Lying

"I came across Lying by happenstance, and I thought it was fascinating. It is by Lauren Slater, who is now a psychotherapist, although that comes as a very unexpected revelation given the book. It’s the memoir of a young woman who has temporal lobe epilepsy and a very dysfunctional mother. So on the face of it, it would seem to be a misery memoir. There has been such a deluge of misery memoirs in America that I have started to think of the genre as being abuse, abandonment, trauma and dysfunction. In a sense, Lying is about that, but it is also a sceptical deconstruction of it on various levels. Lauren Slater has epilepsy. Epilepsy apparently makes people very prone to imagination – as we know from examples like Dostoevsky – but also to lying, we are told. So we are never sure, and she is never sure, whether she is lying or telling the truth. Sometimes this is on a very factual level, but more interestingly it is on a metaphorical level. In other words, she has very acute sensations and experiences, which she describes metaphorically, and sometimes we’re not sure whether the metaphors are describing real events or not. At one point she falls off a precipice – the whole memoir is about the notion of falling, as you do in epilepsy. But did she really fall? Or is this a metaphor for these states of falling? The book is subtitled “A Metaphorical Memoir”. It’s also very much a reflection on the metaphoric character of language altogether, and how it is impossible to give a pure, unmediated account of yourself. The truth of the self is always mediated through language. It’s fascinating. She is telling you that this is how memoirs are. There is always an element of self-construction, self-invention, exaggeration. On the very first page, she simply says, “I exaggerate.” Then she says she has epilepsy – or thinks she does. But we don’t know if she really has epilepsy. She might have bipolar disorder instead, or Munchausen syndrome. We don’t know. She doesn’t know. She cannot be sure. In the middle of the book is a page which says “The End”. It’s an end to this narrative of epilepsy, and then she begins in another vein. Finally she finds a vein of straightforwardness and sincerity. Even though she continues questioning, she acknowledges the need for a stable sense of self, and to say what you mean. But the memoir is about how ambiguous the notion of self is. She says that we invent and construct ourselves. In a sense she is talking about all memoir. We all create our own lives, don’t we? We construct them, we imagine them. We have to imagine how we want our lives to be in order to live. And we revise ourselves very often. Sometimes we think the past was like this – our mother treated us terribly – and at a later point we think no, our mother treated us perfectly well. We revise our memories in the light of the present, and in the light, one hopes, of deepening knowledge. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter But I do think that it is different to fictionalisation. Lauren Slater takes us fascinatingly close to the boundary where memoir and fiction meet. I myself feel that there is a responsibility to simple, naïve, factual truth in a memoir. I don’t think that one should invent things that did not happen. But that aside, any memoir writer could write any number of narratives of their life. We’re constantly engaged in self-interpretation, and that interpretation very often changes."