They Left Us Everything

Winner of the 2015 RBC Taylor Prize

#1 NATIONAL BESTSELLER

After almost twenty years of helping to care for her elderly parents, author Plum Johnson finally falls to her knees with feelings of grief and relief when they die. Now she and her three brothers must empty and sell the beloved family home. It hasn’t been decluttered in more than half a century. Twenty-three rooms bulge with kitsch, antiques, and oxygen tanks. The task consumes her, becoming more rewarding than she could have imagined.

As Johnson sorts through the household, items from childhood trigger memories of her eccentric family growing up in a small town on the shores of Lake Ontario in the 1950s and 60s. Her difficult parents could not have been more different: her father a disciplined, reserved British patriarch and her mother an extroverted, opinionated Southern belle. The surprising discoveries she makes gradually instill a more accepting perspective about who her mother and father were and what she inherited. Johnson realizes that much of the emotional baggage was hers, and what her parents left behind was love.

By turns humorous and touching, They Left Us Everything is an unforgettable memoir about family love, loss and legacies.

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In The Press

  • "A poetic meditation on aging, grief and filial responsibility."

    -The Globe and Mail

  • "At times heartbreaking and at others hysterically funny...The book's descriptive prose brings [the]places and people to life and poignantly conveys the quasi-spiritual journey that helps Johnson overcome her grief."

    -Publishers Weekly

  • "The kind of slim, unassuming memoir that hits you deep in the gut."

    -National Post