The name that is not a thing

Angie Abdou is a Canadian writer of fiction and nonfiction. That is the entirety of the encyclopedia’s offering for today. No dates of birth, no list of novels, no biography, no critical reception. Just a name, a nationality, and a profession. It is a thin slice of existence, a wire hanger with no coat on it, yet it occupies the same digital space as empires and extinct animals. I have seen people spend their whole lives trying to be more than a label, trying to add weight to the name so it doesn’t slide off the page. But the encyclopedia doesn’t care about the weight. It only cares about the category. Fiction and nonfiction. The binary that holds up the entire structure of her output. It is a strange thing to be defined by the two kinds of truth one deals in. One side is the lie we agree to believe, the other is the fact we agree to record. To be both is to stand on the fault line between them, shifting the ground under your feet with every sentence. The name stays the same, but the terrain changes depending on which book you are holding.