Amy Turner Turns Tragedy Into a Memoir

In 2010, Wainscott resident Amy Turner was crossing Newtown Lane in East Hampton when she was hit by a pickup truck as she was in the crosswalk.

“It was Saturday, July 10, and I had just picked up my dry cleaning,” Turner recalled in a recent interview. “As I was leaving the cleaners, I’m in the crosswalk and a pickup pulls onto the street where Hampton Chutney now is, going north. I can see him in the windshield and think he’s going to stop.

“Instead, he accelerates,” Turner continued. “He must have been looking the other way. He hits me, I’m thrown back, I smash my head. I didn’t realize it at the time, but I was dragged about 20 feet. When the truck stops, hot air is blowing on me and my dry-cleaning is on top of my head. I was thinking, ‘Oh my God. I just got hit by a truck and I’m going to die from the plastic on my dry-cleaning.’”

But Turner didn’t die. Instead, she was helicoptered to Stony Brook University Hospital and released only 10 hours later.

“I just had scrapes and a concussion,” she said. “It was almost as shocking going home after being hit by a truck.”

Though she escaped serious injury, that singular event would have a profound effect on Turner, not because of the immediate repercussions of the accident itself, but due to the fact that it led her on a journey that took her back in time to another traumatic moment in her life — one that had occurred decades before and which she barely remembered.

Something about the 2010 accident triggered memories of an event that occurred in the 1950s and it led to her writing “On The Ledge,” a memoir about hidden truths and the price that secrecy can exact on families.

“My brother died unexpectedly a month after my accident, so I found myself not only recovering from the accident, but also a trauma buried far deeper and one I thought I had dealt with — it was the day my father climbed out on a ledge at a hotel,” Turner said.

On Friday, September 16, at 6 p.m., Canio’s Books hosts the book launch of “On The Ledge” at Christ Episcopal Church in Sag Harbor, where Turner will be in conversation with author and friend Susan Scarf Merrill.

Turner explains that she was just 4 years old on November 14, 1957, on the morning her father, Harold M. Turner Jr., climbed out onto the ledge of his fifth floor room in the Taft Hotel in New Haven, Connecticut.

“It overlooks the town green, so a lot of people were around at 9 a.m. in November,” she said, noting that though the family lived in Bronxville, New York, her father had attended Yale University, so it was a place he felt connected to.

As fate would have it, two priests were among the spectators down on the street who saw Harold Turner out on the ledge. While one waited below on the sidewalk in case last rites were needed, the second priest was granted permission to go up to the room and talk to the distraught man on the ledge outside the window.

“There was a lot of serendipity. He was the right priest at the right time. He was 32 years old, and he spoke to my father. He said, ‘Don’t move. I’m afraid of heights.’ That appealed to my father’s empathy and he was able to bring him in,” said Turner. “I was 4 ½ and all I knew was my father was there and then next, he was put in a mental hospital. My mother was an active alcoholic, she was left alone with four kids and she took her last drink and stepped up to care for us.”

While the family stayed together in the years that followed, throughout her childhood, Turner never learned the full story of her father’s emotional struggles and the moment on the ledge. But she could always sense that something was not right.

“I was constantly warned not to get my father upset. Children pick up on the tension,” she said. “I knew making a mistake could have life and death consequences if I do the wrong thing. You don’t quite know where the line is. At 16, I went to a psychologist, I might have been smoking cigarettes, or maybe I was depressed — and that’s when it came out.”

Throughout her teens and beyond, Turner had therapy sessions and she felt as if she had gotten down to the deepest level of grief, abandonment and fear surrounding her father’s suicide attempt. But the accident in East Hampton and subsequent sessions with an acupuncturist, who also offered somatic-oriented therapies, revealed something new to her on a much deeper level.

“I think in a way, processing that accident allowed me to finally come to terms with my father’s vulnerability and looking down from that ledge,” she said. “I was able to face it in a much more visceral way.

“It was wonderful for me. I had an epiphany in one session. I thought it was the truck trauma, and then I started crying and I hadn’t cried for months,” she added. “I’m 4 years old, this is what it is.”

In the course of coming to terms with her father’s experience, Turner, who only had the bare bones details of the event, went back to newspaper archives and located the story (with photos) of her father on the ledge when it ran on the front page of the Daily News in November 1957. But she soon realized that wasn’t the only place it ran. In fact, more than 80 papers in tiny towns and big cities across the country, and even some overseas, had run the story and the photos.

Had it occurred today, there’s a good chance the family would have been mercilessly harassed once the story went viral on the various online platforms.

“We were fortunate, in a way, that there was no social media,” said Turner. “What’s interesting to me is, back then, that they published our street address. A reporter conned his way into our house in Bronxville and stole our Christmas card picture, which he found in the frame. The photo was taken in November 1957 — within two weeks of him going out on the ledge.”

While both her parents have since died — her mother in 2000, her father in 2004 — Turner notes that later in life, her father found happiness and a new sense of purpose.

“My father had serious depression on and off my entire life. But he became a social activist and when he was about 70, my parents split up. He got remarried and I call it his renaissance,” said Turner. “He lived a long life, I didn’t lose him. By the time I was ready to write this book, it was good for me that they were both gone.”

Turner, who is not a writer by trade, worked as an attorney until 1999 before becoming a 7th grade social studies teacher at Springs School. She retired from teaching in 2015 and this is her first book. She admits that she didn’t initially set out to write a memoir.

“I’d always wanted to write, but something stopped me,” she said. “I call it the Turner sludge. My father had writer’s block.”

But after being hit by the truck, both her therapist and her acupuncturist encouraged her to write about it as a way to combat any PTSD, though at first, she resisted.

“I was like a toddler,” said Turner.

Then one day, she began writing a thank-you note to someone who had attended her brother’s funeral, and suddenly, Turner found connections to her back story that went far beyond the bounds of a typical thank-you note.

“I continued to write and showed it to a friend who was an English professor and a freelance editor,” Turner explained.

With encouragement, she enrolled in the Iowa Summer Writing Festival, where she took a weekend workshop with author Hope Edelman. That led her to apply the following year for a full manuscript workshop with Edelman. It was the push she needed to get the story on paper and into book form.

Turner feels that the good news in the story is that these days, people with emotional and psychological issues like those of her father have access to better treatment options and far greater understanding. As far as her own journey is concerned, working through the hidden and unspoken trauma of her youth has brought her to a new level of acceptance and awareness.

“It’s through that process at age 57 or 58 that I came to understand myself and recognize myself in an entirely different way,” Turner said. “My identity reformed. I realized I was stuck and didn’t know it. It was a transformative process for me, but I think that it will go on for the rest of my life.”

Canio’s Books celebrates the book launch of “On The Ledge” with Amy Turner in Conversation with Susan Scarf Merrill on Friday, September 16, at 6 p.m. at Christ Episcopal Church, 5 Hampton Street, Sag Harbor. Turner will also take part in an author talk at East Hampton Public Library, 159 Main Street, East Hampton, on Wednesday, September 21, from 6 to 7:30 p.m. The talk will be offered in person and concurrently on Zoom. For details, visit easthamptonlibrary.org.