How to Survive a Bear Attack, by Claire Cameron

What an interesting book this is. The best essayists and memoirists have a great talent for taking two apparently unrelated subjects and using one to illuminate the other. In this case, it’s the lifelong fascination author Claire Cameron has had with a 1991 bear attack that killed two people in Algonquin Park, and her own midlife diagnosis of and treatment for the same cancer that killed her father when she was young.

In the wake of her diagnosis, Cameron (who has already written a novel inspired by the Algonquin Park bear attack), decides to take an even deeper dive than she’s done before into researching this event, while at the same time navigating her own relationship with the outdoors. Healing from the grief over her father’s death, she became, as a young person, very active in outdoor activities, particularly canoeing and backcountry camping. After her surgery for melanoma, she was told by a doctor that she should avoid exposure to almost all UV light … meaning that most of the activities she loved, the things that spelled healing and wholeness for her, were impossible. When she returns to Algonquin Park, it’s to pursue the seemingly unrelated question of why and how a black bear attacked and killed two campers all those years ago.

But of course, the two unrelated things are never really unrelated. This is an insightful book about black bears, a specific bear attack, backcountry camping, living with cancer, and grief. In other words, it’s a book about the fear of death and how we cope with it. If you learn everything about bears and bear attacks, can you protect yourself from an (incredibly rare) attack? If you avoid daylight, can you avoid a recurrence of your (also quite rare) deadly skin cancer? What does it mean to be “safe,” and how can we cope with the uncertainty that is an inevitable part of being human?

This book has received a lot of attention and acclaim, and that’s very well deserved. I found it fascinating.