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  • Beautiful Scars

  • Steeltown Secrets, Mohawk Skywalkers and the Road Home
  • By: Tom Wilson
  • Narrated by: Tom Wilson
  • Length: 5 hrs and 35 mins
  • 4.5 out of 5 stars (4 ratings)
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Beautiful Scars

By: Tom Wilson
Narrated by: Tom Wilson
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Summary

"Bunny told me there were secrets about me that she would take to the grave, secrets that no one would ever hear, including me...."

Tom Wilson always felt something wasn't quite right. His parents, Bunny and George, were much older than other kids' parents. There were no baby photos of him in the house. At school, classmates called him Indian, despite his parents' Irish-Quebecois background. And as he got older, friends, lovers and even family members remarked on his uncanny resemblance to Bunny's closest relative, her niece Janie Lazare, whose father was a Mohawk from Kahnawake, Quebec.

Tom wouldn't learn the truth about his identity until he was 53, when a tour handler whose mother had known Tom's now deceased parents let it slip that he was adopted. It would be another two years until he worked up the courage to confront Janie with what the handler had told him, what all his life he had suspected. Janie - the woman whom Tom called cousin, whom he'd known his whole life, who had lived with Tom and Bunny after George died - immediately broke into tears and confessed. She was his biological mother.

In this incredible story about family and identity, carefully guarded secrets and profound acts of forgiveness, Tom Wilson writes about growing up as an outsider in two families - the family he lost and the family who took him in. His story takes us from working-class Hamilton of the 1960s and '70s, neighbourhoods peopled by fall-guy wrestlers, broke mobsters, and WWII vets, to today, as he continues his journey to connect with the man he now knows to be his father and with his Mohawk heritage and relatives, discovering Kahnawake chiefs, Brooklyn "skywalkers", and nomadic Arnold Palmer groupies among them.

With a rare gift for storytelling and a remarkable story to tell, Tom Wilson writes with unflinching honesty and extraordinary compassion about his search for identity and for the truth about his family. Moving, captivating and at times hysterically funny, Beautiful Scars is a story about the families who raise us and the families who course through our veins.

©2017 Tom Wilson (P)2017 Doubleday Canada

Critic reviews

  • Finalist for the 2018 Kobo Emerging Writer Prize
  • Finalist for the Hamilton Literary Awards
  • National BestsellerA CBC Best Book of 2017

"Beautiful Scars is a frank and fair, raw and loving look at what it means to grow up with the silver spoon as far from your mouth as it can get, a confession that celebrates the miseries and joys of working-class life, of musicianship, of chasing secrets, of fighting through to discover the person you didn't realize you were. This is a remarkable, generous, big-hearted book that will stick with me for a long time." (Guy Vanderhaeghe, author of The Englishman's Boy, The Last Crossing and A Good Man)

"The book isn't just good. It's stunning.... The secrets around [Wilson's] life form a fundamentally Canadian story, rich in history and steeped in darkness. They also separate Beautiful Scars from the ranks of the typical rock memoir, and place it firmly on the shelf with the likes of Angela's Ashes and The Glass Castle - riveting accounts of family and secrets, poverty and peril, adversity and triumph." (Quill & Quire, starred review)

"A helluva story.... Wilson has the ear of the poet and the eye of the painter. He manages to pick just the right anecdote to sum up a personal feeling, at the same time as capturing a broader cultural moment." (Hamilton Spectator)

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Roller coaster

I'd never given nuch thought to Tom Wilson. He just happened to be a member of one of my favourite bands where the other front stage members - Stephen Fearing and Colin Linden - drew my attention. It was only a mention about this book, live from the Shrewsbury Festival Stage, that alerted me to its existence. It's a full throttle tale of Tom's early life struggles to cope with hardship, alienation and some fairly blatent falsehoods. You really have to wonder why some families make the decisions that they do.

Against this background Tom throws himself into a full on Rock'n'Roll lifestyle as his talent develops. Ultimately it's not good for him emotionally, socially or musically. This is where I get conflicted. His self destructive behaviour appeared to be tolerared to an amazing degree as compensation for his remarkable talent. But he obviously hurt a lot of people, friends and family, along the way.

Only Tom could have narrated his autobiography. It's a gripping saga of an extreme individual as he searches for his true family and ethnic roots. I shall certainly have to search out his solo musical works. I hope he's happier now.

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