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Lying: A Metaphorical Memoir, by Lauren Slater
PDF Ebook Lying: A Metaphorical Memoir, by Lauren Slater
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"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.
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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.
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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 creativity as 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.
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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.
- Sales Rank: #1178243 in Books
- Published on: 2000-05-30
- Released on: 2000-05-30
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.17" h x .83" w x 5.49" l,
- Binding: Hardcover
- 240 pages
Amazon.com Review
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
From 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 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Booklist
Slater, author of Prozac Diary (1998), marshals her literary virtuosity and dual perspective as a psychologist who has suffered mental disorders in this highly provocative inquiry into the nature of epilepsy. She describes her own epileptic seizures with poetic intensity, then declares that "some epileptics are liars," and, indeed, many episodes feel more dramatized than documented. She lyrically recounts her spiritual awakening at a special school for epileptics run by nuns only to slyly observe that epileptics often harbor religious fixations. Slater then suggests that she actually had Munchausen syndrome, which induces sufferers to feign illnesses. Did she have an operation to separate the hemispheres of her brain, or is that a metaphor for her divided sense of self? Each anecdote is as enrapturing and disorienting as the auras, or "strange states," she experiences just before her seizures, and all are inspired by the same overarching question: Why is what we feel less true than what is? Slater's uncanny narrative subtly reveals the meshing of the factual with the emotional and the real with the imagined. Donna Seaman
Copyright � American Library Association. All rights reserved
Most helpful customer reviews
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful.
Fascinating and engaging.
By smele
In "The Art of Time in Memoir", Sven Birkerts wrote that memoirs are works of restoration, "searching out recurrences and patterns, but also then allowing for the idea that pattern hints at a larger order . . . the memoirist researches this, using the self as subject, assembling the shards, riveting his impressions together word by word." This idea is perhaps vital in reading Lauren Slater's "Lying", for she openly admits to creating or altering the stories she tells about herself. There is the lie of Hayward Krieger, whom the introduction is credited to - yet Slater's Dr. Neu claims that Krieger does not exist. Does Dr. Neu exist, or is he another fabrication? Similar questions continue throughout the reading. Slater is not a memoirist who we can consider a reliable narrator, but that factual accuracy was never the point. Tto read Slater's novel is to feel as though you are experiencing the confusions and frustrations that she felt in her life.
Slater's style is experimental and effective. The first chapter is a single sentence: "I exaggerate." She chose to include letters and medical reports along with the narrative, giving us a look at her as perceived by others in her life. In this writing itself, Lying is effective in its use of imagery to pull in the reader, and Slater's writing and identity are persuasive and compelling. A scene standing out in my mind was her watching people on the bus. When they got up, she "sat in their seats and felt the way the foam cushions had molded to their specific shapes", she smelled an old man's hat and "studied the hair carefully . . . two silver strands of hair, with a masculine smell." Slater's ears pop and she feels cool air coming in through the bus window, and in this moment we are Lauren. She is honest about things that someone would not necessarily permit herself to be honest about. For instance, the contemplation about stealing babies, lying about having cancer, and having "an immediate affinity for [the penis]."
It does not matter so much if Slater's memoir is the truth in its entirety. It is her truth. We have been introduced to her life and her character. From what she has presented to us as readers, we are able to use this to interpret who she is. She states that she has given us her essence. Perhaps in a way, the candid admission that this memoir consists of lies makes her more honest than memoirists that embellish their truths (for instance, could Conroy truly have remember every intimate detail and conversation in "Stop-Time"?). Slater urges that the metaphors she uses "resonate in a heartfelt place we cannot dismiss", and that is the goal of her postmodern memoir. Truth can be complex, and Slater masterfully explores this idea.
This book is engaging and undoubtedly one of my favorite memoirs.
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
It is beautifully written and existentially profound
By Ernest Presley
Lauren Slater's book, Lying, may very well be a work of genius. It is beautifully written and existentially profound. Anyone trying to understand his or her own complex behavior, or such behavior of a friend or loved one, will be engaged, encouraged, embraced by this book. If your experience has been such that you still struggle to find words capable of expressing the truth of your experience, this book may be a revelation. If your heart and mind has brought you to discovering this book through interests noted my the amazon algorithm - trust it in this case, and purchase a copy. Really.
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
Amazing Trip Through a Fascinating Mind
By Amazon Customer
"Lying" takes the reader on a fantastical journey through a mind disturbed by epilepsy or maybe something else. The author experiments successfully not only with the concept of truth but point of view in telling the story. The author's syntax and vocabulary is straight-forward, which lets the narrative stand out. However, she also plays with style, as when she crafts the report of a doctor doing research on epilepsy.
The reader also gets an education about epilepsy, Munchausen syndrome and Alcoholics Anonymous.
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