Andrew Clyde Little : Publications
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Books: Before Whispers Become Silence
In 2003 Andrew Clyde Little published Before Whispers Become Silence, a memoir. The memoir chronicles the author’s coming to terms with his mother’s suicide, when he was 17, and his father’s death a year later. Little’s mother had been a patient of Dr. Ewen Cameron, the Director of the Allan Memorial Institute, a mental hospital in Montreal. Dr. Cameron died in 1967, but in 1976 it was learned that he’d carried out brainwashing experiments for the CIA on his patients without their consent. So the memoir is a bit of a whodunit as we learn the reasons why Little’s mother took her own life. It also outlines some of the highlights of Little’s 25-year career as a television journalist in Quebec, a turbulent time in the province’s political history.

"Before Whispers Become Silence" is available for checkout at the Island Branch Libary, or can be ordered online at www.PenumbraPress.com, or at Amazon.com.
Some reviews of "Before Whispers Become Silence"

The Suburban, Oct 13, 2004
By Irene Chwalkowski

Andrew Clyde Little's memoir 'Before Whispers Become Silence' evokes a time and a place native Montrealers of a certain social class can easily remember and for that alone it is worth reading.

Little describes the clanging of the train rides into Montreal from the South Shore via the Victoria Bridge, the downtown Montreal and Southern County streetcars, the modest home in St. Lambert where he grew up, including the threadbare but comfortable living room furniture and the exact location of the box of chocolate Whippets hidden in his mother's kitchen. His years at Bishop's University in the Eastern Townships, involving more train rides, are depicted in the innocence of football games and dances, dating rituals and exam anxieties, quelled by the beginnings of a drinking problem that Little will battle for much of his life.

But it is in the emotional details of his journey where Little bares all, especially as he describes his mother's emotional problems and the evolution of his feelings for his father as they try to come to terms with her suicide.

Little describes in chilling detail how Trudy picks out and buys a rifle from a department store display, how she carefully bathes, perfumes and dresses herself in her best clothes before she goes to the basement where she takes her own life and shatters her son's in the process.

Another compelling reason to read this book is Little's brutal honesty recounting his alcoholism and prescription drug addictions - fuelled by the family tragedy and the subsequent death of his father from cancer the year after. He is left with an inconsolable emptiness, debilitating anxiety attacks and a stepmother he neither wanted nor trusts, but to his credit he snags a job as a reporter for The Sherbrooke Record, marries, and goes on to work for CP and the CBC.

One day Little gets an assignment to cover Dr. Ewen Cameron's experimental therapy at the Allen Memorial Institute. As he is given a demonstration of a technique called "deep sleep therapy" he starts to have suspicions that his mother, who was under Cameron's care throughout her illness, may have been a guinea pig for his research. But unable to get her medical records, Little is powerless to prove it.

Years later, the doubts resurface when he reads a New York Times article about CIA funded mind control experiments carried out by Cameron at the Allen in the late forties. This is where Little's journalistic skills come into play as he starts asking questions and doggedly wears down hospital administrators to finally get a copy of his mother's medical file. To those of us who were born in an age where the new class of antidepressant and antipsychotic drugs are used with some efficacy, the account of Trudy's diagnosis, couched in the overwrought medical jargon of the time, and subsequent treatment for her depression and anxiety, gives us a glimpse into the murky world of mental health practices of the day which included sleep deprivation, insulin induced comas, adrenaline desensitization, electroshock treatments and lobotomies.

We never quite learn exactly what treatments Trudy was subjected to by Cameron, but Little uses his imagination to fill in the blanks in the story, supplying conversations he supposes took place between the characters. He re-ignites Trudy's hopes of being cured every time she undergoes a new treatment, and her bitter disappointments when they fail. Heartbreakingly, Little relives her journey to a different degree in his own battles. The birth of his daughter provides Little with a breakthrough in his psychoanalysis and leads him to understand the complexities of his life and ultimately, provides him with the answers that had eluded him.

The discovery of deep and dark family secrets gives rise to questions about the reasons for Trudy's suicide. But as Little's guilt, induced by the family myth that his mother suffered a nervous breakdown after his birth, lifts, a nagging feeling persists that in this part of the book, Little has closed down and gives but a superficial dénouement of the mystery.

It's not easy to air family skeletons, but Little spoils the reader with the exquisite details of his youth in the first part of the book. He may be forgiven for glossing over the realities of his recovery; the whispers might easily have become silence if not for his determination to track down the truth. But having come so far, Little leaves the reader hanging.

In his epilogue, Little very thoughtfully provides a list of books by other authors detailing Cameron's experiments and the lawsuits brought against him. It's too bad Little didn't delve more deeply into that aspect of the story himself, but understandable, since Little believes that his mother, after all, escaped from Cameron's more sinister experiments.

But it would have been satisfying to learn more about the treatments she did receive, if only to understand how far the world of psychiatry has come. Or perhaps, conversely, how little it has changed.

Little's book is beautifully written, but more importantly, it sheds light on the hidden shame of mental illness, the way that peoples' lives, not only of the afflicted but of those who love them, are changed irrevocably by these mysterious workings of the mind and how often the medical world is powerless, even today, before the enormity of the questions.
Before Whispers Become Silence: A Memoir, by Andrew Clyde Little, Penumbra Press, 278 pp

The Sherbrooke Record September 24, 2004
Reviewed by James Ferrabee

This is a memoir of a Montreal man who grew up in the 1940s and 1950s as an only child in a middle class family whose world fell apart while he was at university when his mother committed suicide and father died of cancer a year apart. Those two events set him on a lifetime search to clear up the mysteries buried deep in his family’s history.

The result is not only a memoir; it is a mystery story as well. That is a difficult combination to pull off without it degenerating into pathos or worse. All this was taking place while he and his wife raised a family, and Andy carried on a successful career as a TV reporter and producer at the CBC.

The first part of the book takes place in the mainly English-speaking community St. Lambert, where he went to school, and at Bishop’s University in Lennoxville, where he had a chance to shine as a leader, write for The Record, become an actor and meet his wife, the anchor of his life. A university of that size breeds close friendships for life.

Again and again through this book those friendships proved to be pillars he grabbed onto along the potholed road he took through a bout with alcoholism and then a prescription drug addiction. He never hit the gutter, but as thousands know, people can live more or less normal lives while inhabiting the world of addiction. He got through both without doing too much damage by sheer willpower and with the help of his wife.

The person who haunts the book from beginning to end is his mother, Trudy. She was a talented musician and especially a singer before she married. Unraveling the story about her growing up and early married years, until she took her own life a few weeks after Andy registered for college, is theme of the book.

It helps that Andy was trained a reporter because there were a lot of questions to ask and he had to over come the reticence of a generation that grew up in the 1920s and 1930 to talk about themselves and their families. In the end, he appears to have found the answers that satisfied him.

Little wandered into a literary genre – a personal memoir – that is difficult to sustain reader interest because it is inevitably so personal. It ends by being successful because Andy has shaped the story so well it describes how three generations removed from our children, now in their thirties and forties, lived their lives and what their values were. And he has crafted his story superbly, making sure it moves along at a good pace, and pulling the reader through to the end where the mystery surrounding Trudy’s suicide is cleared up.

James Ferrabee is a senior consultant and columnist for www.irpp.org and was a college mate of the author.

The Ottawa Citizen
Wednesday, June 16, 2004
Reprinted: The Montreal Gazette
Saturday September 24, 2004

Byline: Bruce Deachman

A writer reconstructs his history: After years of agonizing over his mother's suicide and his father's death from cancer, Andrew Little felt an overpowering need to 'fill in the blanks,' writes Bruce Deachman.

'Within five years of her death, they had come out with tranquillizers which might have enabled her to live longer. The paradox of that, though, is that if she had lived five years longer, she would have been one of Cameron's guinea pigs."

Sitting in the bright living room of his Mooney's Bay home, Andrew Little speaks openly, eloquently and matter-of-factly about his mother Trudy's life and death. He's had a long time to think about it.

In the fall of 1953, Mr. Little, then 17 and fresh out of high school, left his parents' home in St-Lambert, just south of Montreal, to attend Bishop's University in Lennoxville, Que. He had barely settled in when he learned that his mother had purchased a rifle, taken it down to the basement and killed herself.

Mr. Little believed then, as he sometimes does now, that if he hadn't left home for school, things might somehow have turned out differently.

"One of the things that I realized has fundamentally changed as a result of writing this book is that I have a profound love and appreciation for my father, and how important he was. Even though I didn't realize it at the time. He was always there, and he was always in my corner in his own way. When I look back on it, with what he put up with and what he had to endure, the man was really an incredibly stable part of my life.

"But I always felt sad that he died before we had a chance to be adults together."

Mr. Little has had almost as much time to reflect on his father's life. In the early days of 1956, within a year-and-a-half of his mother's passing, Mr. Little's father, Willis, died of cancer. The two had been emotionally distant for years, a detachment exacerbated by Willis's remarriage soon after Trudy's death. Willis refused to acknowledge to his son that he was dying of cancer. Andrew never let on that he already knew.

Mr. Little's memoir, Before Whispers Become Silence, which will be launched with a reading by the author tonight at the National Library, is a riveting, often harrowing, account of Mr. Little's search for the story behind his mother's death.

Trudy's promising music career ended with the severe post-partum depression she suffered following Andrew's birth in 1936, and her later sessions with the psychiatrist, Dr. Ewen Cameron (who would go onto notoriety for his CIA-funded brainwashing experiments at Montreal's Allan Memorial Institute), ultimately failed to resolve her problems.

There was more, of course, to Trudy's darkness than the birth of her son, and Mr. Little guides readers to these revelations with a chilling, yet refreshing, candidness. By the time we approach each truth, we already strongly suspect what we'll find, yet that knowledge somehow doesn't lessen the suspense or impact. At times, too, we are aware of things that the narrator, especially when he's recounting events from when he was a youngster, doesn't yet fully comprehend, an advantage that leaves readers feeling uneasy.

At other times, sudden surprises can knock the wind out of readers. A CBC journalist in Montreal in the early 1960s, Mr. Little finds himself one day at the Allen Institute, where Dr. Cameron is holding a press conference for a new treatment called Deep Sleep Therapy. Seeing Dr. Cameron for the first time ignites all these unanswered questions in Mr. Little. But the chill comes later when, walking back to his office, Mr. Little unexpectedly wanders into Eaton's department store, where he retraces his mother's gun-purchasing day.

"I don't know why I did that," Mr. Little recently admitted. "I just had an urge to, to walk those steps.

"The idea of her buying a rifle was not something that I could easily contemplate. The rest of it, the way she eventually killed herself and even her decision, I had no trouble thinking through."

Before Whispers went through a number of incarnations before reaching its present shape.

In 1991, when Mr. Little retired from the Ottawa CBC, where he worked as a field producer for Wayne Rostad's On the Road Again, he bought a computer and began writing a fictionalized memoir, which, over six years, eventually numbered about 120 pages.

In 1997, teaching fourth-year journalism at Carleton, a colleague pointed out that Mr. Little, who had just turned 60, could take courses for free.

He decided to finish his masters degree in English, which he'd begun at McGill 40 years earlier, only to quit after six weeks. He convinced Carleton's English faculty to let him complete his memoir for his thesis.

"I needed a deadline," says Mr. Little. "I was a journalist all my life; I needed someone to tell me to get it done."

But it wasn't nearly that easy. Mr. Little recalls draft after draft being returned by his adviser, Tom Henighan, with the recurring comment that it just didn't work. A year later, Mr. Little went for a contemplative walk and decided to stop: He didn't need an MA, and he certainly didn't need this grief. He went home, threw his manuscript in a drawer, sat down at his desk, and, inexplicably, started to write.

"I wrote and I wrote and I wrote and I wrote," says Mr. Little. "I wrote for four or five hours. And when I was done, I e-mailed it off to Tom.

"And the next day, back came the e-mail, saying, 'Finally, you're writing the book I knew you could write.'"

Eventually, the adjudicators who awarded him his degree also convinced him to turn his thesis into a book.

Perhaps he never really could have quit. He admits he's always felt an urgent need to know what happened to his mother, and that he also wanted to leave a record for his own children. "They've never met a single living relative of mine," he notes. "I wrote this to fill in the blanks."

When asked about the book's cathartic value, Mr. Little offers a lovely analogy: "It's as if I had all the facts in my hand, like confetti," he says. "Writing the book, I just kind of gently tossed them in the air and caught them again, and somehow those facts settled more comfortably in my hands."

Fascinating Story About Depths of the Soul

"Before Whispers Become Silence"
By Andrew Clyde Little

Part-time Island resident Andy Little has just released his newest book, "Before Whispers Become Silence."

The book is a memoir. In it, Little chronicles his 30-year search for the reasons behind his mother's suicide. The search includes a review of her treatment by a psychiatrist who was using CIA funds to finance brainwashing experiments on his patients without their consent.

Little goes back to the turn of the century and the adoption of his illegitimate grandmother and her later marriage to an abusive Methodist minister.

Trudy Little suffered a nervous breakdown shortly after the author was born in 1936. She never really recovered and ultimately committed suicide in 1953.

Little writes of his years of struggle. He briefly turned to alcohol and later prescription medication. He had a bout with agoraphobia, an abnormal fear of open or public places.

Treatment at the Allen Memorial Institute corrected the agoraphobia but not the addiction. That took a stint with a psychoanalyst.

With the help of analysis, Little kicked the prescription drug habit and found answers to 30 years of questions about his mother's suicide.

Those are the bare bones of an outline of "Before Whispers Become Silence." The book may sound oppressive and depressive. Astoundingly, it's not.

Instead, the reader is treated to a great narrative. There are times when the story line plummets into the depths of sadness and oppression, but the author never wallows there. He descends, explores, comes to terms and proceeds onward.

The story takes place in Canada, Little's homeland. There are, or course, references to locales and brands peculiar to that country, but the story itself holds so much that is universal to all of us that there is no detraction from the way the story draws the reader in.
Where Little doesn't know factually what happens, he "novelizes" the events surrounding an episode in his narrative.

These passages are always printed in italics so the reader clearly knows where reality and imagination separate, but the flow of the writing proceeds seamlessly between the two.

Take, for example, the part of the memoir where Little's Aunt Doris shares what she knows about the arrival Litte's grandmother into the arms of her adoptive family.

"As Doris continued, I tried to imagine the scene. I'd been to Moncton and seen pictures of my great-grandparents, so that helped.

"A light rain falls in the pre-dawn gloom, misting the gentle hills that flow down to the Bay of Fundy. There had been a cover of snow on the ground the night before, when Henry and Nancy Colpitts went to bed. This morning it's gone, pulled from beneath the wooden garden furniture like a magician's parlor trick, leaving tables and chairs undisturbed.

"'According to Mother,' Doris continued, 'it was my grandfather who discovered her that morning.'"

Little then imagines the discovery. The reader is carried through distance and time to that morning when the baby is found on his great-grandparents' doorstep.

Little brings the reader the scene in its entirety. The smells, the feel of the chill in the air, the quality of light, the sound of the babe's lusty cry are all captured in words and there for the reader to experience.

This is a memoir worth reading. It has its dark moments, to be sure, but those moments give the story depth and power leading to the ultimate redemption.

The book won't be officially launched in Canada until the Spring. For now, you can order it from Little. Call him at 778-4018 to reserve a copy from the next shipment.

Laurie Krosney, Sun Staff Writer, The Anna Maria Island Sun, Feb. 11, 2004

Island journalist's memoirs read like mystery novel
Book review
By Rick Catlin
Islander Reporter

It's too bad regular winter Island resident Andy Little isn't as well known as other Canadian broadcast journalists such as Peter Jennings of ABC News, Morley Safer of 60 Minutes, or Robert McNeill of the McNeill-Lehrer Report. If he were, Little's recently published memoir, "Before Whispers Become Silence," could easily be on the New York Times Bestseller List.

The Detroit-born Little is well known in Canada as the producer-writer of the popular television show "On the Road," but regretably his fame hasn't spread too far south of the border, except on Anna Maria Island, where he and wife Dolce winter every year.

"Whispers," however, is likely to be a best-seller in Canada.

It's not just another memoir by a crusty old journalist, recounting the gin-swilled days of stalking the hot story of the day and having the lead on the 6 o'clock news.

Not so.

"Whispers," immediately, but unintentionally, turns into a mystery thriller that leaves the reader unable to put the book down until Little solves the puzzle of why his mother committed suicide in 1953.

The mystery is the memoir, as Little's own life and career are forever linked to his mother's suicide and his search for answers.

It's a mystery that takes him nearly 50 years to uncover and believe the final truth, and reveal it in his book.

When Little decided to write the story, however, he realized that the actual beginning of his quest must take him back to the Great Depression of the 1930s, when his mother was just a teenager. It was a journey he was reluctant to take because he may not like what he finds.

As the ancient maps of the New World used to say, "Here be dragons and demons."

Oh yes, there are buried family secrets.

And who among us does not have a family or a past, or both, with deep, dark secrets to hide?

In the ultimate shocker, particularly for the mystery novel Little has unwittingly created, his search uncovers evidence that his own mother's death could be linked to a CIA ó yes, that CIA ó test program in the 1950s, in which the agency†paid American and Canadian psychiatrists to adminster drugs such as LSD to their own patients to learn how allied soliders in the Korean War might have been brainwashed by the North Koreans.

Years after Trudy Champion Little put a .22-caliber rifle to her head just days before another visit to the respected Montreal psychiatrist who was treating her for depression and mental illness, Little, in the course of a broadcast assignment, came face to face†with the same doctor and the medical file.

His own mother's doctor and her file. The doctor who treated her unsuccessfully for nearly seven years. The doctor who failed Trudy Little. Are the answers Little needs hidden within that file?

Does "the file" also contain answers to Little's own admitted demons and shortcomings?

Where does the ultimate truth lie?

Is it buried forever in a CIA vault in Langley, Va., hidden in a doctor's office in Montreal, or maybe back in Windsor or Detroit, where his mother was raised in the 1920s and 30s.

Or, just maybe, the final answer is found from a 78-year old woman in a Clearwater, Fla., condominium, who might provide Little his final absolution.

"Whispers" is the story of the horror of a family secret so horrible it was stonewalled for nearly 80 years, and the reader must remember that it really is a memoir, not a mystery novel. Little doesn't have to develop his characters as smartly as a Robert Ludlum or Frederick Forsythe, and we're sometimes disappointed that some of the sub-players aren't fully explained and the plot occasionally slows.

Little's search for answers are the plot, and the reader should not be dismayed if the trail sometimes grows cold, then warm, then cold again.

Yes, Little's purpose in writing the book is a memoir to himself and his family, and to quell his own accompanying demons and personal tragedies.

But Little also feels a responsibility to tell those with the same family secrets that you are not alone and those secrets should not be buried. It's OK to talk about them, it's OK to find the truth and bring it out into the open, however painful that truth may be, before everyone and anyone who knows the truth is 6 feet under, before the whispers become silence.



SIDEBAR
Little to speak at library

Author Andy Little will discuss the message of "Before Whispers Become Silence" at the Island Branch Library at 5701 Marina Drive, Holmes Beach, at 2 p.m. Tuesday, Jan. 27.

Little will also autograph copies of the book, and talk in open forum on the issue of child abuse and incest, as expressed in his book.

Little and wife, Dolce, have wintered on Anna Maria Island for the past 12 years.

He is a member of the Anna Maria Island Community Center board of directors and also sits on the board of the Anna Maria Island Historical Society. In addition, he is the volunteer public relations director for the Center and teaches a class there on creative writing. Dolce teaches a class in yoga at the Center and is also an Historical Society volunteer.

from "The Anna Maria Islander" , Jan 21, 2004
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