At age seven, Sarah Polley knew that she wanted to write books. By the late-1980s, she was already a professional child actor who would later star in several television series and perform in tremendous independent and Hollywood films. The Canadian filmmaker, writer, and actress became an Academy Award–nominated screenwriter for her 2006 film Away From Her. In 2012, Polley’s full-length documentary, Stories We Tell, chronicled the complications of storytelling and memory, using her own family history as a starting point. Although she was writing, books would wait. 

However, this March, after working with directors such as Atom Egoyan and Kathryn Bigelow and directing actors such as Julie Christie and Michelle Williams, Polley is realizing her long-held dream: publishing her first book, Run Towards the Danger. This is a visceral and incisive collection of six propulsive personal essays that address the exploitation of child actors, the slippery nature of memory, sexual assault, high-risk pregnancy and premature birth, grief, motherhood, and Polley’s three-year recovery from a concussion so serious that she passed on the adaptation of Little Women (which eventually landed in Greta Gerwig’s hands). While the intimate material may lead you to think otherwise, this is not a memoir. 

“I’m a huge fan of personal essays; I just devour them. It’s a form that I love. And in my mind, any one of these essays could be a stand-alone essay. I think it’s inevitable that this book will be interpreted and written about as a memoir, and I’m sort of at peace with it, but it was certainly not the intention of the book,” Polley remarks in conversation over Zoom from Toronto, where she lives with her family. 

Between books, she is currently working on edits to her fourth feature-length film, an adaptation of Women Talking, Miriam Toews’s 2018 novel, which will star Frances McDormand and Rooney Mara. In a conversation that touched upon Parul Sehgal’s New Yorker essay on the “trauma plot,” the wellness industry’s restrictive notion of self-care, Lauren Groff’s novel Matrix, and what she’s been watching (Force Majeure, The Power of the Dog), Polley explores her path back to writing from acting to filmmaking. 

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Vanity Fair: How did you know that these six essays composed a complete book?

Sarah Polley: I'm really fascinated by the order in which you give information and the way that new information sheds light on a previous story. With my documentary Stories We Tell, I asked what would happen if you told a story like peeling an onion: what were those layers and what order they were in. There was this pivotal moment, when we were editing that film, of realizing that it would be more interesting to not know that my mom had been married before, and had an affair and lost two children. Later, after you'd heard the story of my conception, after she'd had an affair, the viewer would then find out that, in her past, there had been an echo of this experience. The viewer would retrospectively understand the story differently. 

This got me really interested in the order in which I revealed information about myself in this book. What if we don't know what we're supposed to know, in this sort of linear way, that weirdly gives us a bias in terms of how we're processing the information we're given, because of the assumptions one makes. You can read one essay then the next, but maybe two essays later something sheds a different light on the stories that you've read, but you've had to read the others in isolation before you're forced to sort of add another layer to it. 

This led me to realize there were pieces of information that became important in order to understand other essays, and they became their own essays which ended up being the heart of the book. I wrote “High Risk,” the story of my birth story and the relationship with my mother's grief, almost as an afterthought. The way that having this high-risk pregnancy in tandem with this uncertainty about my ability to be a mother and that in dialogue with my grief around my own mother's death and my feeling of loss became an important piece to me to actually understand. Who was that person who had that nervous breakdown with stage fright? And who was that person who was in a really vulnerable situation with and had a horrible experience with a man when she's 16-years-old? It's not what led you to those moments because I think that's really convenient and maybe even a little offensive that someone is sort of essentially damaged in some way then ends up in terrible situations. I don't think it's as simple as that. But I think it's a different window on a life. 

How was this experience different from writing for the screen? 

When you're writing a screenplay, you're really writing a blueprint for something that’s a jumping off point. The way I make films, I'm not a single vision person. I'm very dependent on intense collaboration so a script is a place to begin in terms of conversations with others. To create a document that is the only element there is incredibly intimidating when you're used to having many other layers of the [creation] process on top of it. 

I think writing a book is much more challenging and far more exhilarating. I loved every second of writing, even when it was excruciating, but in the final year I was writing it, I realized that I'd be happy to do only this for the rest of my life. I love making films, and I'll hopefully make more; I treasure that process. But I would be completely fulfilled with writing books, and doing nothing else. 

What did you do to work past the excruciating elements? 

When it was tough, I looked for the moments that gave me the most resistance. I think the whole sort of paradigm shift that happened for me in recovery from the concussion, this notion that instead of hiding away from the world, and lying down in a dark room, that I had to force myself towards the activities that were going to hurt me the most in order to recover my brain to strength, that informed the kinds of stories I chose to return to in the book. 

There were a whole bunch of other essays that are in various stages that I abandoned [for the book] because they were too easy to write. It’s not that I didn't have a joyful process with some of these essays, but the ones that came easily to me didn't feel like they were part of this book. This idea of a dialogue between the past and the present was hugely important. I think that only happens with the difficult stories—at least it happens in a more vivid and profound way with the things that were harder to live through. 

What’s been interesting about writing these essays is that I was often editing or in dialogue with a much younger version of myself and I had to decide whether or not to let her version stand or edit her or superimpose my current perspective on it. What I tried to do with that is just to create a dialogue between them. 

I've always been writing, poetry or essays or short stories. That's always been the place I felt most myself. It's been really strange having this other career because, you know, I love making films. It feels like this enormous privilege. It really is truly the luckiest job in the world to be able to create a world with enormously talented people, but I've always been happiest with the writing part of the process because it's felt the closest to what my instincts have always taken me towards, which is wanting to be writing. It just feels like my most fully realized self is sitting alone writing somewhere. 

Hearing you talk about your various careers, I’m reminded that you’ve often reflected about not being ambitious and yet you are very successful perhaps in spite of an overarching sense of ambition for yourself.  

I get enormously ambitious for the thing I'm working on. But I've never had a view beyond that thing. For me, every film I've made is the last film I'm ever making. This book is the only book I've ever written. No, that's not actually true. [Laughs.] Maybe I'm different with writing books. 

Yeah, you sound like you're committed to it. 

If I'm making a film, it has to feel like my everything at that moment, not part of some bigger plan for myself. It is what it is, and I'm in service of it. Maybe it stems from being a child actor, and having witnessed the use of things and experiences and people to further an agenda and so I'm kind of just allergic to [ambition]. I want to read and invest in things for their own sake, and for no other. For that reason, I have to convince myself all the time, “Well, I wasn't really an actor, I'm just doing it.” And “I'm not really a filmmaker; I've just made a few films.” 

But actually that brings me to this interesting revelation because as I say that to you, I realize that I don't feel that way about being a writer of books. I don't feel like I want to say, “Oh, I just wrote a book.” I would love this to be the beginning of a life where I did this often. There's a joy I get out of it, that’s very deep because it's really self-directed. I don't have any pressure to write a book. I don't have anybody else telling me to do that, or wondering where my next book is. It's something that the seven-year-old who loved writing short stories and wanted to be a writer when they grew up has taken control and done something that feels kind of amazing and unlikely. I'm sort of surprised it ever happened. 

I'm sure I'll make more films, I love making films, but this feels to me more like some realization of the person who got lost a bit by not having a choice of whether or not to go to school, or keep going in the TV show, I was locked into. 

Luckily, on Women Talking, I did feel remarkably free from that voice of that child who was still sad about having missed a childhood. Instead, I kept thinking this is an amazing job and I can't believe I get to do it. But, with writing a book, I'm not in battle with anything but just learning how to do it. 

Do you feel like you want to go back to acting? 

The last time I acted was around 14 years ago and since then I hadn't had a second of wanting to act, but watching these women in Women Talking, it was the first time I'd felt this little hunger of how fun that can be.

The ability to throw yourself so much into somebody else that you were them was such a part of breathing in and out throughout my life. It was like empathy on steroids, that feeling of being able to experience what it felt like to be another person. It was a really good exercise as a human being and one that I miss. So again, I'm not chomping at the bit right now. But I wouldn't be completely closed to the idea that in the next few years I might experiment with acting. What I feel most of all right now is open and flexible and curious in a way that I really haven't been in a long time and I think writing this book was a big part of getting there. 

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