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Lying: A Metaphorical Memoir
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Carl Jung: Wounded Healer of the Soul
The Making of Modern Economics: The Lives and Ideas of the Great Thinkers
Heinz Kohut: The Making of a Psychoanalyst
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Delivering Doctor Amelia : The Story of a Gifted Young Obstetrician's Mistake and the Psychologist WhoHelped Her
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Intertwined Lives : Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, and Their Circle
The Lake Regions of Central Africa: From Zanzibar to Lake Tanganyika (Volume 1)
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Albert Schweitzer: A Biography (The Albert Schweitzer Library)
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My Therapist's Dog : Lessons in Unconditional Love
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The Body Silent: The Different World of the Disabled
My Father's Guru : A Journey Through Spirituality and Disillusion
In the Footsteps of Adam: A Memoir
Dr. Laura: The Unauthorized Biography
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Final Analysis : The Making and Unmaking of a Psychoanalyst
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The Fly Swatter : How My Grandfather Made His Way in the World
Diary of a Country Therapist

Average customer rating:

Brilliant prose from a trickster of a narrator
Well done, but not quite enough feeling
Another triumph for Slater.
nacreous
Not "creative genius" just weird

Lying: A Metaphorical Memoir
Lauren Slater
Manufacturer: Penguin
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 014200006X
Release Date: 2001-10-02

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.")

But if Slater is playing with our heads, she's not doing so for fashionable postmodern reasons. Lying's bag of tricks emerges from some complex and deeply felt ideas about form, reality, and consciousness itself--and what's more, it's an extraordinary memoir, "true" or not. A field full of nuns, their windblown habits tipping them over into the snow; an electric brain stimulator that makes a patient see colors and taste her own words; Slater rolling in mounds of Barbadian sugar and then running back to her mother, coated like candy--who cares whether any of these actually happened? In the end, Lying is fundamentally true, just as a great novel or indeed any great work of art is true: in a way that has nothing to do with fact. --Mary Park

Book Description

"[Slater has] the playful mind of a philosopher and the exquisite, unique voice of a poet." (The Washington Post Book World)

In this powerful and provocative new memoir, award-winning author Lauren Slater forces readers to redraw the boundary between what we know as fact and what we believe through the creation of our own personal fictions. Mixing memoir with mendacity, Slater examines memories of her youth, when after being diagnosed with a strange illness she developed seizures and neurological disturbances-and the compulsion to lie. Openly questioning the reliability of memoir itself, Slater presents the mesmerizing story of a young woman who discovers not only what plagues her but also what cures her-the birth of her sensuality, her creativity as an artist, and storytelling as an act of healing.

Customer Reviews:

Brilliant prose from a trickster of a narrator.......2005-12-25

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.

Well done, but not quite enough feeling.......2005-10-09

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.

Another triumph for Slater........2005-10-07

Lauren Slater, Lying (Random House, 2000)

I picked up Lauren Slater's first book, Welcome to My Country, on a whim in 1997, and instantly fell in love with Slater's impeccable prose. That she related case studies without descending into the smarmy self-help realm of, say, Oliver Sacks helped immensely. Welcome to My Country was on my best-I-read list that year.

Fast forward to 2005, and I start wondering what Slater's been up to since releasing it. I check her out at Amazon, and am thrilled to find she's released two books since. Lying is the first of them I picked up, and it's great to see she's still at the top of her game.

Billed as "a metaphorical memoir," we are given an autobiography of Lauren Slater, an epileptic who's had a rather extreme surgical procedure performed to counter her epilepsy. It controls the physical aspects-- the seizures-- but hasn't controlled any of the mental. This, of course, is the stuff popular memoirs are made of; the dysfunctional childhood sells.

What Slater brings to the table that sets her apart from the others is that, while there is always the understanding that the memoir is colored by the perceptions of its author, Slater recognizes this as much as any reader, and has decided to play with it-- to the point where the reader (and the person who wrote the cover copy, as well) realize that by the time we reach the first of Slater's revelations that she's written a fantasy as an actual event, we can no longer even be sure she has epilepsy. This opens up whole worlds of discussion in the larger genre of memoir, and that in itself makes Lying a singularly important work in its field; if taken as a greater meditation on memoir, the reader should come away with this book with a new way of looking at the form.

All that aside, though, the best reason to read Lauren Slater's books is simply that she's a fine, fine writer. Lying also has a very, very good chance of landing on this year's best-I-read list, despite the quality of my reading having skyrocketed in recent years. **** ½

nacreous.......2004-11-03

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.

Not "creative genius" just weird.......2004-09-27

I must admit that I was somewhat dissapointed in "Lying". The book has a great deal of promise as a tale of dealing with the rigors of epilepsy and various familial dysfunctions but it really doesn't follow through. I will give Slater credit for some marvelously imaginative prose but I finished the book feeling disoriented and duped. After gaining the your interest regarding her coping with her illness and other factors, Slater punishes your emotional investment in her trials by revealing in the last few pages that some or all or none of the entire book is true. Maybe she has epilepsy or maybe its just personality disorder or maybe its neither or maybe she is just a liar or maybe we all are or maybe we are all trying to justfy our existences with "seizures" at reality or maybe . . . etc. While I think all of this was designed to encourage the reader to see life as one big metaphor, it left me with the attitude of simply "yeah, whatever" and I simply ceased caring at all what happened to her. "Lying" is a distracting book that is worth borrowing from someone for its poetic strength but I would skip purchasing this one.

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