Summary

Sarah Polley explains a dream she used to have: she used to wake up thinking she was the real Alice (Alice Liddell) of Alice in Wonderland. When she is fifteen years old, she plays Alice in Alice Through the Looking-Glass at the Stratford Festival. The role brings her so much pain and stress that she wishes to undergo serious spinal surgery to correct her scoliosis. Polley feels that undergoing such serious surgery will be a convenient excuse for not being able to go on stage as Alice night after night.

Polley then relates that her mother was dying of cancer for much of her childhood. Polley knows in her bones that she is in part to blame for the disease. She feels that she played the role of the pitiable child with a sick mother so well that she had somehow...