SALT LAKE CITY, January 28, 2020
One afternoon in June, in Durban, South Africa, a child was born. Doctors and nurses marveled–“This one is destined for greatness!” “Very lucky!”–because the child’s birth was one of the rarest in the world. The child, Gillian August, was born still shrouded in her amniotic sac. She was a caul baby, and in the South Africa of 1971, this heralded greatness. Or it might have, had the baby’s caul not been stolen within hours of her birth. Though fortune did not follow Gillian August home from the hospital that day, or for many years after, the greatness promised at her birth is fulfilled in her memoir, recently contracted with E.L. Marker.™
Gillian August Thorp’s memoir tells the story of a young girl whose father, a Trollope-quoting Coloured man with ivory skin, commits suicide, leaving Thorp and her siblings to face the cruelty of Apartheid amid the dangers of a simmering political revolution, alone. Drifting in and out of their lives is Uncle Nicki, a revolutionary exiled by the South African government and Granny, the bush knife-wielding granddaughter of a Zulu chief. When Thorp’s mother, who disappeared shortly after her husband’s death, returns with a new husband and a new life, Gillian and her siblings follow her to America and into an uncertain future.
Thorp’s story is profoundly tragic, but the storyteller is not tragic. She has endured unbelievable loss, but she is not lost. With her memoir, Thorp proves there is so much more we can have than what has ever been taken from us. We are free to make our own happiness, regardless of past circumstances.
In South Africa, a caul baby is stripped of its magic with the theft of its caul. But Thorp creates her own magic for the reader– who feels as if they have lived her story in the telling and are better for the experience.
“Every story is an orphan,” Thorp says, “until it finds a home. WiDo™ heard my story and welcomed it home.”
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Gillian August Thorp lives between homes in the San Francisco Bay Area and east of the Sierra Nevadas. She has two daughters and a mutt named Taz. She earned a Bachelor’s degree in Psychology from the University of Nevada and a Master’s in Counseling from Santa Clara University. She credits her education and an appreciation for others’ stories with giving her a deep understanding of the human psyche. She credits writing her own stories with helping her find a voice that doesn’t murmur or mumble, but is loud enough to hear.
When Thorp is not reading or writing you can find her gardening, singing badly the music she loves, and volunteering for causes relating to women and children issues. For more information visit www.gillianthorp.com.