Claire Kohda

Who is telling the truth in Kate Reed Petty’s True Story?

Two boys are accused of assault after a lacrosse match. But has the ‘victim’ misremembered the incident?

Kate Reed Petty. Credit: Eric Limon 
issue 15 August 2020

This debut novel, which opens with ‘a high- school lacrosse party in 1999 and the rumour of a sexual assault,’ is billed as one story told in four different genres: memoir, horror, noir and thriller. It even has four covers. There is a reason for this, as Kate Reed Petty explains in an author’s note:

In borrowing these forms from popular culture, I was looking for ways to push against the simplistic assumptions we too often make about power, abuse and gender — assumptions that lock us into the same stories, again and again and again.

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