2

PROMISES KEPT

ALTHOUGH CAROL AND I had been friends for more than a year, I still didn’t know a great deal about what motivated her. When she and Bryan invited my husband and me to visit them at their Amherst Island holiday property, a rural retreat of sheep pastures and hayfields near Kingston, one element of her story emerged. She was a serial entrepreneur. One of her former businesses involved buying and selling primitive Canadian antiques, and the couple’s 1830s limestone house was a Noah’s Ark of folk art animal sculptures. Rustic life-size representations of a Dalmatian and a plump white sheep stood in the south sunroom, along with a robin and a crow, all hewn from wood and painted. In the library, other birds filled a high shelf, and a tall carved figure of a Mi’kmaq man in full headdress guarded the entrance to the laundry. A stylized black cat with green eyes sat on a dining room windowsill and a small church occupied one alcove.

The church was a clue to her other previous start-up. After working as a high school English teacher, she had followed her mother into the Anglican priesthood in the 1990s and then founded an Anglican Church parish west of Toronto called Church of the Resurrection. “I’ve always loved to do stuff from scratch,” she told me.

Carol’s view was that she might have inherited her combination of entrepreneurial drive and the sense of a calling to help others from her great-great-grandfather Sir George Williams. Williams was a successful businessman in the drapers’ trade in Victorian England and was the man who founded the YMCA movement “to save young men from dissipation,” as Carol put it. Williams set an example that appears to have trickled down to generations of Williamses, expressed through a family culture that placed great value on service to others, and a genetic predisposition to starting businesses and being competitive. Carol mentioned that other Williams family descendants included London mayor Boris Johnson and Colin Williams, the highly successful London-based titanium trader. “The spectre of Sir George has always hung over some of us,” Carol said. “It’s this thing about carrying his genes. I seem to have it.”

Over dinner, it became apparent why Carol chose books as her vehicle for helping others. She was born in 1945 in Ashburton, England, just an afternoon’s hike across moorland from Dartmoor Prison. Ashburton is a town on the edge of Dartmoor, a wilderness of peat bogs and granite tors where ponies and sheep roam freely. Her mother, Patricia Williams, a young British war bride, had moved there with her two oldest children to escape the Blitz. Carol’s father, David Wilson Blyth, was an army spotter during the war whose job was to identify targets for bombing sorties. Her mother was passionate about reading. When the six Blyth children were underfoot, their mother would tell them not to go outside and play, but to “go away and read.”

Carol was six when the family finally settled in Canada. “There were long, long summer holidays at lakes where we would just sunbathe and read,” she recalled. Their mother was influential in her children’s lives, guiding four of her five daughters, including Carol, into the study of English literature at university, encouraging them to teach. Her brother, like her, became a serial entrepreneur. I sensed that Carol was partly motivated by a need to succeed in a high-performing family and to leave her mark. We talked and laughed long into the evening, with Carol telling stories about her mother and Bryan guffawing heartily. I knew then something about where her courage came from. Now I had to marshal my own.

In the end, the decision to go into the prison was made for me. While turning it over in my mind, I had filled out the Correctional Service Canada (CSC) volunteer application form, just in case, because there was a long lead time for approvals. When the prison system granted my clearance, I felt I had to follow through with it. I have difficulty walking away from sunk costs and I lack a reverse gear. Just go in once, I said to myself. You can handle this.

What I didn’t know until my first visit to the prison was that Carol and I would meet the eighteen or so heavily tattooed book club members in a remote building within the prison walls, with no guards present and no visible security cameras. Carol’s idea was to put the men at ease. Our only protection would be a chaplain wearing a personal security alarm that would alert guards in the main building on the grounds, some eighty metres away. Great.

Locals know Collins Bay as “the Red Roof Inn,” a play on the name of the discount North American hotel chain. The red metal roof and Gothic turrets are the prison’s most distinguishing features. Built of local limestone in the 1930s, it’s a grey castle fronting a vast square of limestone rampart, with red-capped guard towers at each corner. In my childhood, when my mother drove me past it for my annual eye exam in Kingston, from our home in Prince Edward County, I would ask her if that was Disneyland and whether it had a drawbridge and moat.

So it was strange to finally approach this building as an adult, in October 2010 for my first visit to Carol’s prison book club. A warm Indian summer breeze was blowing the tall grasses of the surrounding meadows, and red-winged blackbirds called out from the marshy lowlands that stretched down to the St. Lawrence River where it meets Lake Ontario. The prison farm was barely visible at the rear. Just two months earlier, cattle trucks had removed three hundred Holstein cows from the farm buildings, as the federal government ended the forty-eight-year-old dairy operation that had provided milk to local prisons and farm skills to inmates. I was surprised to see how the city had filled in across from the prison since my childhood. There were car dealerships with metallic pennant streamers and rundown malls with pawnshops selling paintball guns in the shape of AK-47s.

That day I had followed Carol’s instructions to downplay my curves and eliminate showy jewellery. I was wearing a breast-flattening sports bra, a turtleneck, a buttoned-up stiff tweed jacket and pants. I’d left my emerald engagement ring in the city, and wore only a gold wedding band and simple pearl stud earrings. I was also wearing my nerves. My hand shook as I signed the official guest logbook at reception. Through the one-way glass to my left I could see the outlines of heads, where guards operated the mechanized gates into the core of the prison.

From that moment on I remember only brief impressions. I was fearful to the point of shock. My peripheral vision closed down and I felt like I was looking through a zoom lens, catching only concentrated bursts of images. After the double set of metal doors at the entrance slammed in sequence behind me, I remember being hit by the smell—an unpleasant yeasty odour that I couldn’t quite identify, as though decades of hardship, hate and regret had condensed on the walls. I recall walking down the main hallway with Carol and her co-facilitator Edward, a retired English professor with an upper-class English accent. A prison chaplain, Blair, was escorting us because the book group met in the prison chapel. Blair was explaining something about the building. I remember passing the health clinic with its posters about HIV and hepatitis. Then we passed lots of men in white waffle-weave long-sleeve shirts or blue T-shirts and jeans, some pushing carts or carrying mops, and I recall thinking, gosh, they have a lot of staff here.

The chaplain was saying something about the “telephone pole” design of the prison—a main corridor known as “The Strip” with cell units branching off on both sides. He led us along a sidewalk to a secondary building inside the walls of the prison that looked like a parish hall. And then somehow I was sitting on a wooden chair, waiting for the inmates to arrive, wondering whether to peel off my name tag, which announced to them all that I was ANN.

The men who walked in the door were dressed in white and blue like the ones I had seen walking freely on The Strip—the guys I had thought were cleaning staff. I was confused. Those were the inmates? Why were they walking around freely like that? Where were the guards and why was the chaplain, the only one wearing a security alarm, leaving the room briefly? And why did Carol look so relaxed? Then one man came toward me with his arm extended and a large smile. “Hello, welcome,” he said. I stood up and grasped his hand and thanked him. Then many of the others followed suit, gracious and non-threatening. For some reason, the black men gravitated toward one side of the circle and the white men sat in chairs closer to me.

Carol introduced me as the head of the prison book club’s Book Selection Committee, saying that I was an award-winning magazine journalist who had majored in English literature at university. I was just sitting in to get a better sense of which books might appeal to them. After that she led them in a discussion of Dave Eggers’s wonderful non-fiction book Zeitoun, about a Syrian-born landlord and house painter in post-Katrina New Orleans who is swept up by Homeland Security after disobeying orders to evacuate the flooded city. It’s a book I had read and loved, but I have no recollection of what the men said about the protagonist’s good and bad choices or anything else for that matter. Instead I was rehearsing in my mind the self-defence manoeuvres that I had learned in London. I was sure we were about to be taken hostage. It was the first time I had been so close to criminals since the police lineup in London.

The men seemed equally baffled by my choice to drive such a distance to risk sitting in a room with them, given that I wasn’t proselytizing religion and I wasn’t being paid. After the meeting, a man with dreads and reflector sunglasses, flanked by two other black inmates, approached me and asked, “Miss, why would a nice person like you want to spend time with bad guys like us?”

That’s a very good question, I thought. But I said, “I’d like to help find you some good books.”

Another inmate, who I learned later had killed a man and felt profound regret about it, also approached. “I was thinking you look like that movie star,” he said. “What’s her name? I know, Nicole Kidman. You must get that a lot.”

I felt a chill. “Actually, no one’s ever said that before,” I said, mentioning that she was much taller. Perhaps it was my curly hair that struck him as similar. It was exactly the kind of attention I did not want.

On my drive back to Toronto I asked myself what I had learned in that meeting that would provide new insight into my book recommendations for the men. Almost nothing, because I was so pathetically scared. I could see that they liked non-fiction, and that Carol challenged them to put themselves in the shoes of the protagonist and question characters’ choices. But I would need to attend several monthly meetings if I really wanted to understand their reading level, their reaction to different types of fiction and non-fiction and what kinds of narrative engaged them. I thought back to the book list that my colleagues on the selection committee and I had composed two months earlier without ever having entered a prison. It included Margaret Atwood’s novel Alias Grace; The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon; Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight, Alexandra Fuller’s memoir about her wild Rhodesian childhood (a kind of African The Glass Castle); and The Woman Who Walked Into Doors by Roddy Doyle. They were all books I had read and enjoyed. With the immediate threat of being inside the prison behind me, I was now feeling a familiar tug: curiosity. What would it be like to hear the men talk about Roddy Doyle’s Paula Spencer—the abused alcoholic woman that he so brilliantly conjured up, and Charlo, her abuser? Would literature change the men’s lives in any way?

But curiosity about the unknown is so often paired with fear of the unknown. And I needed to consider what it would take for me to return on a regular basis and get to know the men. It wasn’t just my own safety I was worried about, but that of my family.

I drove past the highway sign marking the exit to Prince Edward County—the beautiful peninsula of farms and sand dunes on Lake Ontario where I had grown up, partway between Kingston and Toronto. It had been a happy childhood. An image of my father came to mind. In 2000, to mark the millennium, he and I took a father-daughter driving trip in California. At one stop he approached some menacing-looking men to ask for directions. I tried to dissuade him, but it was then that he reassured me, “If you expect the best of people, they will rise to the occasion.”

Fear is judgment. I knew that. It is at the heart of some of the worst social injustices. If the men were bringing their best selves to a book club and trying to live a different life for a couple of hours, I should honour that effort, just as Carol was doing. And then it just came down to a decision not to spend my life living in fear and to adopt some of Carol’s bravery. I thought if Carol could walk through the doors of Collins Bay, so could I. Sometimes we borrow our courage from others.

At the same time, I thought about that other well of courage I could draw upon: my creative drive. I was a relentless diarist and note-taker. If I could write about Carol’s idea to run a book club in a prison and depict the men’s reactions to the books’ themes of loss, anger, courage and redemption, I might gradually forget my fear. I approached the prison officials with a request for broader access in 2011 and 2012 to write a book about the prison book club. And then I made plans to return to the book club meetings to observe from the point of view of book selection and to bring a writer’s perspective to the book discussions that Carol was leading.

It was March 2011 when I returned to Collins Bay, and some things had changed in the book club. The old meeting space was being torn down and the club was now convening near the northeast perimeter guard tower in a nondescript building whose corridors smelled strangely of smoke. Later I learned that the smoke emanated from the aboriginal programs wing, where First Nations inmates were permitted to burn sweetgrass and sage in traditional smudging ceremonies designed to cleanse away negative thoughts or feelings. Smoke in a prison? I couldn’t quite fathom how the guards handled the fire needed to light the grass, but it was a progressive policy.

I felt better about the new meeting space.The guards were now in the same building—about twenty-five metres down the hall. And the officials hosting us—the prison chaplains—had a glassed-in office overlooking the book club meeting area, so they and their panic buttons would always be within reach. But it was still a depressing environment. Newly consecrated as a chapel, it was little more than a spartan mid-century school classroom with cinder-block walls painted an institutional shade of sky blue. A wooden cross and altar stood at one end of the room and a few religious books from different faiths filled a bookshelf at the other. The book club had to meet at a time when the chapel was not needed for faith gatherings of Catholics, Anglicans, Wiccans, Jews, Muslims, Rastafarians, Salvation Army or other groups. Like some parts of the prison I’d passed through, the air there smelled of organic decay—sour and fungal—despite its daily cleaning, and the lighting was harsh.

As I walked in, the men were setting up a circle of metal folding chairs in the centre of the room. Soft furniture was discouraged because it could conceal contraband. As the inmates straggled in from lunch, they poured themselves coffee from a Bunn-type coffee maker and looked around for the store-packaged cookies that Carol bought for each meeting. Home-baked pastries were forbidden because they could contain files, saws and weapons. (A year later I learned that British chef Gordon Ramsay had set up a baking program inside the British prison HMP Brixton, and though the point was primarily to provide work experience and to produce baked goods for sale to outside cafés, some treats were destined for inmate consumption.)

The volunteer contingent had also changed since my last visit. Derek, a former CBC Radio classical music host, and a neighbour of Carol’s on Amherst Island, had replaced Edward as Carol’s co-facilitator. Derek had been born into the Mennonite faith. The Mennonite Central Committee’s social justice causes include prison visits. He was a natty dresser, with smart leather loafers, tortoiseshell glasses and designer jackets. I could tell that his style would make a big impression on the men. And his sonorous radio voice would be ideal for reading passages of the books aloud, which, in time, he did as a way of introducing the next month’s book.

That time, I was able to relax enough to absorb the book discussion.We were reading Three Cups of Tea: One Man’s Mission to Promote Peace … One School at a Time by Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin, a book that Carol had chosen. Published four years earlier in 2007, it was a feel-good non-fiction account of how Mortenson, a destitute American mountain climber, built schools for girls in Pakistan and Afghanistan through his charity, Central Asia Institute. It and his 2009 sequel, Stones into Schools: Promoting Peace with Books, Not Bombs, in Afghanistan and Pakistan were both New York Times bestsellers, and by the time we sat down to discuss Three Cups of Tea in March of 2011, Mortenson had gained a kind of pop cult status as a humanitarian. The book had become required reading for U.S. troops deployed to Afghanistan. U.S. president Barack Obama even donated one hundred thousand dollars of his 2009 Nobel Peace Prize winnings to Mortenson’s cause.

According to his book, Mortenson lost his way while descending K2, the second highest mountain in the world, on the border between Pakistan and China, and wound up in the village of Korphe in northern Pakistan, where the villagers nursed him back to health. In thanks, he promised to return to build a school for the girls in the village. He had seen that boys who were educated tended to migrate to the cities for higher-paying jobs, and he had an idea that educated girls would be more likely to stay in their villages and impart their learning to others. Given that back in the United States, Mortenson lived out of his car for a year in order to save money while trying to raise funds for the school, his focus on helping others really caught my attention, just as it had intrigued thousands of other readers.

I recognized a few inmates from the first meeting: Dread, a tall man with a corkscrew moustache and beard who had three tiny dreadlocks dangling from under a black wool tam; Ben, a slow-speaking but eager book enthusiast whose heavy-lidded eyes drooped at the outer corners, giving him a slightly hurt look; and Marley, who wore a long black crucifix around his neck and wove his hair into cornrows that sprayed out from a central part and were gathered on each side by a tiny clip. Another familiar face was Frank, a middle-aged Italian-born inmate with a deep dimple in his left cheek and glasses; he was a key contributor to the discussions. Frank had brought a new member to the book club: Graham. Blond, big-boned and about six feet four, Graham seemed immediately at ease, rocking back in his chair and gripping the armrests whenever he laughed, which he did often. Also new to the group was Grow-Op, a shy, stringy young man wearing sunglasses, who apparently was doing time for growing marijuana. Sunglasses were popular among the inmates, partly as a way of avoiding direct eye contact and confrontation. Sitting next to Grow-Op was a fellow with a scar on his upper lip, who wanted to talk about his prison time in Southeast Asia for drug trafficking. His name tag read RICK.

Carol opened the discussion by giving the floor to Derek, who asked what we all thought about the central figure in the book, Greg Mortenson.

Dread said how impressed he was that Mortenson had remained selfless and endured so many hardships in his determination to build schools for girls. Several of the other men praised Mortenson’s perseverance, despite crippling setbacks. The first time he sent funds for building supplies to Pakistan, many of the supplies disappeared. Later, the villagers said they would take the funds to build a bridge instead.

But the book club members also took note of his flaws. “My impression is he was a big klutz,” said Frank.

“And he bumbles through life in a Forrest Gump–like way,” said the man from the Southeast Asian prison.

Derek agreed, pointing out that Mortenson, like Forrest Gump, managed to show up at key moments that would become historical milestones. “He has tea with the Taliban, meets generals in Pakistan and pays his respects to Mother Teresa after her death,” he said.

But Dread saw it differently. “What I liked is that usually people make promises and never follow through on them,” he said. Broken promises. Dread had put his finger on it. The villagers never expected to see Mortenson again after they nursed him back to health. The men in prison likely had seen plenty of broken promises in their lives, and broken a few themselves.

I then asked the men why they thought Mortenson focused on educating girls as opposed to boys.

“Because women have a big voice in any community,” said Frank. “Women are nurturers, and men are more likely to leave the village once they’re educated.” Frank had a wife and children waiting for him.

Ben reminded us that Mortenson had another reason: a gesture in tribute to his sister, Christa. Mortenson had originally dedicated his attempt to climb K2 to his sister, following her death at age twenty-three from an epileptic seizure. But when he saw the eighty-two children of Korphe practicing their lessons on an open ledge with no shelter and no full-time teacher, he resolved that he could honour her memory in a more meaningful way.

Carol said she wanted to think about Mortenson as a hero. “He is so committed,” she said. “What does it take to be one of these heroes?” As on my first visit to the book group, Carol was keen to rally the men’s moral selves to see whether the protagonist might be a role model for them. Frank was immediately onside, describing Mortenson as a humanitarian despite his klutziness, and suggesting that his name should be put forward for the Nobel Peace Prize. In fact Mortenson had been nominated for the prize in 2009.

But Graham had a different take than his buddy Frank on Mortenson. Speaking for the first time in the book club, he questioned why Mortenson took advantage of his wife’s patience by travelling up to four months at a time. “Nice that she’s patient, but he has neglected his family and his personal health, and his relationship with his board members has broken down.” Graham saw someone who had failed his family and was failing on the accountability front too. When Derek mentioned that Mortenson’s daughter now travelled with him on his school-building trips, Graham responded tartly: “Is she only going because she wants more time with her father?”

I studied Graham’s prominent brow. He had identified that something was wrong with the way Mortenson ran his life and his charity. His acuity caught my attention, as did his facility with words and his confidence to voice a contrary opinion on his first day at book group. Every comment in a book club is coloured with the reader’s world view.We were getting Graham’s world view and I was guessing that it contained a strongly held belief about family. I wondered if Graham’s own father had been as unreliable as Mortenson. It would be months before I got an answer to that question.

“What do you think about his parents?” asked Dread. “They set the stage.” They had been Lutheran missionaries and teachers in Tanzania. While there, they built a school and a hospital on Mount Kilimanjaro. When Mortenson’s father died in mid-life, Mortenson’s fear of losing his sister too compelled him to step in to care for her.

Graham answered Dread’s question by saying that Mortenson’s parents, Dempsey and Jerene, were no more balanced than their son, even when they were setting up the hospital. His comments sent me back to the book in my lap and I scanned the chapter on his parents. I saw that Dempsey often travelled abroad for long stretches to fundraise and recruit hospital staff and Mortenson had to stand in as the dad. Perhaps Graham was talking about Dempsey semi-abandoning his family. I looked at him with more interest. But the passage also talked about Dempsey going against the wishes of the many expatriate members of the hospital board by offering medical scholarships to local African students instead of to expat offspring. Dempsey’s heart was in the right place, but perhaps he was too much of a loose cannon for Graham.

Carol asked how many of the men had come from families that did some volunteering. One new member was the only one to put up his hand. “My family had a lot of involvement with library work,” he said. But in a strange segue he began talking about his grandfather, who was involved in crime and “got murdered.” We waited, but no one else had a tale of volunteering to offer. I felt a sharp pang of empathy for these men, whose childhoods were so different from my own.

“I’d like to make a pitch for his driving desire to help other people,” said Carol. “The most meaningful thing for me is being here with all of you. I would not have met Marley, for example. I know that fills me up.” She turned to look at Marley and he nodded back with a big ear-to-ear grin. “I encourage you when you’re out to see when and where you can help. Be mentors to help kids who might get into trouble.” The conversation lulled briefly.

Then Frank said, “We’re afraid to help others, like panhandlers, because they might be scammers.” We sat with that thought for another moment. And then I told the men the story of my father urging me to expect the best of people. And that seemed to inspire Frank. He referenced Malcolm Gladwell’s argument in The Tipping Point, that if you fix broken windows in a derelict neighbourhood, the crime rate will drop. “Just one window can make a difference,” said Frank.

Graham had nothing to say on that subject, but he wanted to add one more thing about Mortenson. He said that Mortenson’s story about being kidnapped by the Taliban didn’t add up. Mortenson claimed that AK-47-wielding Wazir tribesmen held him for six days and then freed him and thrust donations into his hands after he talked about wanting to build schools for neglected Wazir children. Graham argued that Mortenson’s story boiled down to being extorted by thugs to build schools in their villages. The part about the money—Graham just rolled his eyes. Later, I learned that Graham had some familiarity with the subject. A former Hells Angel, he was serving a seventeen-year prison sentence for drug trafficking and extortion.

After the meeting, Marley walked over to me, his crucifix swinging, and sat down beside me. “God is everything,” he said, his black eyes sparkling. “I believe in Christ.” I think he was imagining that I might share his views because we were meeting in the chapel. I nodded to show my respect. I told him I believed in goodness. Unlike Carol, I was not religious.

The men said goodbye and I gathered up my things, thinking that the book had worked well, even though it wasn’t one that our selection committee had suggested.

As we walked out past the main guard station on The Strip, that day’s “Strip Boss,” the correctional officer in charge of the guards on The Strip, said that he was reading Three Cups of Tea because he’d heard from book club members that it was good and he wondered if he could join the book group. He laughed in a way that made it hard to tell whether he was serious or not.

On the drive back to Toronto with Carol, she told me the story of how the book club was born. It was the summer of 2009 and she was weeding the arugula in her vegetable garden on Amherst Island. She was thinking about her recent trip to Trosly-Breuil, France, to visit the noted Canadian humanitarian Jean Vanier and his L’Arche community, where developmentally disabled people live with their caregivers. Vanier told Carol that whenever she travelled to a new city, she should visit people in hospitals for the mentally ill and those in prison because they were the most marginalized and lonely people in society. Those institutions, he said, were where the greatest suffering in society resided. She looked up from her weeding and sat back on her heels, looking across the water to the town of Millhaven, home to the maximum-security penitentiary through which every federal inmate in Ontario was processed and at which some remained to serve their sentences. Then she thought: There are thirteen other penal institutions in the area. I should get my sorry you-know-what over there.

Carol, then sixty-three, initially imagined that she might visit men in segregation. But when she met with Blair, the first prison chaplain to answer her call, she suggested casually that maybe instead she could lead the men in reading good literature and discussing their reading in circles of civil discourse. After all, she had helped launch a number of book clubs in her community already. Her idea was to encourage a love of books and to offer the men heroes and heroines worth emulating. She also hoped, as she put it, to “hoist them into the middle class through reading.”The phrase was her metaphor for helping the men connect to a broader culture. It was also code for redemption through the development of greater literacy, empathy and social skills. Blair invited Carol to sit in on his Roman Catholic spirituality group and he spontaneously put the idea to the men. The men said, “Miss, when can we start?”

Thus it happened that the original core members of the Collins Bay Book Club came from the Catholic group plus a few mates they’d brought along from their “ranges.” (A range is a row of cells within a cellblock.) Despite its origins, the book club was strictly secular, and I was glad that Carol’s religiosity was not part of it. Carol and her husband bought about twenty copies of Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes for the first book club meeting that August—in 2009. Since then, she had started book clubs in four other federal prisons, including Grand Valley, the only federal women’s prison in Ontario. Many of those books the Finlays had also paid for out of their own pockets.

As I looked sideways at her at the wheel of her SUV, I could see that she was a smart, creative, determined woman and that five prisons likely would not satisfy her. She complained to me about how hard it was to juggle everything. From the set of her lower lip, it was clear that complaining was part of her process. It was the step just before impatience, where change could happen. In the months to come, I would see that volunteers who didn’t measure up would be gently encouraged to apply their skills elsewhere, prison staff who didn’t return her calls would be phoned back—repeatedly, assistants who bungled book orders would be replaced. Change would lead to success. And she was as fearless of change as she was of the men. I saw that two deep rivers ran inside Carol: compassion for the dispossessed and relentless drive. She was a Christian, but a hard-nosed one. Like Mortenson, Carol was keeping a promise to herself and to Jean Vanier to help the lonely and the marginalized. And maybe a promise to her mother and to Sir George Williams.

There was a postscript to that month’s book club. Just six weeks later, in April 2011, the mainstream media were echoing Graham’s hunches about Greg Mortenson. In a documentary televised on 60 Minutes, interviewees alleged that Mortenson had exaggerated his benevolent achievements and fabricated parts of his story. Around the same time, Jon Krakauer published Three Cups of Deceit, which detailed Mortenson’s alleged fabrications, including claiming to have built schools that others built, lying about getting lost on K2, misusing donors’ funds and misrepresenting his stay with the Wazir tribesmen as capture.

Although our book club didn’t know it then, this was only the beginning of two years of misery for Mortenson. Following an investigation by the attorney general of Montana, Mortenson agreed to repay one million dollars to his school-building charity, Central Asia Institute, for travel and other book-related expenses, that the charity had originally funded. Four American readers brought a lawsuit against Mortenson alleging fraud, but a judge dismissed the case about thirteen months after our book club meeting. Seven months after that, Mortenson’s co-author, David Relin, committed suicide by stepping in front of a freight train. His family released a statement through his literary agent saying that Relin had suffered from depression.

We had an opportunity to regroup with the men on the issue soon after the scandal broke that spring of 2011. Frank, who had heard about the accusations, still stood with Mortenson, saying he thought the criticisms stemmed from “a bit of jealousy.”“Mortenson could achieve with a thousand dollars what the government would need three million to do,” he said.

Ben pointed out that Mortenson had admitted in Three Cups of Tea that he had “procrastinated” on his accounts. Graham, who had been critical of Mortenson during the initial book club discussion, was now prepared to cut him some slack. “Is there anyone who writes a memoir who doesn’t embellish it or remember it differently from the way it happened or the way it occurred from somebody else’s perspective?” he asked. Now that Mortenson found himself under attack, the men seemed to be more forgiving.