PRESS RELEASE

FILMMAKER RECALLS 60'S FRANCE

Award-winning filmmaker Heather Cook is releasing an intimate memoir about her years as a young journalist who takes up modelling in 1960s Paris.

            "The fact is I'm better known for giving birth to guitarist Jesse Cook," says Cook, "but I have done a few other things in my time."

            Cook, who for many years made documentary films for the CBC Nature of Things, set out in her twenties on the adventure of a lifetime. Her memoir Pictures from a Darkroom Floor: My Life in France is the story of that formative and turbulent period, as writer/model in Paris and mother/pioneer in rural southwest France where she lived in a rambling old house and lost her heart to a place and a people.  

            Pictures from a Darkroom Floor gives readers a glimpse into the life of a young Canadian woman discovering herself in 1960s France, a time when you could still run into Picasso at a bullfight, Irving Penn at French Vogue or buy a house for $100 in a forgotten hamlet. Men's and women's roles were in flux. Through an impossible relationship Cook gradually learned to rebel against the constricted expectations for women.  Undaunted she dealt with the conflicts in her life as well as day-to-day challenges such as babies, divorce courts and the application of false eyelashes.

            In 1962, pregnant and unmarried, she made plans to have the baby on her own:

            Somehow in Paris, where women were the strong sex, though they pretended otherwise, where most people were non-believers, though they pretended otherwise, somehow in Paris my situation made me fearless, she writes. I was doing what I had to do. I didn't care what my parents thought, and I assumed that in Paris no one would think ill of me. I believed that as a foreigner, I was beyond the bounds of societal strictures. Everything was possible.           

            TWO LADIES PRESS is proud to announce the release of Pictures from a Darkroom Floor: My Life in France on September 17th, 2013 in Toronto, Canada.

Contact:  Heather Cook  

heathercookinfo@gmail.com