Anne Coleman has a secret: as a teen she was in love with the much older, much lauded Canadian author Hugh MacLennan. She got to know him over seven summers in the 1950s, when they both spent time at cottages in the bucolic Eastern townships of Quebec. But this is not a Lolita narrative. Coleman doesn’t know if MacLennan ever loved her back. Her memoir is about how what didn’t happen between the pair affected her.

Coleman became a woman in the confines of upper-class WASP society in the days before sexual liberation. In MacLennan she saw possibility. He fed her strong intellect and encouraged her passionate nature. But he had limitations. He could neither save her from a doomed love affair with a brooding young émigré nor be a viable role model for her. Reacting to and against her CanLit crush, her dreams and desires took shape.

Coleman’s account is intimate and direct, evoking not only a particular time and place in history but the distinctive landscape between childhood and adulthood. Her memories are intensely self-centred, drawing on the romantic fantasies and speculations of a young girl. Is her description of MacLennan accurate? We’ll never know. This is not intended to be a contribution to his biographical canon.

In the end, what MacLennan really felt about Coleman doesn’t matter. The truth conveyed in the book is emotional, subjective, and one-sided, echoing Alice Munro’s stories of girlhood in their narrowness of location and point of view, as well as their concern with what is unspoken and unrealized.

There are times when this smallness does not work. The pacing can be slow. Characters’ inner worlds are not always compelling. Context for MacLennan’s significance as a writer is lacking.

What does work is Coleman’s insight that even our recollections of key events and large figures are not necessarily steeped in fact. They are prey to ego and imagination. That is their real authenticity and their charm. That is Coleman’s real secret to share.