Memoir is bullshit
An interview with Richard Kelly Kemick, author of Decadence
I think what I love most about Richard Kelly Kemick’s work—regardless of whether he’s writing poetry, fiction, or nonfiction—is his emotional range. He doesn’t simply accept whatever emotion feels most natural or pressing to a scene or image. He steps back, and reconsiders the possibilities of feeling, and leads us towards feeling more. And with less certainty.
What comes out of this range is a humour that feels honest rather than fabricated—the distillation of many ways of thinking through experience. I often think of this opening to the collection’s final essay, “Rules”:
“Litia and I had been together for ten years (almost to the day) when she came home from work and told me she was gay. That summary sounds much less shocking—less plunging—than the revelation actually was. I reacted with all the clichés: the gasp, the floor falling away, the sound of the ocean in my ears. At one point, I stopped crying long enough to say, “Then I will become a woman.”’
The scene is silly, at least partly comical for its depiction of grand emotion and for its final statement, but there’s also a sweetness that makes the work ultimately feel more vulnerable than ironic. And this, in my opinion, is where humour thrives the most naturally: when the world turns on its head, and the rules have flown out the window, and the narrator is thrown into a clearing of not-knowing.
Decadence is for readers who like a strong voice, which is to say: there’s a thoughtful, weird, nuanced personhood in this book, which is also to say: what comes through, in each essay, is the immense care of its author for the people and things occupying the Kemickian universe.
I had the pleasure of asking Kemick a few questions about Decadence, his lovely collection of personal essays coming out next Tuesday, which he answers below with his characteristic thoughtfulness, gentle self-deprecation, and wit.
Dominique,
Publicity & Marketing Coordinator
A Biblioasis Interview with Richard Kelly Kemick
Author of Decadence
Decadence spans a decade of some of your best magazine writing, and covers a wide range of topics and obsessions. Do you see a throughline, in hindsight (or even as you were writing)? And do you notice any shifts in your approach / preoccupations as time passes in Decadence?
While I was writing the pieces, I did not see any throughlines. My only preoccupations were: 1) Will an editor accept this pitch, and 2) Will they pay me for it? However, when I assembled these pieces into the manuscript, I saw that I kept coming back to similar ideas and themes, no matter the topic at hand. My relationship with Litia, my relationship with my friends, my relationships with my sworn enemies—all of it kept resurfacing throughout the decade it took me to finish this book.
My approach shifted as I became less concerned with arguing a standpoint or (god forbid) a thesis, but rather just exploring the parameters of the issue at hand. I used to start an article knowing what I thought about the topic; now, I am most interested in writing about topics that I am unsure how I feel towards. There’s nothing more obnoxious than a Canadian writer who thinks they have something to teach.
Also, halfway through writing this book (about year five), I deleted all social media and lost much of my fear of being cancelled. (I still have some fear of it, of course. Like, I am always very careful what specific insults I say to other drivers.) But I think this changed my humour overall.
You’ve written poetry, short fiction, personal essays, and you also wrote a podcast series about your incarcerated cousin. What do you think separates the kind of nonfiction we get in Decadence from your other work? What propels this formal restlessness?
It takes me a lo(ooo)ng time to edit. When I am finally done with a manuscript, I am so over-stuffed with the genre that the idea of starting another project in the same vein is akin to ordering another cabbage when you have spent the past ten years of your life eating cabbage.
Decadence begins with an epigraph by another Biblioasis author, Marcello Di Cintio. It’s a lovely quote from his essay “Fatherhood”: “I call Heather again and she tells us to go to the hospital. [. . .] I can’t decide whether to drive very fast or very slow.” Can you tell us a little bit why you chose this as the epigraph?
I love this quotation from Marcello. I also love Marcello—how could you not adore a man who (and this is true) is named after an Italian marshmallow brand? But back to the quotation: I love how succinctly it summarizes most of the great fulcrums of our life: we know that we should do something, and we know that we shouldn’t do the other thing, but it’s always such a fine line between behaving perfectly and awfully. This, at least, is what I would tell my priest during my Catholic school days.
You’ve famously (around here) declared that “the genre of memoir is bullshit,” though Decadence of course draws heavily from your life. Could you elaborate some more on why you think it’s “bullshit”?
Sometimes I just say things and see what happens. Truthfully, I don’t even remember saying (or typing?) this, but I trust you far more than I do myself. I think most memoirs are written with a lot of clarity (admittedly, I’ve read, like, three). This clarity, however, seems disingenuous to the form because we live without any clarity—we are unsure, always, whether to drive very fast or very slow. This lack of perspective exists even when we are looking back on an event because we are just as subjective now as we were then. I’ve stumbled into writing a memoir that tries to mimic this complete lack of narrative (and marketable) form. Oftentimes, when we think we’re talking about X we are really thinking about Y. When I thought I was writing about my miniature Christmas village, it turns out I was writing about my fear of loneliness; but then, a few years later, I thought that I was actually writing about my fear of failing as a writer. Now, I think I was writing about my fears about impending fatherhood. Whatever it was, fear was involved.
What have you read or been reading lately that you’d like to recommend to your own readers?
I’ve been reading Eichmann in Jerusalem and Zolitude. Both are very good, and both I’ve been pretending to have read for years and have finally made the leap. Whatever took me so long? (Hint: The answer is two words. First word, “Vinyl.” Second word, “Cafe.”)
In good publicity news:
- Daphnis and Chloe by Colin McAdam (out Sept. 15 in Canada!) was included in Lit Hub’s list of Most Anticipated Books of 2026 Part Two: “A retelling, perhaps, of the titular myth—but spun through a modern Kelly-Link-sounding lens. Bring me myth, bring me love, bring me beauty! Plus, it has a Max Porter stamp of approval.”
- Every Time We Say Goodbye by Ivana Sajko (trans. by Mima Simić) was featured in the Globe and Mail’s recent novellas round-up: “Sajko braids the personal and political into something both artful and quietly unsettling.”
- Ducks, Newburyport by Lucy Ellman got a shoutout in The Guardian’s article, “Home is where the art is: the rise of the epic domestic novel.”: “Ellmann transforms the domestic experience into a philosophical, heroic one: the woman methodically latticing pastry over cherry pies is at the same time grappling with existence in all its light and shade.”
- Precarious: The Lives of Migrant Workers by Marcello Di Cintio was included in The Tyee’s list of 2026 Summer Reads: “A stirring work of non-fiction that pulls back the curtain on the lives of migrant workers in Canada.”
- Oblivious: Residential Schools, Segregated Hospitals, and the use of Indigenous Peoples as Slaves of Race Science by Elaine Dewar was featured in an article from APTN News on the legacy of medical experimentation on Inuit in the Arctic.
