Rae Armantrout's brief, downbeat memoir True contains some indications of the fault lines between speech and identity that open up in her poetry. They show her as a small child encouraged by both parents to see herself as ‘ “male-identified” and an outlaw – little Jesse James’. And they show her as an adolescent infatuated with the myth of the Old West, saving up money to fund an escape across the border to Mexico, where life was, allegedly, closer to what it had been in the heroic days of the cowboys. Armantrout writes of her childhood adoration of Billy the Kid, who assumed the central position in a pantheon of rebellious male idols. This figure was consciously chosen to rival her mother's admiration for various conformist males, mainly ministers. Billy the Kid was a ‘fetish figure’ for the young Armantrout. It was unclear, she remarks, whether she identified with such rebellious males or was ‘romantically attracted’ to them (True, p. 34). What is clear, however, is that putting popular myths to her own uses provided Armantrout with a little leverage on an oppressive familial environment that she gradually realised was representative of the culture as a whole. The first sentence of True stakes a claim for the importance of such questioning of her own experience: ‘Many people must see their lives as somehow exemplary. I tend to see my early life as an example of the pathology of “Middle America” at mid-century.’

In self-deprecating low-key prose, Armantrout's memoir makes it clear that the ‘pathology of “Middle America” ‘, as exemplified by the Armantrout household, was a pathology of religious conservatism, racism and sexism. Armantrout's poetry can be read as a highly oblique attempt to expose the hidden linguistic wiring of that culture's contemporary manifestations. Disney, also an ‘exemplary’ aspect of midcentury American cultural life, is another part of the picture for the young Armantrout. Fantasia inducts her into the world of Stravinsky. And, later on, Disney's presence stands over an early date with her future husband, Chuck Korkegian: