Jean Roberts bears all in her raw biography of how her homegrown tropical paradise became a tainted prison.
Through her youth and 20s living on the small Caribbean island of Grenada, Roberts, a Banff resident for the past 17 years, chronicles her self-destructive story in Secrets of an Island Girl: How I Lost and Found My Mind in Paradise.
The book launch for Roberts’ memoir will be held Monday (Aug. 10) from 5-7 p.m. at 100 Fox St. in Banff. Everyone is welcome to attend.
Roberts, a certified life coach, in her own words recounts the 126-page story as a hard one to relive, but necessary for her to do so. As a young woman, a troubled, uneducated Roberts lived a harsh reality where begging for food and selling her body for sex were common.
“The heart of the story is me in my early 20s. I had an instant mental breakdown and so the story is around that and what happened when that happened to me,” said the 52-year-old first-time author. Roberts was able to change her life when she moved to Canada.
“When I left the island … I knew that I was going to write this book. I kind of made a promise to myself to tell this story, mostly, I wanted to tell the story to the island people. I wanted to say this is something that happened to me here on this island and I don’t think you guys are aware of this, so I wanted to say that to them – I wanted to write this for them.”
The story details her guideless youth, but also what was happening on the island in those times. Roberts recalls her experience during the United States invasion of Grenada in 1983, when U.S. Forces smashed a revolutionary government with close ties to communist regimes and reinstated power to the previous island rule.
“(Writing the memoir) took me a little bit of time because it’s my story, so it was incredibly hard to write,” she said.
Roberts started to write her memoir in 2009, but 2012-15 is when she completed a major portion of the book. During this time, she often needed a friend’s support to write as the story became emotionally draining. Roberts says every Monday night for an hour in 2013, she and friend Kim Mayberry would read a chapter and Mayberry encouraged her to complete it.
“(Mayberry) would read after every chapter, because my English is Caribbean-English as someone pointed out to me, so she read it and cleaned up the grammar,” Roberts said. “She would read my chapter and take it home and read it and do some grammar on it and give it back to me and keep doing it, so that was the process.”
Another trick the first-time author did to help continue finishing the book was to live in a cabin for a month on the quiet shores of Crawford Bay, British Columbia.
“I know I’m not technically a writer, but I thought that’s what writers do,” Roberts said. “So I spent some time at a cabin where every morning I’d just sit down and write that path of my life. Every morning for a month I’d write that certain part of my life.”
Roberts is pleased to share this success with the community and hopes the community comes and celebrates with her on Aug. 10.
The self-published Secrets of an Island Girl can be found on amazon.com.
