Jennie's Boy: A Newfoundland childhood

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • WINNER OF ONE OF THE 2023 LEACOCK MEDAL FOR HUMOUR • A CBC BEST CANADIAN NONFICTION BOOK OF 2022 • SHORTLISTED FOR CANADA READS 2025 

Consummate storyteller and bestselling novelist Wayne Johnston reaches back into his past to bring us a sad, tender, and at times extremely funny memoir of his Newfoundland boyhood.

For six months between 1966 and 1967, Wayne Johnston and his family lived in a wreck of a house across from his grandparents in Goulds, Newfoundland. At seven, Wayne was sickly and skinny, unable to keep food down, plagued with insomnia and a relentless cough that no doctor could diagnose, though they had already removed his ton­sils, adenoids, and appendix. To the neighbours, he was known as “Jennie’s boy,” a backhanded salute to his tiny, ferocious mother, who felt judged for Wayne’s condition at the same time as she worried he might never grow up.

Unable to go to school, Wayne spent his days with his witty, religious, deeply eccentric maternal grand­mother, Lucy. During these six months of Wayne’s childhood, he and Lucy faced two life-or-death crises, the odds against them both.

Jennie’s Boy is Wayne’s tribute to a family and a community that were simultaneously fiercely protective of him and fed up with having to make allowances for him. His boyhood was full of pain, yes, but also tenderness and Newfoundland wit. By that wit, and through love—often expressed in the most unlikely ways—Wayne survived.