Response to Lauren Slater's Lying

Both the book's introduction and its reputation dominated my reading for the first 70 pages. The tone of the book, a sort of--maybe I had epilepsy, maybe I didn't, or maybe I did--detracted from the story. Slater describes her memoir as "impish" and that's exactly how it felt. The dictionary definition of impish is--"naughtily or annoyingly playful" and this descriptor seemed for the first third of the book an accurate description--annoying and unnecessarily playful.

Slater overemphasizes the notion that her epilepsy is possibly fiction. She seems to care so much what the reader thinks, as on page 56, "I still loved my mother, understand that, please." She goes so far as to address the reader in second person; she pleads with us to understand. Slater also refuses to suspend disbelief, refuses to re-imagine scenes from her past and present them as truth. As on page 23, "I'd say she smiled then," she self-consciously reminds the reader that she is in fact imagining her past. This is redundant in that she is writing a memoir. Pointing out that she's imagining didn't seem interesting enough to point out in such a specific way. It struck me as an unnecessary reminder that memoir is in some ways fiction. Her continual noting of this took away from her story, as though the author is concerned that her memoir won't be noteworthy unless it continually emphasizes this focus on truth-telling. It strikes me as a self-conscious tic that takes away from her story.

But what kept me going were her one-liners:

-"...the kind of sky they show in decongestant commercials" (34)
-"...an illness so existential, so oddly spiritual, you are stuck out in the stratosphere with Sartre and Kierkegaard, with dead dogs and owls" (34).
-"This, this is the happy part of my story, which does not mean I was happy" (55)
-"In there, girls leaned toward the mirrors, fell into their faces' reflections like it was love, like it was hate, snapping open clam-shaped compact cases and patching up their oily skin" (65)
-"A home has many purposes, but it should primarily be a place where you can cry and run a good fever" (70)
....And on and on.....

At page 88, the book became weightier, less an exercise in truth telling than a real narrative. "...I ask you to please consider this--perhaps Munchausen's is all I ever had. Perhaps I was, and still am, a pretender, a person who creates illnesses because she needs time, attention, touch, because she knows no other way of telling her life's tale." It is at this point that Slater becomes vulnerable. She suggests that she's not being impish on purpose, that it is quite possible that she too has confused fact and fiction.