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This essay is a response to the following prompt:
‘Stories We Tell is as much about truth as it is about artifice. To what extent do you agree?’
Description
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The delineation between artifice and truth becomes the focus of director Sarah Polley’s tribute to her late mother Diane Polley. Diverging from a chronological biography of her ‘fabulous’ mother’s life, the revelation of a secret dimension obscures the purpose of the docu-memoir Stories We Tell. Discrepancies between the public and the private self, revealed by the co-contributors to the act of storytelling, emphasise how the way individuals present themselves to the world, and the way they actually are, can be seemingly incompatible. Despite the challenges that ensue as the one dimensional woman with the ‘contagious personality’ morphs into a woman who keeps personal truths ‘artfully hidden’, Diane Polley emerges from the ‘wreckage’ of the narrative, intact. As much about the blurring of the line between truth and fiction, as it is about Diane Polley, Stories We Tell communicates the tragic misunderstandings that result as a consequence of deception, validating in the end, the subjective impressions of all those who knew her.
