Ambiguity vs. veracity

This post is a disclaimer.

When I was in high school, a memoir about addiction was picked up by Oprah’s book club. You might remember it too — the book’s cover was light blue and had a hand covered in rainbow coloured sprinkles. It’s a poetic drug reference, presumably. After being launched to O Network fame overnight, the young memoirist was 2004-era canceled for authoring high quality fiction — book clubs that were more usually beholden to the bestsellers lists and library kits instead debated memoir as a genre. What is representative, really? It was too good to be true. To this very moment, the book’s Wikipedia page has a detailed subsection that describes what reads like an account of a vicious doxxing: “Doubts on its authenticity.” It’s a wonder I ever got bold enough to write at all.

Gratefully, I’m not a memoirist. My primary concern is the emotional or affective register of this text.

I am, above all, loyal to Belcourt’s (2019) aesthetic preference for ambiguity over veracity.

“My story isn’t linear, and in these pages, I marshal the forces of poetry and theory to create a kind of memoir that stretches as well beyond the boundaries of my individual life" (n.p.) 

“Perhaps this romance with the not yet makes me a bad lover,” Belcourt said.

“So be it” (p. 97).