Skip to main content Skip to search Skip to search

Biography & Autobiography Personal Memoirs

In the Company of Strangers

by (author) Mary Meigs

Publisher
Talonbooks
Initial publish date
Jan 1991
Category
Personal Memoirs, Women, Women
  • Paperback / softback

    ISBN
    9780889222946
    Publish Date
    Jan 1991
    List Price
    $18.95

Classroom Resources

Where to buy it

Description

Mary Meigs is one of the eight women who portray themselves in the film The Company of Strangers, a “semi-documentary” National Film Board production, released in 1990 to overwhelming critical and popular acclaim. Meigs spent two years writing this extraordinary narrative, which begins as her story of being in the film and unfolds into a gentle, intricate meditation on the experience of time, old age, magic and binding. Time becomes still and circular as the women’s self-images and film images, their past and present, are bound inextricably with the filmmaker’s vision.

About the author

Mary Meigs
Born in Philadelphia, writer and painter Mary Meigs wrote her first novel, Lily Briscoe: A Self-Portrait, at the age of 60. For the next two decades, Meigs chronicled her extraordinary life as a writer, a painter, an actress, a social activist and a lesbian feminist. In 1988, Meigs played herself in the critically acclaimed film The Company of Strangers (U.S. release title: Strangers in Good Company; French title: Le Fabuleux gang des sept [1990]), about eight women on a bus tour who are stranded in isolated countryside when the bus breaks down. In the Company of Strangers (1991) followed, a fascinating work documenting her experience during the production of the film. Mary Meigs died in 2002 at the age of 85, shortly before the completion of Beyond Recall.

Mary Meigs' profile page

Awards

  • Winner, QSPELL Award Winner for Non-fiction

Editorial Reviews

“Her book on the film is exquisitely attuned to the interplay between art and life.”
Boston Globe

Related lists