Our Daily Bread

Inspired by the real-life Goler clan living in an isolated Nova Scotia mountain community, Canadian author Lauren B. Davis’s historical novel Our Daily Bread (2011) chronicles two families living on North Mountain and the hardships they face, including physical and sexual abuse, incest, and psychological torture. Our Daily Bread was named one of the Best Books of 2011 by the Globe and Mail and The Boston Globe.

Set in a tiny mountain community outside Gideon, Nova Scotia, the narrative focuses on two vastly different but equally hardscrabble families. The Erskine clan, a family of incestuous, abusive crystal meth producers is led by the cruel Uncle Ray. Ray frequently beats his wife, Meg, so badly that she suffers convulsions. His son, Billy, often suffers black eyes, split lips, and missing teeth because of his father's violent outbursts. Conversely, the Evans family is led by their straight-arrow upright patriarch, Tom. Early in the book, Tom's common-law wife, Patty, abandons the family which includes their son, Bobby, and their daughter, Ivy. The man Patty runs off with belongs to the Corkum clan, another group of mountain-dwelling scoundrels who are only slightly less depraved than the Erskines. Despite the unholy actions of so many of the characters, Tom and Patty are viewed with deep disdain by many of the churchgoing residents of Gideon as violators of the Holy Bible, living in sin without an official marriage license and later separating.

Despite the differences between their families, fifteen-year-old Bobby befriends twenty-one-year-old Albert Erskine. Though Albert participates in the Erskines' meth operation and other illegal activities, he lacks the cruelty and sadism of other members of his clan. Until Bobby meets Albert, he is as morally upright as his father, never drinking, smoking, or engaging in petty theft. That all changes when he meets Albert, who slowly inducts him into a criminal lifestyle. On one of their first nights of drinking together, Bobby goes home to Albert's where they sleep on the filthy floor alongside a dozen children and countless mice, virtually on top of one another. Albert's personal code, which he shares with Bobby in increments, includes never passing out in your own vomit and never shacking up with a woman who tosses her tampons into the stove.



Meanwhile, Ivy suffers relentless bullying and persecution at school and is eventually taken under the wing of Dorothy Carlisle, an angelic woman who runs a small antique store in town. While Ivy spends her days polishing silver and preparing tea, Bobby follows an opposite path, drawn deeper and deeper into criminality. According to the author, Ivy's experiences are based on her own. When she was a nine-year-old girl dealing with her parents' alcoholism and mental illness, the author befriended a kindly elderly antique shop owner after whom Dorothy is modeled.

Before long, Albert's lack of overt evil alienates him from the rest of the Erskines, and he holes up in a tiny rundown shack on the edge of the family property. He also sets up the shack as something of a safe haven for the younger children who continue to suffer deprivations at the hands of the older Erskines like Uncle Ray, including incest, sodomy, burns, and lashings. These refugees come to refer to themselves as "the Others," barely subsisting outside the terrifying orbit of the elder Erskine men and the women who are too busy trying to survive themselves to protect the children.

As Albert continues to induct Bobby into the life of a hillbilly criminal, he inadvertently brings himself—and Bobby—back into the orbit of the Erskines' dangerous meth empire. Meanwhile, the story also examines the townspeople of Gideon's unwillingness to help the children who suffer daily predations by the Erskine patriarchs. They view the actions of the adults as so sinful that the children are beyond redemption, implying a strong sense of hypocrisy among these churchgoing citizens of Gideon. The exception to this is Dorothy, who regularly drops off packages of food and clothing for the Erskine children. Even still, she feels that she needs to do more but cannot think of how else she can help. At the end of the novel, in despair over her inability to save Albert, Bobby, and the younger Erskine children, Dorothy leaves Gideon forever.



Our Daily Bread is a deeply disturbing examination of religious intolerance, hypocrisy, and trauma.