Troubled
RM Vaughan
(Coach House Books)
In 1999, Toronto writer and artist RM Vaughan had a crush on his therapist, often referred to as transference. But when his therapist showed up at the opening night of one of Vaughan’s plays, a real sexual relationship began. Troubled is a memoir of an inappropriate union, and its emotional, psychological and legal consequences. But Troubled isn’t Dr. Phil material—this is a beautifully angry confession told through poetry and fragmented prose, interspersed with blacked-out photocopied documents and correspondences between lawyers and medical professionals. As with Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton and, more recently, Lynn Crosbie’s Liar, a long-form confessional poem about her boyfriend’s infidelities and their breakup, it’s difficult to judge the authors’ real motives—revenge, healing or forgiveness—because their vulnerabilities are dressed in such carefully constructed words. Each section is named after a significant moment in the relationship, like “Session” and “New York Weekend.” Or “Dufferin Park”: “On this beaten picnic platform, this nail-and-plank lovers’ couch, a teenage perch/common as a chair, a knife, you make luxurious demands, ask me not to speak of us, of our time. I promise to only circumvent, or write poetry; the second-best silence.”
Sue Carter Flinn
type: book
This article appears in Sep 18-24, 2008.
