The Surprise of My Life

“It’s an autobiography! If I tell you what’s in it you won’t read the book.” — Claire Drainie Taylor Or would you? Maybe you’d be intrigued by the progression of a life begun as an unexceptional little girl born to a middle-class Jewish Canadian couple in a small prairie town who, at age sixteen, married a refined Englishman, and survived the Great Depression, partly alone in a shack in the woods of Vancouver Island. Or how, only a few months after returning to Vancouver, with no training and mi