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Inside Out: Reflections on a Life So Far
By Evelyn Lau Doubleday Canada, 238 pages, $29.95

There are two important questions at the heart of Inside Out, a collection of essays by Evelyn Lau:

1. Are writers professionally entitled to the identifiable private lives of others, and if yes, to what degree?

2. What is the relationship between someone's early and later work?

Vancouver-based Lau first came to prominence in 1989, with Runaway: Diary of a Street Kid, the story of her life as an emotionally needy child, careening fight and flight diarist and teen sex-trade worker. Lau wrote with lyricism, formalism, rage and yearning. The young self, and anyone who came near it, was splayed out, laid bare -- as exposed as the neophyte street hooker in the cars and hotel rooms of the redundantly failing father figures with whom she had transactional sex. No, Runaway is far more detailed, more nuanced than the sex. The sex was, as is usually the case with prostitution, mostly oral and quick: Two people seeking what they weren't getting at home, with the seeker of fellatio receiving what he sought, while the kid built self-loathing and a disdainful distrust of others.

Twelve years on, with Inside Out,the precociously prodigious writing skills have refined and intensified. And, though the Evelyn Lau one finds in these pages periodically circles the optimistic hope of outrunning her demons, the bouts with self-loathing, disdain and distrust are still verymuch alive, ifnot well.

Perhaps this is inevitable. Some years ago, a dear friend of mine fell very much in love with a "street boy." This boy, wanting to be held and cuddled, equated sex with transaction. My friend reached and reached for him, always on the other side of clear bulletproof glass. The boy, at 21, blew himself out of the world with bad heroin in a Vancouver shooting gallery. Evelyn Lau found a successful career path, the path she'd passionately focused on since childhood. This probably saved her life. The path to the tenderness and trust she yearns for is, however, repeatedly barred by the shadow of a sexually transactional adolescence.

Or so it appears from the declarations and howling outcries in these new and reprinted essays.

"The prostitution is what has remained, what has left its seal and shadow on everything. It has set me apart . . . 'Oh, do you know what she used to do?' people I have just met tell me others have already said to them. And I can hear in my mind their excited voices, the looks on their faces -- the part shock, part enjoyment that is titillation."

It does not matter, or doesn't matter enough that many of us value Lau, the writer. She is haunted by an adolescence in which sex was "never an activity I engaged in except for money. Sometimes it was brutal and painful. Sometimes it startled me by being pleasant, but most often it just felt repugnant, a chore to finish while trying not to look like someone who couldn't wait to jump into a scalding shower or bath immediately afterwards." And what is a celebrated, award-winning writer to make of a male friend who suddenly, as a notion of solidarity, starts to tell her of pretending his wife is a whore and giving money to this wife-whore, claiming "the first time I did that, she got so hot." Lau, hearing this, feels "as if he had told me he liked having sex with farm animals."

In reviewing this book, I've led with "the hooker story." As does Lau. Which is the problem. I want to say, "Look, I love your writing. The world is full of ex-hookers, and their sisters and brothers in loveless arrangements with the rich and famous. I can let you move on from your hooker years if you can. If you can't, I cannot."

Of course, this is easier for me to say than it is for Evelyn Lau to do. Nonetheless, I believe that if she is to be taken at her word, which I do regarding the wished-for, she has to move on from this subject, or take it out of the autobiographical, even if the reworking starts as a stilted, unpublishable exercise. Otherwise, both reviewers and readers are being asked to "ignore what I'm about to describe in detail."

Throughout the book, Lau asserts her right to reveal all she knows about anyone with whom she crosses paths. This debate has likely gone on since there was papyrus. Scott Fitzgerald told wife Zelda that, as the better writer, he owned the writing rights to both their stories. Currently, we frequently favour a kind of art and techno proctology, in which absolutely every aspect of every life is a public matter.

Is this less invasive if the invader is gifted? Are all private moments "public domain"? Should they be? These are the questions at the heart of Anatomy of a Libel Lawsuit, which is the longest, and dreariest, essay. It examines the lawsuit brought by writer W. P. Kinsella, after Lau wrote a zits-and-all piece about their relationship (to the delight of many native writers, who think Kinsella writes a faux-native world, and deserves to have his shape shifted).

It was Lau's first lawsuit, and she is understandably interested in its details. Unfortunately, its details are like reading a long legal brief -- only of interest to the litigants. Ironically, it may well have been the hope for "dish" re this lawsuit that sold the collection. It wastes Lau's talent, and our time.

In Residence, the shortest and perhaps best piece in this collection, she details with tenderness and passion her love of the one-bedroom Vancouver flat her writing enabled her to purchase.

"Sometimes in the evenings when things are quiet, I walk around my home touching its walls and cupboards and windowpanes. I am able to tell it that I love it in a way I might not dare tell another human being."

Lau also suffers profoundly under the "quagmire of heavy mud and quicksand" that is clinical depression. When she writes of this grey "boulder" and its companion rages, the work is as powerful as that of William Styron on the same subject. Her writing about writing is also rich and illuminating, as is her vertiginous reminiscence of a hated piece of childhood furniture (The Dream of the Purple Dresser).

Most times, I am on the opposite side of the privacy question, believing we can reveal deeply and fully without naming names. It is not, as Lau believes, about others' "affections," but about their trust, and about the love she does and does not want. Repeatedly, she speaks of finding ways to keep people at a distance, and about having "crushes" on people who will reject her. Having a reputation for telling all about everything also guarantees that the desired will not "risk" her. I'm sure she knows this. This is, finally, her call -- her kitchen and her heat. And at her best, she is as good as I hope she can one day fully believe she is. Contributing reviewer Gale Zoë Garnett is an actor and writer. Her coming-of-age novel,Visible Amazement, has just been published in the United States, and is now in paperback in Canada. On April 13, it appears in France and francophone Canada as Etoile de mère .

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