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'Does it sound weird for me to say that in many ways I don't think I'm writing about myself?" Evelyn Lau asks, punctuating the coyly deceptive question with an impenetrable pout.

Uh, yes. Either extremely odd or frighteningly similar to a serious case of split-personality disorder.

It's impossible to open her new book, Inside Out: Reflections On a Life So Far, book without finding the 29-year-old writer -- storming through her apartment, suffocating under a fog of depression, vomiting a hole through her bulimia-ravaged esophagus, chained to a typewriter or curled up in some old fart's lap -- splayed naked and vulnerable over every single page?

A shrink might say Lau is in denial. A cynic would say she's being incredibly disingenuous. But whatever you might want to make of Lau, she has one small request: Please don't call this latest batch of profoundly introspective writing a memoir.

"This book was never meant to be a memoir. It's a collection of personal essays. If people think it's a memoir they won't give it a chance. They'll think it's ridiculous because of my age. In the last few years, there has been a proliferation of memoirs. Whenever I read reviews of them and so on, they tended to be dismissed -- 'Who does this person think he or she is to be writing about their own lives?' So I really wanted to avoid that."

I'm baffled. Lau has been dipping into her private world for inspiration ever since she burst onto the Canadian literary map in 1989 with Runaway: Diary of a Street Kid, a powerfully raw depiction of her years as a drug-addled teenage prostitute. In 1999, with a novel, a collection of short stories, three books of poetry and a Governor-General's Award nomination under her belt, Lau settled a highly publicized libel lawsuit.

It was filed against her by the then 62-year-old writer, W. P. Kinsella, after she wrote in Vancouver magazine a poignantly lucid article, in excruciatingly lurid detail, about their relationship. The settlement coincided with the launch of another collection of short stories, Choose Me, a book which re-examined some exceedingly familiar terrain, relationships between young needy women and much older father figures.

While many critics reviewed the book as a roman à clef, Lau was, at the time, adamant about drawing a distinct line between her stories and her life, purposely stamping the book with a disclaimer stating that the situations and characters were "imaginary composites."

Lau's reluctance to parse out autobiographical elements of the composites was no doubt influenced by the spectre of the lawsuit still snapping overhead. But now, in Inside Out, Lau thoughtfully and repetitively examines that rubbery line between fact and fiction, notions of privacy, the paramount importance of writing over relationships and the influence of her past.

"I grew up both at home and on the street without a sense of where the lines should be drawn, and my writing ended up reflecting that lack [of boundaries]" she writes in the first essay, The Shadow of the Prostitute. "I could, without flinching, write about experiences that other people would consider too personal to reveal even to their closest friends, let alone to strangers. There seemed to be no limits to what I could reveal about myself or others in my life, no sense of where to stop."

Inside Out may not be a memoir, per se, but there's no way Lau can deny it's all about her. So why is she sitting here, slowly sipping her juice, and back-tracking on the very words she is peddling? Is this a twisted futile argument over semantics or structure?

"It's a difference in approach."

Uh, huh.

"I'm not sure I can define this, but I think it's a very different thing to sit down and say I'm going to write my memoirs -- the story of my life -- as opposed to my wanting to approach certain issues, like depression. Granted, I do approach them from a very personal angle, but I try to use the very personal experience with the subject as a doorway into writing about a feeling or a situation. And to me, somehow, that is an important distinction. The personal insight gives me a vehicle into certain topics. But I can't imagine too many people picking up this book because they're interested in me as a person."

Whatever Lau wants to believe -- or say -- there are many readers who will approach this book differently. Some will read these essays looking for illumination into her past work. She does, after all, devote an entire essay, The Observing Ego, to the creative obsession that compels her to write -- at any human cost. Another essay, Father Figures, explores her lifelong search to find a replacement for her long-lost daddy. Lau, nevertheless, stubbornly insists that people should not reflect on her past work any differently after reading these passages. Inside Out, in her mind, "stands on its own."

Others will slowly cruise up to her longest essay, Anatomy of a Libel Lawsuit, with the same morbid curiosity that compels people to stop and watch a car wreck. They might even accuse her of exploiting her courtroom experience for the media attention and publicity that a work of fiction on the same topic could never hope to draw. "I don't understand that at all," Lau says.

"The people who are interested in that essay would be writers, journalists. But I think most people who are interested in my work would not find that essay particularly interesting. It's not the most compelling piece in the book."

And she's right. For 62 tedious pages, Lau chronicles the long hours she spent sifting through documents, talking with her lawyer friends, pondering a new career as a solicitor, flirting with the plaintiff's male lawyer and condescending to the plaintiff's female lawyer. "In the end," she concludes, "nothing much happened."

Lau is still the narcissistic child railing against the restrictions the lawsuit placed on her freedom of expression ("It reminded me of how I felt as a child living with my parents") and wondering, in blind ignorance, where all the feelings Kinsella "surely once had" had gone.

I realize that my lack of patience -- the reason I felt compelled, on more than one occasion, to throw the book across the room -- stems from my own flawed approach to the book. As a fan of Lau's lyrical writing, I had hoped that this introspective book would be a positive form of therapy for her.

Perhaps, after analyzing her impulses, childhood nightmares and self-destructive tendencies, Lau would finally be able to get over her self-indulgent issues, move forward and stop wrapping her wonderful words around the same tired old stories. Wrong. With Inside Out,Lau wallows even deeper in her Freudian obsessions -- seemingly content with her arrested development, while at other times completely unaware of it.

" Runaway was definitely therapy for me," she explains. "That was catharsis. There was no thought to the writing. Whereas these pieces, for me -- it was like writing poetry. I spent so much time on every line, on every phrase. How is that therapy? When you're writing something, not to purge yourself of it, but in order to create it, to best describe a situation for a reader. It's a different impulse. This is my fear in calling it a memoir -- people will connect it to Runaway and it's very different. What makes these essays important to me is the writing, not so much the content."

Don't read this book looking for answers, Lau advises, because she doesn't have any. She explores her past to examine how it affects her present. But she's not willing to let go of that part of herself "that is in some way fuelled by all the afflictions that otherwise make me miserable as a person." She is a writer. And this is what she writes.

Lau points to the final essay, The Dream of the Purple Dresser, and the ugly lavender piece of furniture her parents had salvaged from the garbage which still haunts her. "The dream is in some way about being stuck emotionally. I'm describing that state. But describing it doesn't mean I've elevated myself from it at all. In that essay, I think I'm mainly trying to describe the place the past has in the present. Which is in some small way a theme in all the essays. How inescapable some things can be." Evelyn Lau reads at the Brigantine Room at Toronto's Harbourfront Centre on March 28, starting at 7:30 p.m. She has appearances in Vancouver April 2 and 4, Edmonton April 10 and Winnipeg April 11.

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