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 sarah polley’s documemoir stories we tell:
the refracted subject

kate j. waites

Sarah Polley’s documemoir Stories We Tell (2013) stretches the boundaries

of the memoir genre while adding a meta-twist to the documentary film. It
does so by documenting the personal journey that finds her investigating her
muddled parentage through the lens of artifacts and interviews with family
members and friends, while foregrounding both the director and filmmak-
ing process. With deft editing and a postmodern method of approaching her
subject—Super 8 archival home-video footage laced with faux home-video,
photographs, re-enacted scenes, email correspondence delivered in voice-over,
and a narrative within a narrative—the director balances multiple perspec-
tives to arrive at an approximation of the “truth” concerning her deceased
mother’s shadow life and its impact on her family, and more significantly, on
Polley’s own refracted identity. By employing fictional elements in her self-
reflexive film, Polley highlights the degree to which the self that is represented
in and produced by the film is a dynamic, ongoing performance constructed
in relationship to others.
The memoir genre has exploded and expanded since the 1980s, opening
its doors to everyman and everywoman with a story to tell, and branching
out into multiple forms and sub-genres. Recognizing the genre’s flexibility,
Susanna Egan sees the collaborative element in film as particularly suitable
to “contemporary autobiography,” which is an “interactive genre,” in terms
of “subjects . . . genres . . . and readers” (2). In the view of some critics, such
as G. Thomas Couser, the “high-def” memoir, which relies as much on dra-
matic “scene” as narrative “summary,” has veered perilously close to fiction
(77). Despite such criticism, however, the memoir’s wide-ranging and myr-
iad forms, including digital and electronic media, together with its liberal
appropriation of fictional techniques—epitomized in Mary Karr’s The Liar’s
Club—has fueled its popularity. To this point, in his groundbreaking work

Biography 38.4 (Fall 2015) © Biographical Research Center

544 Biography 38.4 (Fall 2015)

Telling Lies in Modern American Autobiography, Timothy Dow Adams argues

that “What makes autobiography valuable . . . is not its fidelity to fact but
its revelations . . . of self” (170). Polley’s sleight of hand documemoir both
employs fictional techniques and engages multiple voices to reconstruct her
mother’s married life, with an eye, ultimately, toward revealing the “I-now”
self that emerges from her investigation. Ultimately, as with a written text, the
viewer is invited to complete his/her own “reading” of Stories We Tell and the
construction of Polley’s “narrative identity” within it. Douglas Ezzy explains
that “a narrative conception of identity” reflects the ways that “Lives and texts
are not configurations ‘out there.’” One cannot, he cautions,

assume that lived experience is in some way separate from its narration as if one
were reality and the other fiction. Action is always symbolically mediated with sym-
bols acting as a quasi-text that allows conduct to be interpreted. (244)

In Polley’s work, of course, the narrative self is a cinematic storyteller who

transforms actual email messages into dramatic scenes, and employs actors to
create faux home video footage. Fictional devices, a commonly used strategy
in the literary memoir, highlight the constructed nature of identity and mem-
ory-driven storytelling, a central theme of the film. An established director of
narrative film,1 Polley employs the camera as mediator for her self-explora-
tion. Consistent with the notion of performatism, the “primary” or “ostensive”
frame, moreover, is storytelling, as seen through its objective correlative—the
camera, or the various “cameras” that function throughout the film.2 The
camera focuses alternately on the interviewees and on Polley herself, calling
attention to the crucial role of the other in her self-representation. Such a
strategy cushions the impact of the family revelation at the film’s center, dis-
rupting Polley’s personal identity while pointing to a more fully conscious,
if refracted, subjectivity abetted by and within the frame of filmic narrative.
In effect, Polley produces, with the camera, what the writer does with
the pen (or the keyboard) and the artist does with the brush. Indeed, Polley’s
self-presentation follows in a long tradition in which the artist, according to
art critics W. Ray Crozier and Paul Greenhaigh, “seeks to tell the truth about
oneself and to others” (30). As with most artists’ self-portraits, the memoir-
ist “is not just engaged in self-reflection but has a job to do. . . . The artist
has to translate his or her appearance in the mirror into some representation”
(29). Through this process of self-representation, the “self” necessarily be-
comes an “other” in relationship to the film’s “others,” specifically those who
are remembering Polley’s mother—the linchpin of the director’s narrative self.
These include Polley’s stepfather, biological father, siblings, mother’s broth-
er, and friends. The Observer’s Kate Kellaway—acknowledging the atypical
 Waites, Sarah Polley’s Documemoir 545

nature of Polley’s multi-versioned story—aptly names it “an extended family’s

portrait of itself ” (par. 3). The complex, and at times competing stories con-
cerning Polley’s mother’s life highlight the shifting sands of the dynamic self
under narrative construction.
“‘When you are in the middle of the story, it isn’t a story at all.’” Thus
begins Michael Polley, in the film’s opening minutes, quoting Margaret At-
wood’s narrator from Alias Grace. Michael is being videotaped while reading
his, ironically, third-person account of “Mick and Diane”—his written version
of marriage with Diane Polley until her premature death from cancer when
Sarah—in her mid-thirties at the time of filming—was just eleven years old.
This “narrative” account of Michael’s married life with Diane parallels Polley’s
storytelling and construction of her “self.” Seated in a sound-booth across from
his director-daughter who is stationed at a soundboard on the other side of the
glass, he begins narrating at her cue. This arrangement introduces an essential
element of the film and Polley’s memoir, revealing how identity and truth are
refracted and made both more complete and complex as a result.
As Michael narrates, a montage of images from both actual and manufac-
tured home video footage of Diane and Michael play out on the film screen.
The blurring of real with dramatized footage underscores the elusive bound-
ary between memory and imagination. The distinction between real and fic-
tional elements does become clear to the viewer, however, when, among other
clues, the director is taped giving notes to actors who “play” the younger Mi-
chael and Diane. At one point Michael tellingly notes that Diane fell in love
not with him, but with the exciting character he was performing on stage
when they met. Michael’s acknowledgment of this fact and Diane’s penchant
for role-playing—on stage and in her life—together with Polley’s liberal use
of staging, emphasize the performative nature of identity formation, which is
captured in the dramatization of the memorial service for Diane that Sarah’s
sibling Joanna remembers as more like a theatrical production than a service.
Wife, mother, actor, and casting director, Diane’s defining gusto for life
is reflected in a fleeting close-up of the ever-elusive Diane that occurs early
in the film. In it, Diane (played by Rebecca Jenkins) is looking longingly at
the rapidly moving landscape from the window of a train. We also see an
animated “Diane” twirling on a dance floor, running and playing with “Mi-
chael” and Sarah in the snow (in both real and faux video footage), and—as
testified to by interviewees—buzzing around her young children while multi-
tasking at home. In the hands of its capable director, the association between
Michael’s voiced memories and, later, those of the other interviewees, spliced
between video clips, is fluid, as is the transition back to Michael’s narrative. It
is not, however, sutured in the manner of cinematic realism, as the audience
is always reminded that a filmic memoir is in the making.
546 Biography 38.4 (Fall 2015)

In voice-over, Michael continues quoting Alias Grace’s commentary on

how life experiences, such as this one, have no meaning—are not a story—
until one has reflected on them. Until then, they are
only a confusion; a dark roaring, a blindness, a wreckage of shattered glass and
splintered wood. . . . It’s only afterwards that it becomes anything like a story at all.
When you are telling it, to yourself or to someone else.

Michael’s introductory narrative sets the stage for the film’s “splintered wood,”
or the varying views of, memories, and facts associated with Diane’s love af-
fair with Harry Gulkin, instigated while Diane was away from the family’s
Toronto home to perform in a Montreal play, Oh, Toronto.
During the tightly edited 108 minutes of film, we learn that Polley’s cin-
ematic inquiry began with two crucial questions initially entertained in a
veiled, humorous way by her siblings: Why does Sarah bear no resemblance to
her father, Michael? Initially posed by siblings Jon, Mark, Joanna, and Susy,
that question—the stuff of family legend—initiates Polley’s search for self. If
Michael is not her father, as she grew up believing, then who is she? Besides
prompting Polley’s exploration, it also leads to the film’s driving question:
who is Sarah’s real father—Diane’s lover Harry, or Geoff, an actor whom her
mother met while performing in a play. (Correcting his original denial, Geoff
admits—in a second interview placed at the end of the film—that he had had
a one-night stand with Diane.) Equally germane to Sarah Polley’s quest, and
the inimitable documemoir it produces, is the self-reflexive question she poses
to her significant others: “What do you think about this documentary being
made?” The complex process by which these questions are asked, answered,
and pieced together, forms the “splintered wood” or the segments of film, a
method aptly suited to the director’s aim of demonstrating “‘the vagaries of
truth,’” as Polley described in an interview (Kohn).
Indicative of her aim to weave all the contradictory and related strands
of memory and fact into a “story,” and by extension a “self” with agency,
Polley instructs her father at the outset of the film and to his bemusement,
to “Tell us the whole story.” She gives the same directive to Harry and her
siblings. In the absence of a single, identifiable “truth,” Polley aims for the
next best thing: the various accounts of this crucial epoch in Diane’s life—
from the perspective of her significant others—spliced together to make a
coherent whole like so many pieces of film in the editing room. In his mem-
oir Annie’s Ghosts: A Journey into a Family Secret, journalist Steve Luxenberg
takes a similar approach, albeit with lessened stakes. In seeking the truth of
the decades’ long “lie” his mother perpetrated about her mentally ill sister
that she shielded from his knowledge, the son comes to an unexpected and
 Waites, Sarah Polley’s Documemoir 547

fuller understanding of his mother as well as himself. His other-centered or

outwardly focused journalistic memoir ultimately turns back on him—his
“truth” and personal identity.
Polley takes a similar route in her documentary film journey. She “reads”
the text of her mother’s life through the eyes and memories of others so that
she may read and construct the text of her own life. The result here is a more
intricate self-portrait, since Diane’s affair—which Polley’s search unearths and
her own memory could not possibly have produced—has profound bear-
ing on the most fundamental aspect of identity—one’s biological parents.
Through her mining, and the filmic assemblage of facts and memories it pro-
duces, Polley reveals what she learns about her mother and its impact on her
understanding of “self.” Through the making of the film, she also documents
the long process by which she comes to learn and make sense of this informa-
tion, beginning at age twenty or so.
This metanarrative is evidenced in the numerous self-referencing gestures
sprinkled throughout the film. For instance, the documentary repeatedly fea-
tures the director at work behind the camera, while simultaneously suggesting
that she is the subject by placing her in front of the camera. Her appearance
as the protagonist of the film is complicated by the fact that Sarah Polley is
also a recognizable actor, as are the other principal characters, Michael, Di-
ane, and Harry. Highlighting the prominence of role-playing and Polley’s nar-
rative identity, vis-à-vis her mother’s, is a grainy, color videotaped image of
Polley’s face in one scene, which is immediately replaced by a matching black
and white videotaped close-up of Diane’s face. In this segment, the real Diane
is preparing for an audition in which she sings “Ain’t Misbehavin.’” Bon Iver’s
snappy “Skinny Love” then swells on the soundtrack as the images of Diane
roll on. He sings: “My, my, my, my, my, my my, my / Staring at the sink of
blood and crushed veneer / Tell my love to wreck it all / Cut out all the ropes
and let me fall.” As the soundtrack fades, Diane looks directly at the camera
and says, “Me? You want me?” as if she were suddenly aware of the camera,
before breaking out into a broad and mischievous smile. “Yes,” Polley—as
well as film viewers—might answer, “I want you.” Laced through Diane’s coy
performance on the video, Iver’s lyrics may also be understood as subtly al-
luding to Sarah’s “crushed” identity owing to her mother’s “veneer”—that is,
the duplicity with which she concealed her affair with Harry while married
to Michael. As her search and the film reveal, Polley is not the daughter of
Diane and Michael but of Diane and Harry, and more tellingly, Diane had
seriously considered aborting her. In his narrative Michael, who knew about
the prospect of the abortion but not about Diane’s affair, concedes that it is
“amazing how close we were to your never existing.” For this reason, the video
548 Biography 38.4 (Fall 2015)

clip of Diane’s rendition of “Ain’t Misbehavin’ / Savin’ my love for you” may
be viewed as an ironic acknowledgment that Polley’s mother, had, indeed,
“saved” her daughter by choosing to give birth to her. Moreover, given Diane’s
complicated loyalties to Michael, Harry, and Sarah, the lines “I’m saving my
love for you” might be applied to all three of them. Ironically, too, Diane also
“saved” herself for her daughter’s filmic discovery of her mother. Framed this
way, Diane’s question—“You want me?”—implies the slipperiness of Polley’s
getting at the truth about, and from, her now deceased mother, as well as that
of her own identity.
Ostensibly about Diane, the film inevitably turns back on Sarah and to
the narrative method by which she explores truth and identity. In other filmic
self-referencing gestures, Polley’s brother John apologizes for “breaking the
fourth wall” of the film performance when he asks his interviewer-sister, ap-
parently spontaneously: “What’s this documentary film really all about?” She
answers off-camera, telling him she wants to explore “memory and the way
[my emphasis] we tell our stories.”
In addition to this obvious, though not uncommon,3 challenge to con-
ventional film-making methods—by which the documentary filmmaker en-
ters and becomes the subject in the frame and the filmmaking process is itself
exposed—the cameras, camera operator, boom, technicians, and monitors
are clearly visible at various junctures throughout the documentary, as if they,
too, were characters complicit in the telling of the “story.” Here, however, the
director/interviewer is also its self-reflexive subject. The viewer, then, is re-
peatedly reminded that storytelling and the fashioning of a self are both under
narrative construction.
One amusing instance occurs later in the film when a hand suddenly ap-
pears from the side of the frame holding up a makeshift scene card in front of
Michael as he responds to an interview question while seated in his kitchen.
Is it the director’s hand? The reference returns viewers to Mark’s recollection
of mother Diane’s multitasking “hand” used to keep clamoring children at
bay. The scene card also reads: “The Stories We Tell Shot 1 Take 3” (which is
crossed out twice and replaced by 4) Tangled Productions Inc.,” before go-
ing on to name the director and her assistants. “Tangled” alludes to the inter­
woven strands of the story—and of the self that is constructed, revised, and
reconstructed, in view of her mother’s duplicity on stage and in life. Similarly,
the original title, The Stories We Tell, was changed to Stories We Tell. By delet-
ing the article “the,” Polley highlights the contrast between the single, em-
phatic article and its absence, laying claim to an amorphous collection of sto-
ries rather than a single definitive one. In this way, the altered wording of the
title underscores the fact that this is not an individual’s memoir but rather, as
 Waites, Sarah Polley’s Documemoir 549

film critic Leah Anderst of Senses of Cinema, puts it, a “choral, relational auto­
biography” (1), even though the guiding hand here is clearly Sarah Polley’s.
In the opening scenes, for example, Sarah is depicted ushering Michael
into the sound booth and giving him notes, finally seating herself at the
soundboard with Michael in view, as mentioned previously. In one instance,
the director asks him to re-read a passage, thus announcing the fact that Mi-
chael, too, is an actor and that his narrative is another constructed perfor-
mance in the context of Sarah Polley’s documemoir. At one point, Michael
asks if the director’s approach to his studio recording, with three cameras roll-
ing, is “the normal way of doing things” for a documentary. Polley, also pic-
tured in the frame, says, “I don’t know,” and then concedes that it is “an inter-
rogation process we’ve set up,” again calling attention to the fact that this is
the director’s note to an actor, and Michael’s narrative is one version based on
his memories. This approach of including varying perspectives and memories
of Diane underscores the director’s aim to include “everyone’s point of view”
and “everyone’s experience,” as Sarah explains to Harry Gulkin, her mother’s
former lover and her biological father. What she doesn’t explain, but the film
ultimately reveals, however, is how her orchestration of “remembering” dem-
onstrates that storytelling is a mechanism by which one constructs one’s truth
and identity within the text of the film narrative. As Paul John Eakin explains:
“it is preferable to conceptualize the relation between the self and language as
a mutually constituting interdependency” (8).
This notion is re-enforced in the numerous allusions to the mechanics of
filmic “language” or storytelling. In the film’s opening, for example, we watch
as the director sets things up in the sound studio, and her siblings are situated
and hooked up to microphones. Later, several shots reveal the director stand-
ing behind the camera consulting with the camera operator while her assis-
tants situate the boom and lighting equipment.
This foregrounding of filmmaking mechanics is more liberally displayed
in the last third of the film, when most of the “splinters of wood” have been
pieced together and the director’s more frequent appearances in front of the
camera reinscribe her as the subject of the film as well as the subject that is nar-
ratively fashioned. In one crucial shot towards the end, for instance, Sarah is
seated across from former actor and filmmaker Harry, whom she now knows
to be her mother’s lover and her biological father—as evidenced in a previ-
ous close-up of the DNA report—at a table in his kitchen. In this startling
self-reflexive shot, she lifts and points a video camera at the camera which is
filming her and Harry at her direction. In this poignant scene, she shows the
viewer that filmic storytelling is not only a means of her constructing and
representing her identity, but indeed that the camera mirrors her refracted
550 Biography 38.4 (Fall 2015)

subjectivity, which is both informed by and formed through the varying per-
ceptions and recollections of others rather than limited to the memories of the
memoirist. Cinema Scope’s Adam Nayman observes that “Polley casts herself
as acted-upon subject and string-pulling puppet-mistress.” One senses, how-
ever, a whining note in a review that blames a director for the meta-gestures
by which she displays the tools of her trade and how they figure in her process.
Instead of dishonestly absenting herself and pretending she does not stand at
the center of the film with her mother, Polley owns her role as actor-filmmaker
as central to her refracted identity.
Although the film moves seamlessly from recollections to real and faux
images and back again, blurring the barriers between fact and fiction, crucial
portions of Michael’s third-person narrative in voice-over anchor the film and
speak directly to the constructed nature of all storytelling. Peppered through-
out the film, they are interspersed with at times conflicting views of family
members and close friends connected with the story.
In one such occurrence, while interviewing Michael in his home, Polley
asks him to recall the months leading up to Diane’s death and specifically,
whether she knew she was going to die. A concentrated and pained expres-
sion appears on Michael’s face as he considers the question, finally replying,
“No, I don’t think so.” Key friends of Diane, including her lover Harry, reply
to the same question with a confident “Yes.” In another scene, Diane’s friend
Anne reports that Diane “really lacked guile; she did not have two faces for
the world”—this in spite of the fact that Diane’s affair with Harry lasted well
beyond the duration of her appearance in the Montreal play. Her friend Deir-
dre, however, saw Diane as having a “private, secret side,” claiming she was
“a woman of secrets that were artfully hidden.” In yet another differing ac-
count, Michael readily concedes his emotional unavailability and bedroom
shortcomings in their marriage, but maintains that he was a good husband
in other ways, such as by helping out in the household. By contrast, Joanna
claims that their mother did everything and Michael took on no household
responsibilities. In a more pertinent sequence, Michael—whose love, if not
his passion, for Diane never abated—recalls being “lucky” that he had eleven-
year-old Sarah “to look after” in the months following Diane’s death, while
Joanna remembers this period of time as one of depression and solitude for
Michael, during which he neglected both Sarah and the home. Interestingly,
Sarah does not speak for herself here: was this a time of bonding with her fa-
ther or did the grieving spouse neglect his child?4
Polley’s film honors all these contradictory perspectives. In fact, the film
seems to suggest that all versions are true, or at least that they reflect the “va-
garies of truth.” Eleven-year-old Sarah, for instance, the youngest child and
 Waites, Sarah Polley’s Documemoir 551

only one in the home at the time of her mother’s death, was very likely both
intimately connected with her grieving father, as he attests, as well as ne-
glected by his aloofness, when viewed from Joanna’s protective and perhaps
resentful perspective. Moreover, Diane’s genuineness and two-facedness like-
wise illustrate the complexity of a human being in conflict because of com-
peting loyalties.
In the first two-thirds of the film, Diane’s hopeful but ultimately unhap-
py married life with Michael dominates the film. The disconnection in their
marriage, however, and its effect on Polley’s identity, along with the primary
frame of storytelling, drive the narrative. Family members and friends re-
spond to the same set of questions, and memories are collected and reported.
Verifiable “facts” are, at times, dramatized, as with the video footage of Di-
ane’s well-attended funeral service and Michael and Diane’s honeymoon. One
revealing fact that predates her relationship with Michael is discussed by her
first two children, Jon and Susy, and confirmed by a close-up of a newspa-
per article and actual home video of Diane’s wedding to her first husband,
George Spafford. Triggered by her adultery, Diane’s first marriage resulted in
a public scandal and the devastating loss of custody of Jon and Susy, and—so
the evidence implies—may have figured in her decision not to end her mar-
riage with Michael or to abort Sarah. The more critical fact, of course, which
is corroborated by witness accounts and DNA testing, involves Diane’s torrid,
short-term love affair that produced Sarah. Although Diane’s personality and
“story” loom large in the film, Sarah Polley—the product of her clandestine
love affair—is ever present, either in the background or, at times, in the fore-
ground as its director and subject-in-the-making.
The last third of the film turns more closely on Sarah as subject, and spe-
cifically on her discovery of and newly developing relationship with her bio-
logical father, Harry. As the voices of other storytellers trail away, email cor-
respondence between Sarah and Harry, rendered as fictionalized scenes with
voice-over, take center stage. In this section, too, the film comments more
deliberately on itself, since the question—posed initially by Michael and her
brother Mark—arises as to the real or underlying purpose in Polley’s decision
to make the film. Susy expresses consternation—“Who the hell cares about
our family”—while Michael asserts that the “truth” might only be found in the
six hours of tape sans editing, and Harry balks at Polley’s collective storytelling
method altogether, for what he perceives as only his and Diane’s story. In an
email reply to Harry during an early stage of her search, Polley admits that she
doesn’t “know where the project is going to take me.” As she reads this email
in voice-over, the beleaguered director is depicted in a grainy long shot. Stand-
ing in front of a monitor and surrounded by film equipment, she scratches her
552 Biography 38.4 (Fall 2015)

head and looks away as though faced by an insurmountable problem, finally

resting her face and head in her hands in a gesture of resignation.
In a subsequent scene she reads an email reply to Michael in which she
seems to solve the problem by conceding what the process and the film ulti-
mately make clear: “You’re right,” she says, almost as if she is discovering this
truth through the process of making the film: “The film is really about me.” In
another email, Sarah wonders if she’s “losing” her “mind” by “trying to recon-
struct the past through other people’s words.” Here the memoirist concedes
that the film—ostensibly about the discovery of her biological father—is re-
ally about her attempt to discover her mother and weigh the impact of her
mother’s choices on her own sense of self.
In effect, the other-focused documemoir exercise that takes her away from
her “self ” enables Polley to create a narrative identity. Joanna’s circumspect
response to Polley’s question concerning her view of the making of the docu-
mentary with a family secret at its core proves to be perceptive: “It’s really in-
teresting to look at this one thing that happened and how it’s refracted in so
many different ways and there are so many different angles.” Polley’s sibling is,
of course, referring to their mother’s secret love affair. But one might suggest
the same about Polley’s identity; as the filmmaker daughter of two fathers, her
identity is informed by the tangled threads of facts and memories associated
with her mother, and indeed, by the film itself, which offers multiple angles
from which to view them.
Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson explain that
In contemporary writing, the categorization of memoir often signals autobiographi-
cal works characterized by density of language and self-reflexivity about the writing
process, yoking the author’s status as a professional writer with the work’s status as
an aesthetic object. (4)

A tour de force, Polley’s self-reflexive documemoir is such an aesthetic object;

and the fictional devices woven into her autobiographical film highlight what
Polley characterizes as the “shifts and fictions” in our memory-invoked sto-
ries, or as she puts it, the “truth that is ephemeral.”
Of particular interest to students of life writing is not the fact that Pol-
ley employs self-reflexivity and blurs the lines between fact and fiction, since
there is ample precedent for this in literary memoir, but that her film process
augments the constructed nature of the self, demonstrates the elusiveness of
truth, and enhances the self-reflective element necessary to memoir. A vi-
sual artist, she “stages” remembered events, as the writer of literary memoir
does with scene, in order to bring the past into focus and to gain perspective.
But here her camera-self is winking at the audience, as if to say: “Yes, I am
 Waites, Sarah Polley’s Documemoir 553

reaching back into the past to find and tell the truth to ascertain the self,”
while at the same time conceding that even if her mother were still alive and
could speak for herself, the truth would likely remain elusive.
This oxymoronic staging of memory, and the blurring of fiction and fact,
moreover, highlight the degree to which the self—identity—is “staged” and
therefore molten. What, one might ask, is to be gained by such a narrative
journey? The answer is in the film, which reminds us that, like Polley, all of
us play roles, and to some extent script our life stories. Ironically, at the same
time we are also the characters in, as well as the audience for, others’ dramas.
We can only have partial access to these dramas, however, because they may
be interpreted differently, as evidenced by the various versions presented by
those who figure in Polley’s life and “star” in her film, including her father,
stepfather, siblings, aunt, uncle, and her mothers’ friends. Moreover, Polley’s
documemoir is not “the” story that “I” tell but Stories We Tell. The lack of
“The,” as noted before, underscores the fact that these are not definitive sto-
ries. It is also worth noting that, unlike writing, the signifying practice of film
is a collaborative affair that depends on multiple contributors, including the
writer, director, producer, sound and image technicians, actors, etc. Such a
medium, by definition, seems to be antithetical to the singular author in the
memoir tradition, and yet here it is actually conducive to the plural—“We”
versus “I”—and the open-ended nature of Polley’s documemoir. The lack of a
single “I” perspective complicates our expectations and understanding of the
memoir genre, which typically relies on the memory and consciousness of a
single remember-er. This collapsed boundary may suggest that memoir’s bor-
ders have become entirely too flexible. On the other hand, it may well reveal
another frontier in our understanding of self as well as of memoir.
Nevertheless, if the purpose of the memoir is to stitch together a self, or a
new understanding of self from the “wreckage” of life experience—in this case
the knowledge that her mother “lied” about Polley’s parentage and considered
not giving birth to her—Polley’s documemoir achieves this goal. As memoir-
ist Judith Barrington writes: “the memoirist both tells the story and muses
upon it, trying to unravel what it means in light of her current knowledge”
(20). Conceding that “there are lots of perspectives” and “you don’t ever get
to an answer,” as Joanna puts it, the film stakes its claim, and Polley’s refracted
identity, therefore, on storytelling.
Like the reader of a memoir, then, the film viewer is invited to reflect on
how the self-reflexive project illuminates his/her own identity and the sto-
ries by which it comes to be constituted. The “We” in the title, after all, is
inclusive of the viewer, since the film transcends the personal “I.” As well, it
offers us insight into the nature of self-awareness. Our understanding and
554 Biography 38.4 (Fall 2015)

knowledge of “self” derives, ultimately, from the stories we are told, that we
create, and that we tell others. These stories are filtered through the lens of
perception—the tales and images we inherit and then pass on—as reflected
in the filmed records and the stories that Polley, the director and memoirist,
relies upon.
Joan Didion famously claimed in The White Album: “We tell ourselves
stories in order to live.” Indeed.

notes

1. Her most recent films include Away from Her (2006) and Take This Waltz (2011). She is
currently working on an adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace, a pseudo-mem-
oir, suggesting the director’s interest in the intersection of lived experience and fiction.
2. Working from Erving Goffman’s concept of “frame analysis,” Raoul Eshelman explains
that “performatism is not to restore the dogmatic authority of the center, but rather to
return, if only temporarily, to the originary scene as a way of restoring to culture the
originary experience of love, beauty and reconciliation.”
3. Ross McElwee’s 1986 autobiographical documentary Sherman’s March comes to mind,
as do Michael Moore’s documentaries, such as Bowling for Columbine (2002).
4. In his blending of George Herbert Mead’s notion of the “intersubjective nature of the
self” with Paul Ricoeur’s hermeneutics of “narrative identity,” Douglas Ezzy explains
that Einstein’s theory of relativity made it clear that what one sees depends “on the
spatio-temporal framework from which it is observed,” and that “the meaning a ‘minded
organism’ gives to a particular event depends on the spatio-temporal-social-interpretive
framework from which it is interpreted” (241).

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