Lying: A Metaphorical Memoir

by Lauren Slater

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780142000069
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	10/01/2001
Pages:	240
Sales rank:	1,008,511
Product dimensions:	5.10(w) x 7.66(h) x 0.50(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Lauren Slater is the author of five books of nonfiction and two memoirs, as well as a collection of short stories. She has received numerous awards, including a 2004 National Endowment for the Arts award, multiple inclusions in Best American volumes, and a Knight Science Journalism Fellowship at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Read an Excerpt

INTRODUCTION
(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "Lying"
by .
Copyright © 2001 Lauren Slater.
Excerpted by permission of Penguin Publishing Group.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Editorial Reviews

"Like Oliver Sacks . . . Ms. Slater writes about her patients with enormous compassion and insight. . . . A revealing memoir and thoughtful meditation on the therapeutic process itself . . . powerful."
        —-The New York Times, about Welcome to My Country

"Stunningly written . . . [Welcome to My Country] is relentless in its mask-stripping, yet instead of indulgence the act of revealing is handled with beauty and bravery."
        —-Los Angeles Times Book Review, about Welcome to My Country

"With the playful mind of a philosopher and the exquisite, unique voice of a poet, Slater renders a self-portrait that challenges our understanding of illness and health—and illuminates both."
        —-The Washington Post Book World, about Prozac Diary

From the Publisher

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 Cahners Business Information.|

Publishers Weekly

Slater is a gorgeous writer, and she describes the dissolving hallucinations of the epileptic state with seductive grace.
—The New York Times Book Review

Rebecca Mead

[A] strange but mesmerizing book...Slater's arguments are beautifully shaped; her prose, especially the descriptions of her childhood, are blunt and searing. In the end does it matter if you know what's real and what's fantasy? In this case, the answer is: When the narrative is powerfull enough, not at all.
—Entertainment Weekly Editor's Pick

Vanessa V. Friedman