The Boy In The Moon

“What on earth is my kid trying to show me?” is a daily refrain for parents during the year or so that it usually takes for their newborn offspring to learn how to talk. Celebrated journalist Ian Brown has wrestled with this same quandary for the past twelve years of his son Walker’s life. To celebrate the launch of his poignant memoir,The Boy In The Moon: A Father’s Search For His Disabled Son (Random House Canada), Brown will have a thought-provoking and candid on-stage conversation with his wife, Johanna Schellner of The Globe And Mail. There will be a Q&A with the audience.

The Boy in the Moon, Walker Brown, was born with a genetic mutation so rare that doctors call it an orphan syndrome. At twelve, Walker is still in diapers: he is globally delayed and can’t speak. “Sometimes watching Walker,” Ian Brown writes, “is like looking at the man in the moon: You see the face of the man in the moon, yet you know there’s actually no man there. But if Walker is so insubstantial, why does he feel so important? What is he trying to show me?”In The Boy In The Moon: A Father’s Search For His Disabled Son, which owes its beginnings to Brown’s original Globe and Mail series, he sets out to answer that question, a journey that takes him into deeply touching and troubling territory. “All I really want to know is what goes on inside his off-shaped head,” he writes, “But every time I ask, he somehow persuades me to look into my own.”Ian Brown is a feature writer for The Globe and Mail; the anchor of TVO’s two pre-eminent television documentary series, Human Edge and The View from Here; and for ten years was the host of CBC Radio’s Talking Books. His reporting and writing have won more than a dozen national magazine and newspaper awards. He is the author of two books, Freewheeling and Man Overboard, and the editor of the anthology What I Meant to Say: The Private Lives of Men.Johanna Schneller is a freelance journalist specializing in entertainment features. She has written cover stories for such publications as Vanity Fair, GQ, and Marie Claire. She writes the weekly Fame Game column in The Globe and Mail, and for two seasons, hosted TVO’s Saturday Night at the Movies.