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Polley began as a child actor before becoming an acclaimed filmmaker, and her one book to date turns the same unflinching, patient camera she brought to her documentaries on her own life — a childhood on film sets, a concussion that upended her adult life, and a reckoning with a story she’d avoided telling for years. She writes the way she directs: carefully, with no interest in easy resolution.
By Lisanne Swart · 1 books · Personal Essays · Updated August 2026
Essays · MemoirOn my shelf
Run Towards the Danger: Confrontations with a Body of Memory
A collection of six personal essays examining formative and difficult experiences from Polley’s life — a childhood spent as a working actor, a severe concussion and the counterintuitive treatment that helped her recover, and a reckoning with an assault she experienced as a teenager. The title comes from the advice a specialist gave her during recovery: rather than avoiding what triggers her symptoms, to move directly toward it.
Notable for how deliberately Polley structures the collection — each essay approaches a different kind of danger she spent years avoiding, and the book itself enacts the advice in its title by finally writing directly toward what she’d circled around for years.
