Her Name Was Margaret - Denise Davy

 

Title: Her Name Was Margaret: Life and Death on the Streets

Author: Denise Davy

Publisher: James Street North Books (Wolsak & Wynn), 2021 (Paperback)

Length: 295 pages

Genre: Adult; Nonfiction

Started: November 30, 2021

Finished: December 4, 2021

Summary:

From the publisher's website:

Margaret Jacobson was a sweet-natured young girl who played the accordion and had dreams of being a teacher until she had a psychotic break in her teens, which sent her down a much darker path. Her Name Was Margaret traces Margaret's life from her childhood to her death as a homeless woman on the streets of Hamilton, Ontario. With meticulous research and deep compassion author Denise Davy analyzed over eight hundred pages of medical records and conducted interviews with Margaret's friends and family, as well as those who worked in psychiatric care, to create this compelling portrait of a woman abandoned by society. 

Through a revolving door of psychiatric admissions to discharges to rundown boarding homes, Davy shows us the grim impact of deinstitutionalization: patients spiralled inexorably towards homelessness and death as psychiatric beds were closed and patients were left to fend for themselves on the streets of cities across North America. Today there are more than 235,000 people in Canada who are counted among the homeless annually and 35,000 who are homeless on any given night. Most of them are struggling with mental health issues. Margaret's story is a heartbreaking illustration of what happens in our society to to our most vulnerable and should serve as a wake-up call to politicians and leaders in cities across Canada. 

Review:

I came across this book through helping to organize a local charity event (Purses for Margaret) through work. We were lucky to get the author, who also founded the charity, to come to speak at the event. A few people attending had already read her book and I couldn't say no after hearing such glowing recommendations, especially since I don't often get to read books about issues happening in my own city. After reading, I can add my own glowing recommendation for this book. It is so human and speaks to such a vital issue that I honestly think everyone should read it. 

The author, Denise Davy, was working as a journalist for the Hamilton Spectator in 1993 when she came across a homeless woman named Margaret at the Wesley Centre while doing research for her articles on homelessness in the city. Intrigued by Margaret's story, the author was granted access to Margaret's massive medical files from the local hospital and began piecing together the puzzle of how she came to be homeless in the first place. 

This book traces Margaret's life from her childhood in Barbados and Antigua as the oldest child of Canadian missionary parents, her onset of mental health struggles at sixteen, admission to psychiatric hospitals in Cambridge and Hamilton beginning at age seventeen, decades of cycling between the hospital and inadequate boarding homes, to her eventual descent into homelessness until her death in 1995 at the age of fifty-one. This book is incredibly well-researched, the author truly did her homework in this regard. She interviewed not only Margaret's estranged family members, but also hospital workers, friends from the shelters, and various people who encountered Margaret in the city. Peppered in between telling the story of Margaret's life the author also gives historical context on psychiatric care and the process of deinstitutionalization, the reason many people like Margaret with severe mental illness are so vulnerable to homelessness in the first place. 

I already knew much of what the author discusses, but having an actual person's story attached to something always makes more of an impact, and Margaret's story proves that the people we see on the streets could just as easily be you or me, or someone we know and care about. It's for this reason that we need to advocate for better mental health care in our country, as well as proper, affordable housing with support structures in place for all people to live with dignity. 

Recommendation:

This book serves a need to have the interwoven story of mental health, affordable housing, and homelessness told with a human face. It needs to be read, and its messages advocated in every city if we truly want to call our society civilized and humane. 

You can buy the book from the publisher's website here: Wolsak and Wynn - Her Name Was Margaret

If you'd like to visit the author's website you can do so here: Denise Davy

Thoughts on the cover:

I love the black and gold colour scheme paired with Margaret's photo, it makes for a compelling cover.