Lying: A Metaphorical Memoir
Lying: A Metaphorical Memoir Books
Product Description
“The beauty of Lauren Slater’s prose is shocking,” said Newsday about Welcome to My People, and now, in this powerful and provocative new book, Slater brilliantly explores a mind, a body, and a life below siege. Diag-nosed as a child with a weird 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 appearance-of-age tale 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 like. 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 judge we make as fiction. Here a young woman discovers not only what plagues her but also what heals her–the birth of sensuality, her creativity as an artist–in a book that reaffirms how a fine novelist can reveal what is common to us all in the course of telling her own unique tale.
About Welcome to My People, the San Francisco Chronicle said, “Every page brims with perfectly rendered images of thoughts, feelings, emotional states.” The same can be said about Lying: A Metaphorical Memoir.Amazon.com Review
One has excellent 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 correlated, and a memoir relates the private experiences of the author, then a metaphorical memoir would be… well, lying, if we’re going to get technical about it. Or it may possibly 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 excruciating 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 choice to call the work nonfiction:
Why is what we feel less right 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 right 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 explosive of its prose, reading Lying can be an unnerving experience–sort of like hanging out with a compulsive liar, really. (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 right.”)
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 thoughts about form, reality, and consciousness itself–and what’s more, it’s an extraordinary memoir, “right” 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 really happened? In the end, Lying is fundamentally right, just as a fantastic novel or indeed any fantastic work of art is right: in a way that has nothing to do with fact. –Mary Park
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