In Sarah Polley’s documentary Stories We Tell , she creates a highly complex meta-narrative told from numerous perspectives, ultimately taking us into the life of her family’s past to reveal her deceased mother Diane’s extramarital affair and ultimately how she discovers the existence of her illegitimate father, Harry Gulkin. One of the many key considerations that I took away from the film was how different characters, namely Sarah and her two fathers, Michael and Harry, experienced exigence to tell this same story in very distinct ways. For each of these characters, they feel compelled to tell this story, a need for it to be heard by someone for some reason in some form. While their social motives to tell their story of Diane’s affair that led to Sarah’s existence are complex and perhaps not fully known even by the characters themselves, I will begin to unpack the exigencies experience by Sarah, Michael, and Harry to tell their version of the story.

Carolyn Miller reveals exigence as “a form of social knowledge – a mutual construing of objects, events, interests and purposes that not only links them but also makes them what they are: an objectified social need” (157). Furthermore, she suggests that it provides “an occasion, and thus a form, for making public our private version of things” (Miller 158). Sarah, Michael, and Harry experience distinct “social need[s]” that compel them to construe their understanding of what occurred, however each of their exigencies are very distinct and shape the way they share their story.

For Sarah, she experiences exigence to reveal her private family story to the public through the medium of film.  Polley reveals a key motivator that compelled the creation of the film is perhaps not only to “make public” and expose the truth of her secret, but to demonstrate how truth is not fixed or singular, but fragmented, flexible, and ambiguous. By telling the story through interviews with family and those who knew Diane during her affair in Montreal, Polley includes multiple points of view to demonstrate how “truth is difficult to pin down” (Polley). This is also revealed in an interview with Polley conducted by Interview Magazine. Sarah states:

“What made me originally think, ‘Wow, this actually would make an interesting subject for a film,’ was watching how we were all telling the story to the people in our lives. I started to notice embellishments on some peoples’ parts—or things that got omitted that were crucial [laughs]—as we all do in families when we’re hearing people talking about the past. It’s often not the past that we remember. So it was really interesting to see how the story was kind of mutating and how everybody was very committed to their version of what had happened.”

This reveals how Sarah experienced exigence to create an “interesting” documentary in which truth and memory is not fixed, but constantly changing or “mutating”. As Sarah is the only character in her film that is not actually interviewed, but instead is behind the camera, this interview provides further insight into what compelled the creation of her story as told from multiple perspectives.

Harry Gulkin, however, experiences a need to tell his version by writing a story that he intended to publish, to “make public” his “private version of things”. What compels Harry to write his version of his story, as revealed in his interviews contained in the film, is to fulfill a need to establish a singular, objective truth of what occurred. He suggests that this story is not one in which multiple perspectives should be given equal weight, but instead claims that this is his story with Sarah’s mother Diane and thus he should have the authority to tell it as it happened (Polley). Harry’s preoccupation with his version as an accurate “truth” perhaps speaks to his need to legitimize himself in both Sarah and Diane’s life. By publishing his version of the story to the public, Harry would thus legitimize his relationship with both his daughter and Diane, a woman whose tragic death prevents her from legitimizing a “truth” about what occurred and her relationship with Harry.

By contrast, Michael Polley, who was married to Diane and believed to be Sarah’s father throughout her childhood, experiences exigence to write his version of what occurred in a letter to Sarah. This letter, which is then read by Michael within the documentary, was written for Sarah following his discovery that he was not her father. Michael demonstrates how finding out the truth about who Sarah’s father allowed for his memories to be understood in a different perspective, thus creating new revelations about his relationship with Diane and Sarah’s childhood. The exigence Michael experience to write his own version thus does not aim to create an “objective” truth, but to create a new story based on this new found perspective of the events of his past. By writing to Sarah, Michael, too, works to legitimize his relationship with Sarah, perpetually alluding to the bond they shared and how this brought them closer.

It is evident that exigence can be experienced in very distinct ways to fulfill the “social needs” of each character. By including the documentary process in the film itself, Polley demonstrates how each version of the story is compelled by different motives and understandings, thus creating numerous evolving perspectives on the same events. As a result, a fascinating story of multiple, ambiguous truths is created, which Polley demonstrates is “the power of storytelling and how transformative it can be—for better or for worse”.

Works Cited

Miller, Carolyn R. Genre as Social Action. Quarterly Journal of Speech, 1984. Print.

Polley Sarah. Stories We Tell. Lionsgate, 2013. Film.

“Sarah Polley.” Interview Magazine. Web. 21 Nov. 2014. <http://www.interviewmagazine.com/film/sarah-polley#_>.

Memory, like truth, is too often perceived in society as fixed, static, and unchanging. It is comforting or reassuring to consider memory as such, to think that our memory is fool-proof and accurately captures our experiences exactly as they happen. This perception is carried over to expectations in the field of autobiography and memoir, perhaps explaining the preoccupation with authenticity and factual truth in the genre. While autobiography is often confronted with expectations of being “true” or “accurate”, the expanding parameters of the genre have largely challenged these expectations, revealing how memory is highly flexible and contextual in time and circumstance.

In what ways do autobiographical works challenge these traditional perceptions of memory? How does the act of memory function in autobiographical texts?

Two very different autobiographical texts, Art Spiegelman’s graphic memoir Maus and Dany Laferriere’s memoir The World is Moving Around Me, explore memory in surprisingly similar ways. While they differ vastly  in both content and form, these texts both reveal how memory is highly interested, constructed, fluid, and flexible. In considering a key passage from each text, I will demonstrate the way in which memory functions in these ways, revealing how autobiography is an effective genre in exposing the social construction of memory.

For Spiegelman, the fluid and constructed nature of memory is exposed when Vladek is explaining and visualizing to Art how war prisoners in Auschwitz were evaluated to determine their capacity to work in the camp or be sent to die. This powerful scene features four frames, three of which Vladek is re-enacting the scene with his Art and the last frame shifting to the image of Vladek’s frail, naked figure in Auschwitz being examined not by his son, but a Nazi guard. In this scene, the memory is reconstructed not only by Vladek’s experience that he recounts, but also by Art in producing the story in comic form. The way in which Spiegelman connects these two distinct recollections of memory brilliantly reveals how memory is not static, but fluid even intergenerationally. Erin McGlothlin suggests that this passage illustrates the way in which “the past and the present are intimately interconnected and difficult to separate from one another”, resulting in a sort of “temporal blurring” (179-80). By blurring the memory that Vladek has of the event and Art’s re-membering of Vladek’s memory (post-memory), the present and past become integrated, revealing how the construction of memory is highly fluid and ambiguous.

The “temporal blurring” that McGlothlin identifies in Maus is also present in Laferriere’s memoir on the earthquake in Haiti. This is particularly evident in the passage “Morning Conversation”, in which Laferriere overhears a grandmother and grandson singing and laughing as they all sleep on a tennis court following the earthquake. As Lafarriere reflects on the ability of the grandmother to “spare her grandson the horror of the day” that is the earthquake, he compares this to his own experiences with his grandmother (68). He suggests, “my grandmother tore me from the claws of the dictator by teaching me something other than hatred and vengeance” (68). Just as Art Spiegelman blurs his own post-memory with his father’s memory, Laferriere’s perception of the grandmother and grandchild’s interaction is contextualized in his own memories and past experiences. As a result, his past and present memories are blurred and connected in a meaningful way, revealing how memory making is never fixed or objective.

Memory and the act of remembering play a key role in the production of memoirs, as evident in both Spiegelman and Laferriere’s works. As autobiography is intrinsically linked to memory, it is particularly important to consider the way in which memory functions in these texts not as objective truths, but as social constructions that evolve in both time and circumstance.

Works Cited

Laferriere, Dany. The World Is Moving Around Me. Vancouver: Aresenal Pulp, 2013. Print.

Mcglothlin, Erin Heather. “No Time Like the Present: Narrative and Time in Art Spiegelman’s Maus.” Narrative: 177-98. Print.

Spiegelman, Art. Maus II: A Survivor’s Tale : And Here My Troubles Began. New York: Pantheon, 1991. Print.