Author of upcoming book Drama Bonds
Sarah Barrett is a former high school teacher who is now a professor in a Faculty of Education. Her research focuses on the day‑to‑day lives of teachers. She is also the daughter of Jamaican immigrants and grew up in and around Toronto.
After spending twenty years observing people as they struggled to reconcile their desires with their circumstances (both professionally and personally), she found herself drawn to the pen. If the book she wanted to read didn’t exist yet, then she would write it herself. She had already co-written high school science textbooks and contributed to several academic volumes, but some stories she wanted to tell demanded something more intimate: fiction. Drama Bonds is Sarah Barrett’s fiction debut and the culmination of her drive to tell these untold stories.
When she isn’t writing, you can find Sarah expressing herself through playing the piano, singing in a choir, and dabbling in various visual arts. She currently lives, works, and plays in and around her hometown of Toronto, Ontario, with her dear family.
Ordinary life around ’90s Toronto—it’s got way more drama than it has any right to. Though, really, with all those duties to follow and desires to chase, pulling a woman in far too many directions at once, what else could she expect?
These are the stories of the immigrant women and their families who won’t stop trying to hold the disparate threads of their lives together, desperately wrangling their duties and desires so they’ll sit together and play nice. Love hits hard, and so does grief. Sometimes, a woman just needs to be true to herself and prioritize her emotional safety. But how can she do that when so many scream that women with a sense of self‑preservation are actually just being selfish?
In these pages, you’ll meet various sisters and daughters, wives and mothers, all striving to reach for what they want without hurting the people they love. At times, there’s just too much change, movement, and divergent paths. Life’s not always fair, but sometimes, if you know where to look, it can be shockingly beautiful too.