In the Company of Strangers

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.

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, which resulted in the publication of In the Company of Strangers (1991), 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.

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