Lying : A Metaphorical Memoir

Amazon.com
One has good reason to be suspicious of a book that calls itself a "metaphorical memoir." If a metaphor substitutes one thing for another to which it's not ordinarily related, and a memoir relates the personal experiences of the author, then a metaphorical memoir would be... well, lying, if we're going to get technical about it. Or it could be Lying, in which case, hold that judgment and lay all categories aside: here is a book so stunningly contrary it deserves a whole genre to itself.

Lauren Slater may have grown up with epilepsy. Or she may have Munchausen syndrome, "also called factitious illness," also called lying. Or, quite possibly, she has never had any of the above, and all her exquisite evocations of auras and grand mal seizures are merely well-researched symbolic descriptions of her psychic state. In a chapter that's disguised as an extended letter to her editor (and impishly titled "How to Market This Book") she defends her decision to call the work nonfiction: Why is what we feel less true than what is? Supposing I simply feel like an epileptic, a spastic person, one with a shivering brain; supposing I have chosen epilepsy because it is the most accurate conduit to convey my psyche to you? Would this not still be a memoir, my memoir? Slater is peering down a slippery slope here, and for all its manifest brilliance, the pyrotechnics of its prose, reading Lying can be an unnerving experience--sort of like hanging out with a compulsive liar, actually. (It's no help to find out that "after all, a lot, or at least some, or at least a few, of the literal facts are accurate.")

FROM THE PUBLISHER

"The beauty of Lauren Slater's prose is shocking," said Newsday about Welcome to My Country, and now, in this powerful and provocative new book, Slater brilliantly explores a mind, a body, and a life under siege. Diag-nosed as a child with a strange illness, brought up in a family given to fantasy and ambition, Lauren Slater developed seizures, auras, neurological disturbances—and an ability to lie. In Lying: A Metaphorical Memoir, Slater blends a coming-of-age story with an electrifying exploration of the nature of truth, and of whether it is ever possible to tell—or to know—the facts about a self, a human being, a life.
                
Lying chronicles the doctors, the tests, the seizures, the family embarrassments, even as it explores a sensitive child's illness as both metaphor and a means of attention-getting—a human being's susceptibility to malady, and to storytelling as an act of healing and as part of the quest for love. This mesmerizing memoir openly questions the reliability of memoir itself, the trickiness of the mind in perceiving reality, the slippery nature of illness and diagnosis—the shifting perceptions and images of who we are and what, for God's sake, is the matter with us.
                
In Lying, Lauren Slater forces us to redraw the boundary between what we know as fact and what we believe we create as fiction. Here a young woman discovers not only what plagues her but also what heals her—the birth of sensuality, her creativityas an artist—in a book that reaffirms how a fine writer can reveal what is common to us all in the course of telling her own unique story.
                
About Welcome to My Country, the San Francisco Chronicle said, "Every page brims with beautifully rendered images of thoughts, feelings, emotional states." The same can be said about Lying: A Metaphorical Memoir.

FROM THE CRITICS

Publishers Weekly

If fact is shaded with metaphor, does it become fiction? In a memoir that raises that question, the author of Prozac Diary and Welcome to My Country narrates a life marked by a disease she may or may not actually have. "I have epilepsy," she writes in the first chapter. "Or I feel I have epilepsy. Or I wish I had epilepsy, so I could find a way of explaining the dirty, spastic glittering place I had in my mother's heart." But was it epilepsy, or depression, or bipolar disorder, or Munchausen syndrome, or none of the above? And did Slater really undergo a corpus callostomy operation separating her right and left brain? Questions of authenticity aside, at its core this memoir touchingly describes the coming of age of a young girl who relies on illness to gain the attention of her narcissistic mother and ineffectual father, and who must find a way to navigate her parents' often vicious marriage and her own troubled adolescence. Slater, who says she must take anticonvulsant medication daily, had her first seizure the summer she turned 10. The symptoms of epilepsy function as a vehicle for her most potently written passages: dazzling hallucinations, teeth-grinding spasms, exuberant exaggerations. As often happens to those with illness, Slater moves from diagnosis to misdiagnosis to cure to redefinition and eventually to acceptance. In her afterword, the author explains that for personal and philosophical reasons, she had no choice but to transcribe her life in "a slippery, playful, impish, exasperating text, shaped, if it could be, like a question mark." The skill with which she achieves her goal reflects unusual insight. Agent, Kim Witherspoon. (June) Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.|

KLIATT - Francisca Goldsmith

The art of writing memoir that evokes greater truths in the minds and hearts of readers, instead of being limited to a catharsis for the author, is both subtle and capable of great power. Slater (author of Prozac Diary, 1998) accomplishes much in this memoir of her struggles with epilepsy and concomitant personality issues in her childhood and youth: she provides readers with insight on this myth-laden physical disorder and its psychological components; she reveals subtle truths about how people choose somatic as well as intellectual methods for "telling" the stories of their own lives; and she calls into serious question how lying, when used as metaphor, can be a method of communicating the truth. Slater developed epilepsy when she was ten, and suffered such severe and frequent seizures that she underwent surgery, at 13, to relieve the intensity of the electrical discharges as they traveled between brain hemispheres. No one, however, is limited to the sum of his/her physical state, and Slater's character also was informed by her parents' mismatched partnership, her own imaginative world, and the interest her physical condition evoked in healthcare professionals. Whether she "used" epilepsy to show herself or whether being epileptic shaped that self is one of the provocative questions she raises within her telling of her youth. Slater's writing is graceful and engaging, making the story of her years between 10 and 20 easy to offer teenage girls. Readers who themselves have experiences with epilepsy will find valuable insight on the condition and its treatment here, but those with no such experience will become equally involved in the author's discussion of how one both does andcan't shape self perception willfully. Among the variety of audiences this book suits, mother-daughter book clubs might consider it a meaty text to share. KLIATT Codes: SA*￯﾿ﾽExceptional book, recommended for senior high school students, advanced students, and adults. 2000, Penguin, 222p.,

Vanessa V. Friedman - Entertainment Weekly Editor's Pick

[A] strange but mesmerizing book...Slater's arguments are beautifully shaped; her prose, especially the descriptions of her childhood, are blunt and searing. In the end does it matter if you know what's real and what's fantasy? In this case, the answer is: When the narrative is powerfull enough, not at all.

Rebecca Mead - The New York Times Book Review