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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 filmmaking 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 perspectives 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 selfreflexive 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 dramatic "scene" as narrative "summary," has veered perilously close to fiction (77). Despite such criticism, however, the memoir's wide-ranging and myriad 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 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...