Marguerite Orane Launches 'Forget It! What's the Point?'

It was an intimate affair as friends, family, clients, and well-wishers, came out to support Marguerite Orane at the launch of her second book, Forget it! What's the point?.

The Temple of Light Centre for Spiritual Living served as the perfect backdrop for the author and her guests to share in her experience of writing her 22,000- word school assignment turned-autobiography. Her brother, Douglas Orane, chaired the programme, guiding the proceedings with ease and humour.

Orane gave an animated reading of snippets of her book, accompanied by flutist Simone Kenny, who set the mood ahead of each reading with folk songs like Fi mi love, Mi cawfi and I saw my land in the morning. Beginning with her life in Jamaica with her mother and siblings and morning her mother's passing, followed by her love for coffee and how it helped her remain grounded and cope with living abroad and away from her first home, Jamaica, the chapters she read left everyone wanting more.

Orane also explained how writing the book plucked her from the safety of her comfort zone to explore more of herself. Still, her greatest joy from the experience comes from having her icon, the South African Anglican cleric and theologian Archbishop Desmond Tutu, write the foreword for her book.

The Jamaica-born writer who now lives in Canada, recounts in her book her move to the Great White North following the death of her mother. A graduate of Harvard Business School in the United States, it was at the University of Toronto less than a decade ago that she began this manuscript as part of her creative writing programme. Six years later, she has given birth to Forget it! What's the point? The final excerpt she read focused on her journey to entrepreneurship in Canada and the challenges she faced. Through it all, her favourite Bob Marley song, Three Little Birds, always kept her positive and motivated.

Along with being an author, mother and dog lover, Orane is also a strategy guide and leadership coach, running her company - Free and Laughing Inc. In that capacity, she advises and facilitates leaders of growing firms across the world to achieve clarity on the results they want and helps them with implementing strategies for success.

Wayne Chen, who brought remarks, described the book as inspiring and charged all to get a copy.