Lying: A Metaphorical Memoir

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.