Though few of us perhaps admit it, being - or becoming - Canadian is invariably a long journey: a lifetime’s work to pull together the ragged seams of consciousness and thus construct some consistent essence of collective self. It is, invariably, a highly self-conscious act. Richard Lemm’s memoir, “Imagined Truths: Myths from a Draft Dodging Poet” is also a self-conscious act, relating his experiences growing up in The United States of America in the years after World War II, his coming to terms with his family’s history and the culmination of that in his decision to become a Conscientious Objector and, ultimately, a draft dodger to avoid serving in Vietnam. Having read the stories of other draft dodgers, one often approaches these narratives with a set of expectations which subjectively contribute to the collation of a certain body of impressions about what it was like to give up everything and become, in essence, a fugitive crossing the Canadian border. Lemm’s journey, however, seems rather different from any other stories I have read. His quiet and uneventful assimilation presents another reality, possibly representative of countless others. Of the broadly estimated 25 000+ draft eligible young men who came to Canada it would be short-sighted to believe that each met with the same narrative arc, tinted as it is in our sensibilities by a half century of nostalgia for that particular brand of ‘radical chic.’  As such it is only in the last few chapters that Lemm touches on his experiences of living in Canada which, for me, seems incommensurate with the rather grand implications of his book’s title. Had there been more detail about his integration and his long journey to becoming Canadian and the corollary ‘deconstruction’ of his American mind, I may have better connected with his candour, may have more completely empathized with his self-reflections, may have more profoundly engaged in dialogue with some of his philosophical assertions. As Lemm is a poet and academic his prose is nevertheless supple and the overlapping of stories across timelines highly effective in relating a journey though memory that is for the most part an engaging read that encapsulates growing up in Washington in the 1960s amidst the lingering patriotic and militaristic haze of the Eisenhower-Kennedy years when many Americans would shortly find that sensibility face to face with a new and very different war, but as it stands in Lemm’s book only half the journey is complete: he gives us some sense of the ‘being’, but we are left wanting the ‘becoming.’