Customer Reviews

Lying: A Metaphorical Memoir

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I loved this book. The barbed review by Janet Maslin in the NYT seems to me to reflect more on Maslin's squeamishness with self revelation than it does on the book itself, which exerts an unsually strong narrative pull while also exploring moral, philosophical and psychological issues.

The book begins when Slater, age ten, starts experiencing strange, oftentimes lovely hallucinations, called auras, and then the wracking seizures that soon follow. At the same time Slater manages, slyly but charmingly, to warn us for reasons this book then goes on to explore that she may be making her epileptic illness up. In any case, her seizures worsen, and eventually Slater undergoes brain surgery in order to cure her condition. The surgery works, in that it reduces the seizurees, but she is left still with her auras, and it is in the midst of an especially potent aura that Slater discovers her creativity as a writer. She then goes off to Bread Loaf Writer's conference, only to meet and fall in love with an author some thirty years her senior. We follow Slater, breathlessly, through her illness, her surgery, through her torrid, touching, and at times horrifying love affair, to its painful conclusion, when she is left alone, having to grapple with the emptiness that follows passionate attachment. This book succeeds on multiple levels, which makes for a rich and rewarding reading experience. On the one hand there's the straightforward narrative of illness, cure, and love affair, all compulsively page turning. On the other hand, there's the meta level: throughout the text Slater casts doubt as to the veracity of her story. "Some epileptics," Slater writes, "have the neurologically based need to lie." Or, she offers, maybe she doesn't have epilepsy at all. Maybe she has Munchausen's, a psychiatric disorder in which a person creates illness to get attention and love. Why, you may wonder, would an author on the one hand write such a beautiful tale of epilepsy and love, and on the other hand, cast doubt on its veracity. This question gets to the heart of the book. Truth, Slater is ultimitely saying,lies not in fact, but in what could be called Keat's negative capability, meaning a willingness to dwell in undefined space where nothing is really solid. Reading Slater's work, in the final analysis, is like entering that mysterious space. You don't know what really happened, but in the end it doesn't matter, because the story casts such a sure spell, and we float through it, suspended, in abeyance, guided not by what we know is real, but by what we see, hear, feel, in this richly textured tale.

I originally read a copy from England, surprisingly, it had a different title, "Spasm: A Memoir With Lies." Needless to say, I was intrigued by the title & read it right away. Without going into much detail about how this book changed me in a way I cannot formulate, I would like to point out that it does address important questions regarding what we accept as our Reality vs. our Genuine Experience of Reality. For me, because Slater includes all the lies (or truths) we tell ourselves daily, it was one of the most honest, insightful, artistic and perplexing memoirs I have read.

This is Slater's best work yet. It's a novel, a memoir, a neurological thriller, a fantastic flamboyant merging of genres. Slater tells the compulsively readable story of a young girl's epilepsy.(Her own? Maybe, maybe not, it hardly matters,) and the fascinating neurologically based states that result: auras of every color, scintillating smells; here, in this work, Slater examines fully the poetic possibility of disease, and, also, the way we use disease not only as an art form, but as a conduit for love. The scenes involving brain surgery and electrical brain probes are especially haunting and ironically accurate for a book which claims it's rooted in deception. It may be, but if so, than Lying, a splendid tour de force, illumintes for all of us how close truth and trickery really are.

I truly loved this book, I found it both profound and in a very odd way honest. The title tells you what to expect, "A Metaphorical Memoir". This is not a story about facts, which facts are true, and which are not, this is irrelevant. The honesty is in the human experience of this woman, that she is indeed lost somewhere in the gray matter of life, and what that constant state of "seizure" is like for her. This book is not for the person who takes everything literal, but if you are able to see her in the fictions and truths that she shares, without knowing which is which, the point of the book will not be lost to you.

One finishes this book with many questions about what has actually happened during the life of Lauren Slater. Did she have temporal lobe seizure disorder? Or was she so traumatized during her childhood and adolescence by something or someone that she substitutes the seizure disorder for some other form of mental or physical illness? We are told that this is supposed to be a memoir not only about her illness -- whatever it was or is -- and the development of her creative abilities, but also about her relationship with her mother. We are given relatively little information about this relationship, except to be told about the mother's cold, distant method of "showing love" to her young daughter, her drinking problem, and her narcissistic personality. Could her mother have been so unloving that Slater could simply not write any more about a relationship that barely existed? It is difficult to review a work in which so much information seems to be withheld from the reader. This reader hopes some of these questions will be answered in future works by the author (and, meanwhile, feels rather frustrated with this "nonfiction" book which seems to be more like fiction!).

Lauren Slater's tribute to postmodernism in her "metaphorical memoir" is an interesting exploration of the role of fact in what is true. Where we may tend to regard the objective facts of a situation to be the truth of it, Ms. Slater takes a much more subjective view. She asserts her point, explicitly and in a masterful way woven seemlessly throughout the text, that there may be a more truthful way to relate a situation, a character, an anecdote, than to simply relate the facts.

So she leads us to wonder even about the most central elements of the story. Does she really have epilepsy? Has she ever really had a seizure? Does the doctor she cites throughout her story really exist, or is he a metaphor also?

While fascinating questions I found their deliberate effect a bit too successful: I couldn't trust the narrator. Unfortunately for me, that meant also that I was ultimately unable to feel close to the narrator and really understand her motivations -- perhaps, in my eyes at least, the most important role of a memoir.

It's a bit of a quandry that I'm left in. She's succeeded fully in doing what she set out to do. She's presented herself as something of a chronic lier; a trickster at the very least. But since I know this about her so soon, and I'm so frequently reminded, I have difficultly staving off the need to push her away. So as a memoir, instead of a piece of literary theory, I found Slater's book a bit distant.

This is, simply, the best memoir available in contemporary American letters. Slater here tells a gripping story of spiritual and moral awakening in beautiful prose. At the same time, this memoir explores the contradictions and possibilities at the heart of this new creative non fiction form, and she does this in a way that is not pretentious or overly "post modern," but that is exacting and exciting. Slater's book in many ways is like Dave Egger's book, A Heartbreaking work Of Staggering Genius in its innovative and oftentimes hilarious and heartbreaking sttructure and theme, but Slater's book is better, because while Eggers plays some neat narrative tricks, they never integrate with the deeper meaning of his work. Lying integrates form and function gorgeously. It will make you laugh, cry, and think. Congratulations, Lauren Slater, on a brilliant book.

Slater insists that her book be characterized as a non-fiction memoir, despite that fact that she freely admits that her account of her epilepsy is factual, symbolic, real, and fantastical all at once. Slater herself isn't always sure which of her memories are true and which are vivid but invented. If the reader can let themselves free in this alternate reality, Slater's memoir makes for fascinating, touching, and chilling reading. She truly brings the reader inside her own confusions about how much of her disease is real and how much fabricated. The short length of the book allows Slater's literary trickery to work well.

As an adult, Slater confesses to her adolescent neurologist that she frequently exaggerated her seizures and symptoms right before her corpus callostomy surgery. He dismisses her guilt, saying it was well-known that she was an exaggerator. "Okay, you lied. But really, Lauren, I don't want you to feel guilty. In a sense you lied, but in another sense you didn't, because trickery is so hinged on your personality style, and, therefore, you were only being true to yourself."

Also as an adult, Slater finds salvation in AA, despite the fact that she's hardly a drinker. She enjoys the comraderie and the structure of the 12 steps. The climax of Slater's coming to terms with her disease is a stunning confessional at an AA meeting, spoken entirely metaphorically, which has a huge impact on her group and the reader.

Memoir: Harper's Magazine gives us the "Offutt Glossary" which states, "Memoir: ...a popular form in which the writer remembers entire passages of dialogue from the past, with the ultimate goal of blaming the writer's parents for his current psychological challenges." (Which is invariably the mother as is the case with Slater's Metaphorical Memoir, "Lying.")

While her writing is visual, sensual, creative, stylish, graphic, I find myself carried along but never quite sure of where I am going and, if the narrator and I ever arrive, is it a place she meant to lead me; is it where she even meant to go herself? Or is she going in circles and never arriving? In other words, I'm lost and I don't trust my guide.

Willa Cather in the 1930s urged the memoirist to uncover the "inviolable self, the core being at the center in whose company we breathe free; that something we call our real selves." Where is the real self of Laura Slater? At the end of the day, she makes us question, "Where is the 'real self' of anyone when life itself is in a constant state of flux?" She may have a point. Am I afraid to look at that point? It's all very nebulous and we're on thin ice.

Back to the supposed purpose of memoir: It is, hopefully, a pursuit of becoming and in the course of this 'becoming' one becomes authentic. As a memoirist Slater should take the reader (and herself) away from the fog of her perceptions created by the conflict with her "bitchy, depressed, hissing, narcissistic, controlling" mother, and whatever the circumstances of her birth were (we're never quite sure) toward the truth of her core self. She blames epileptic seizures for standing in her way of doing just that, although the reader comes to find that she didn't have epilepsy at all: she was just using its symptoms as a metaphor to create colors, sensations, blackouts to define the indefinable "non being" or "other being" from which she does not seem to be able to escape; a beautifully creative tactic and as such should be marketed as fiction. Or should it? Perhaps this is the new memoir. I don't know.

She was close to approaching her authentic self in the AA meeting she accidentally tripped upon, but she falters and deceives in that she has to lie to fit in, and she does it quite convincingly. Or did she lie? I'm not sure. She was being true to herself, or was she? As her neurologist says, "In a sense you lied, but in another sense you didn't, because trickery is so hinged on your personality style, and, therefore, you were only being true to yourself." Now there's a good one. Can all the wrongdoers be excused because their deviations are a result of following the dictates of a personality "style" through which they are being true to themselves? I'm confused. Colorfully, metaphorically, mystically confused.

In the final analysis memoir, it has been posited, should lift the self from the raw material of life shaped by circumstance and experience, and ultimately transform and deliver wisdom. What happened to her is not what mattered, be it metaphorical or real, but what she made of what happened and what she brings to the reader of what she made of what happened.

I think...maybe...I wonder.

Lying is both intellectually exciting and in some ways, psychologically helpful. It promotes the view of the influence of behavior and talk on mental illness, i.e., in this book, epilepsy. Lauren Slater is actually remarkably close-mouthed in many instances (through her reliance on emotionally based rather than realistic, connect the dots, event by event narration) for a person able to write countless memoirs, concerning her own mental illness, and she could have epilepsy--but I don't think so, just the fact that this is "A Metaphorical Memoir" and she talks about what her metaphor of epilepsy actually means very strongly indicates the fact, that she is talking about her mental illness. Her metaphorical lying about epilepsy also extends to the both escapist and hurtful tendencies of borderline personality disorder which go along with her depression. To be able to look at such feelings as influenced by behavior is freeing in a sense because with a change of behavior and biochemistry a new person can be shaped. A little lying is still nice anyway in a person who is able to be psychologically dependent or interdependent, as it creates an effervescent, "nacreous" (this appears to be one of Slater's favorite words) fiction such as this.

Personally, I think that this book is less scary than Prozac Diary, and more helpful to me as a person, simply seeking ways to deal with life. Of course, scaring and disgusting and making a person afraid of even herself can have its uses and is not a hallmark of bad literature---but it was more alienating than instructive.

Also, I am proud of Lauren Slater for going from tell-all-literature to a more novelistic postmodern style, despite the fact that this is still a memoir. I hope that she writes more books: hopefully, ones that are not autobiographical. I would prefer novels, but if she wants to write psychological tomes that's cool too. This is the kind of book that I could definitely see a college professor assigning in class and I rather would like that idea if I were the author.

The people who say this book is unreadable are probably those readers who liked her through her other book, Prozac Diary, which is in a fairly different style. Certain people like certain styles. I prefer this style. It's classier.

I wonder who Christopher Marin is? It's cool that he wrote a review.