Beautiful Scars

Steeltown Secrets, Mohawk Skywalkers and the Road Home

By: Tom Wilson

Narrated by: Tom Wilson

Length: 5 hrs and 35 mins

Publisher's summary

"Bunny told me there were secrets about me that she would take to the grave, secrets that no one would ever hear, including me...."

Tom Wilson always felt something wasn't quite right. His parents, Bunny and George, were much older than other kids' parents. There were no baby photos of him in the house. At school, classmates called him Indian, despite his parents' Irish-Quebecois background. And as he got older, friends, lovers and even family members remarked on his uncanny resemblance to Bunny's closest relative, her niece Janie Lazare, whose father was a Mohawk from Kahnawake, Quebec.

Tom wouldn't learn the truth about his identity until he was 53, when a tour handler whose mother had known Tom's now deceased parents let it slip that he was adopted. It would be another two years until he worked up the courage to confront Janie with what the handler had told him, what all his life he had suspected. Janie - the woman whom Tom called cousin, whom he'd known his whole life, who had lived with Tom and Bunny after George died - immediately broke into tears and confessed. She was his biological mother.

In this incredible story about family and identity, carefully guarded secrets and profound acts of forgiveness, Tom Wilson writes about growing up as an outsider in two families - the family he lost and the family who took him in. His story takes us from working-class Hamilton of the 1960s and '70s, neighbourhoods peopled by fall-guy wrestlers, broke mobsters, and WWII vets, to today, as he continues his journey to connect with the man he now knows to be his father and with his Mohawk heritage and relatives, discovering Kahnawake chiefs, Brooklyn "skywalkers", and nomadic Arnold Palmer groupies among them.

With a rare gift for storytelling and a remarkable story to tell, Tom Wilson writes with unflinching honesty and extraordinary compassion about his search for identity and for the truth about his family. Moving, captivating and at times hysterically funny, Beautiful Scars is a story about the families who raise us and the families who course through our veins.

©2017 Tom Wilson (P)2017 Doubleday Canada

Critic reviews

• Finalist for the 2018 Kobo Emerging Writer Prize
• Finalist for the Hamilton Literary Awards
• National BestsellerA CBC Best Book of 2017

"Beautiful Scars is a frank and fair, raw and loving look at what it means to grow up with the silver spoon as far from your mouth as it can get, a confession that celebrates the miseries and joys of working-class life, of musicianship, of chasing secrets, of fighting through to discover the person you didn't realize you were. This is a remarkable, generous, big-hearted book that will stick with me for a long time." (Guy Vanderhaeghe, author of The Englishman's Boy, The Last Crossing and A Good Man)

"The book isn't just good. It's stunning.... The secrets around [Wilson's] life form a fundamentally Canadian story, rich in history and steeped in darkness. They also separate Beautiful Scars from the ranks of the typical rock memoir, and place it firmly on the shelf with the likes of Angela's Ashes and The Glass Castle - riveting accounts of family and secrets, poverty and peril, adversity and triumph." (Quill & Quire, starred review)

"A helluva story.... Wilson has the ear of the poet and the eye of the painter. He manages to pick just the right anecdote to sum up a personal feeling, at the same time as capturing a broader cultural moment." (Hamilton Spectator)

Powerful real life story

Too often we think of the lives of performing artists in terms of the glamour, and the glitz and the beauty of it all. Tom story “Beautiful Scars” takes us beyond that glamour, beyond that glory, into the reality of the Canadian performing artist trying to make his way in the musical world and share it with us so many of the pitfalls, challenges, and heartbreak that is the cost of that world. More than that, it is the story of Canada. Our folk music industry, the reality of pursuing your passions, your creative gifts, and the unknowing. All of the experience as we try and meld those gifts into the Creator’s vision for us. I love listening to Tom read his own works through the entirety. I’ve had the great pleasure of meeting Tom at the launch of our recent Artist Against Racism (aarcharity.org) campaign in March in Toronto. He captured my interest intrigue then, and I love how he shared his story through the book in such an easy to hear, easy to understand language, peppered with the humor and the reality that all Canadians can appreciate. Loved it. “I have told my truth the way I remember it and everything else is bullshit “ words all of us can benefit from embracing. Loved it all!

Absolutely fantastic!!!

If Tom can sing anything like he can write, I am his new #1 fan! And as a narrator, no one but no one could have touched his performance! Simply put: amazing!

Outta his head!

It is surprisingly light on music and songwriting and centres on Tom's personal and family life.
And what a life.
Tom's unpretentious delivery make it an authentic tale of a life on the wrong side of the tracks in one of Canada's most unglamourous towns.
You will laugh and you will cry, and you will hear about lives in Canada that rarely get told. Disabled war vets. First Nations. The addicted.


Hopefully Tom will write a sequel with more road stories .

A Good Memoir

A solid read by a wonderful narrator of stories comprising his life so far. I recommend it.