Lying: A Metaphorical Memoir"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. 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. 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. 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. |
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LibraryThing Review
User Review - NeitherNora - LibraryThingLYING is a stunning feat of postmodern nonfiction, professing itself in every page as being both true and untrue, fully metaphorical and essentially accurate. I don't know how much of it "actually ... Read full review
LibraryThing Review
User Review - rhussey174 - LibraryThingI couldn’t decide for a while whether I loved or hated Lauren Slater’s book Lying: A Metaphorical Memoir. Finally, maybe a quarter of the way into it, I decided I loved it and I never changed my mind ... Read full review
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alcoholic asked auras Barbados Bernard Malamud blue body brain Bread Loaf called cherry tree Christopher Christopher’s corpus callostomy corpus callosum couldn’t Danny Harris dark depression disease doctor dress Elaine epilepsy epileptic eyes fact fall father feel felt fucked girl hair hand head heard hypergraphia I’ve illness Jesus knew Lauren Jean Lauren Slater learned live looked Mark Strand metaphor mother mouth Munchausen’s mythomania never night nuns Okay once patient person phenobarbital ptyalism seemed seizures sickness skating skin Slotnicks smell snow someone sometimes sound staring started steal stood stopped story surgery Swan talk tchotchkes tell temporal lobe epilepsy things thought three blind mice told took touch truth turned voice walked wanted wasn’t watched week whole woman words write You’re
Bibliographic information
| Title | Lying: A Metaphorical Memoir |
| Author | Lauren Slater |
| Publisher | Random House Publishing Group, 2012 |
| ISBN | 0307830160, 9780307830166 |
| Length | 240 pages |
| Subjects | › Biography & Autobiography / Personal Memoirs Family & Relationships / Dysfunctional Families Psychology / Mental Health |
| Export Citation | BiBTeX EndNote RefMan |