley writes that, as other charges mounted against Ghomeshi in this era before the #MeToo movement, she was dissuaded from coming forward by friends, lawyers and other experts who warned that her memory and sexual history would be subjected to merciless cross-examination. Her subsequent interactions with Ghomeshi — friendly radio interviews and playful emails in the years that followed — could be used to undermine her credibility and attack her character.

But after years of reconsideration, Polley said during our interview, “I felt a deep, ethical obligation, especially to the women who came forward in that case, to tell that story, and a deep haunting that I wasn’t able to tell it sooner.” (Ghomeshi didn’t respond to requests for comment sent to Roqe Media, where he hosts a podcast and serves as chief executive.)

“I feel a relief in finally just standing up,” she said. “But I’ll always wonder if it’s just too little too late. That’s always going to be with me.”

Polley is hardly a novice when it comes to untangling knotty personal narratives in front of an audience. She previously directed the 2012 documentary “Stories We Tell,” which used interviews with her family members and re-enactments to reveal that her own birth had been the result of her mother’s affair with a man who was not the father who raised her.

John Buchan, Polley’s brother and an on-camera subject in “Stories We Tell,” said in an interview that he had some hesitation about entrusting so much family history to her for that film.

“I’m very open and I don’t have a lot of secrets, but who doesn’t have some?” Buchan said. “I’m indiscreet about myself sometimes. It’s different if somebody else is indiscreet about you.”

But Polley’s choice to share herself in “Run Towards the Danger” did not make him anxious in the same way, and he praised her for taking the risk and acknowledging her own vulnerability.

“She’s an artist,” he said. “You can’t be an artist unless you put yourself into it. You’re not just borrowing from yourself — you’re putting yourself on the line.”

The filmmaker Atom Egoyan, who directed Polley in his movies “Exotica” and “The Sweet Hereafter,” said that not even his long friendship and past collaborations with her had fully prepared him for what he read in early drafts of her book.

“As a director, you have conversations with your actors and you get to know things about their lives,” Egoyan said. “To be reintroduced to her world with such detail and such a brilliant sense of self-observation, so many years later, was really shocking.”

Though Polley did not express misgivings about the films she made with him, Egoyan said he still felt guilty for her tenuous relationship to her past acting work.

“In a strange way, I contributed to that,” he said. “I was hiring her as an actress. As generous as she’s been, I’m also part of that weird conspiracy against her ability to grow up normally.”

(Polley responded in an email, “I had transformative, beautiful experiences working on Atom’s films. And I think the ship bearing my chance at a normal childhood/transition to adulthood had sailed long before I met Atom.”)

The author Margaret Atwood, a longtime friend who also read drafts of “Run Towards the Danger,” said that she has seen Polley strive for greater honesty in her work and in her life.

“I think actors are trained to go to the emotion in them that is most suitable for their character at that moment,” Atwood said. “But being candid doesn’t mean that you always know what the truth is. Being candid can also mean, I’ve got no idea. Did I really feel that? What was really going on?”

While Polley was recuperating from her concussion, Atwood said she held the rights to her novel “Alias Grace” — a book that Polley first asked her if she could adapt when she was 17 — so that she could complete a TV mini-series based on it.

During her recovery, Polley gave up her screenwriting duties on a film version of Louisa May Alcott’s “Little Women,” which instead was written and directed by Greta Gerwig. (Polley writes in the book that she saw Gerwig’s film, calling it “beautifully realized.”)

Polley was in the midst of another film project, an adaptation of Miriam Toews’s novel “Women Talking” that she wrote and directed, when the pandemic forced its temporary suspension. This at least afforded her the time to finish the essays in “Run Towards the Danger” while her three children slept or her husband looked after them.

(Polley said that she is still editing “Women Talking” and that she completed its production last summer without a single headache: “If I could get through that with three small children, I think it’s a pretty hopeful prognosis.”)

Now, as she waits for a wider world to discover the sides of herself she reveals in “Run Towards the Danger,” Polley said that her sharing these stories doesn’t necessarily mean she is done with them — or that they are done with her, either.

“There is just this messiness to the human experience that’s extraordinarily inconvenient if you’re trying to tell one story about it,” she said. “As I get older, I’m realizing it’s OK for stories to be messy or go down circuitous paths that don’t lead anywhere.”

She added, “We create these clean narratives to make sense of our basically bewildering lives. Hopefully, over time, we can loosen our iron grip and let other complexities in.”