Candy Palmater ran down a dream and made it her reality

Reviewed by Marci Becking

It’s been almost a year since Candy Palmater passed into the Spirit World.  It’s still hard to believe that she’s gone.

In her memoir, Running Down a Dream, which she had finished the manuscript before she passed, Candy doesn’t sugar coat anything. She wrote about her family, education, and work experience, self-empowerment, and relationships. The former lawyer was a much-loved person and spoke on issues of self-acceptance, love, kindness, Indigenous rights, queer rights, and self-empowerment.

“I’m not a shiny, perfect woman who has it all, writing a book about her shiny, perfect life. I’m bruised and dented. I’ve had some hard knocks and some lucky breaks. I’ve won some and I’ve lost some. I’ve been chasing down a dream…This book is the story of that dream. In reading it, I hope you are encouraged to step out onto the road and start running down your own dream.”

She goes into detail about her family and how they wove through her life at various stages. Holding nothing back, she still seems to find humour in some dark times. But that’s Candy. I appreciated her candidness of food addiction and how it was a coping mechanism when in Law School. One can feel how deep her love was for her family and can’t help but feel so overwhelmingly happy for Candy when she finds her soulmate Denise.

I was interested to learn that Candy worked as a public servant for the Government of Ontario in Aboriginal Affairs as a policy analyst, then moved to the Department of Education making a difference with Mi’kmaq education.

If you enjoyed watching The Candy Show on APTN or seeing her on the Trailer Park Boys or in the CBC series Run the Burbs; saw her as a regular guest host on The Social or listened to her on CBC Radio’s Because News or The Next Chapter, Radio One’s Q or The Candy Palmater Show on CBC Radio, you will love this book.

Denise Tompkins, Candy’s widow and manager, wrote the Forward and Afterword.

There is also a plea at the end of the book seeking information on the whereabouts of Candy’s friend, Darryl Ferneyhough, last seen at NRG nightclub on Gottingen Street, Halifax, Nova Scotia, on May 13, 2001.  If you have any information, please contact your local police service or Crime Stoppers. For more information, please visit: Halifax Rainbow Encyclopedia: Darryl Ferneyhough.

Running Down a Dream by Candy Palmater, Harper Collins Publishing, 2022.
ISBN 978–1-4434-5509-1