She wrote a book about Mental Health for Women, in which is a guide for women to take control of their mental health. The book explains the psychological importance of women’s sexuality and relationships, and the affects of social contexts, such as poverty and racism. Lauren Slater is a psychologist, she uses the three structures of Freud’s personality theory, Id, ego, and superego. Id is based on instincts. This personality is unconscious, and it demands the id desires, and needs. If these desires, and needs are not met it will result to anxiety or problematic within the complex human behaviors. Ego is based on Reality. This sort of personality, is the desires of realistic and social behaviors. Finally, superego is based on Morality. This is based on the ideals on our senses of what is right and wrong. She uses the three structures through examining her memories, and she explains in her book. One of the main conflicted and ethically wrong part of what Lauren did was, she claimed that she has epilepsy. The entire book, Slater explains her diagnosis, the development of seizures and the neurological disturbances, also the compulsion to lie. Many readers believe it was wrong of Slater to input graphic details of epilepsy, illnesses and even the situation with the 50-year-old man. My own view is that Slater is telling somewhat of a truth, but in an exaggerated way. Though I concede that Slater should be question of her profession, I still maintain that she is in fact a genius. For example, Slater is a psychologist, whom wrote about women’s mental health. The issue is important because if she was crazy or messed up person, how is she able to publish a book about women’s health? We can think about in another perspective, as in it was terrible for her to tell a lie. However, what is a lie? Can a lie not telling the truth, or is it telling a story that may or may not be true, but it is just a story. Our world, as I
Lying: A Metaphorical Memoir by Lauren Slater. Spine creases, wear to binding and pages from reading. May contain limited notes, underlining or highlighting that does affect the text. Possible ex library copy, will have the markings and stickers associated from the library. Lauren Slater's Lying13 Lauren Slater's memoir of growing up with epilepsy, Lying: A Metaphorical Memoir, similarly foregrounds and manipulates the expectations of the reader in order to transgress the conventions of the illness narrative.
Lying: A Metaphorical Memoir
Genre: Memoir
- Annotated by:
- Belling, Catherine
Lying: A Metaphorical Memoir is a 2001 book by Lauren Slater. Slater herself suffers from mental illness, as chronicled in several other of her books (such as, more recently, Prozac Diary. Lying: A Metaphorical Memoir is a 2001 book by Lauren Slater. Slater herself suffers from mental illness, as chronicled in several other of her books (such as, more recently, Prozac Diary.
Summary
The first chapter of this memoir consists of two words: 'I exaggerate.' The narrator then tells us the story of her childhood and early adult experiences as an epileptic. After having her first seizure, at the age of ten, she spends a month at a special Catholic school in Topeka, Kansas, where the nuns teach epileptic children to fall without hurting themselves. This falling may or may not be literal; it is certainly symbolically apt.
During adolescence, Lauren begins lying, stealing, and faking seizures to get attention. She reveals that she has developed Munchausen's Syndrome, whose sufferers are 'makers of myths that are still somehow true, the illness a conduit to convey real pain' (88). A neurologist, Dr. Neu, performs surgery severing Lauren's corpus callosum, effectively dividing her brain in half and markedly alleviating the seizure disorder.
Later she attends a writer's workshop where she begins an affair with a married man, a writer much older than she. After it ends badly, she starts going to Alcoholics Anonymous (although she does not drink) and tells her story with such authenticity that when she later confesses that she is NOT an alcoholic, no-one believes her, dismissing her true story as denial. The memoir ends both with her recognition of the value of narrating and with a silent fall to the snowy ground, as the nuns taught her to do, in the knowledge that the sense of falling (rather than the material certainty of landing) is all that is finally, reliably, real.
Commentary
Even while she draws us into a vivid account of lived experience, Slater's narrator keeps reminding us that she may be unreliable. This book is concerned with what Slater calls 'narrative truth,' as opposed to 'historical truth,' and as such, neither fiction nor (quite) non-fiction, is both disconcerting, even annoying, and illuminating. Some events seem obviously spurious, like the 'Startle and Shake' technique that Lauren's mother learns can end a seizure. It is so violent that trying it in a supermarket gets her arrested for child abuse. (On the other hand, I wouldn't be surprised to learn that this bit is true.)
Other episodes are explicitly acknowledged as false: Lauren has a seizure at a funeral and falls into the grave. She then confesses that, although she had gone to the funeral and imagined falling in, she had not actually done so. The image of her struggling up out of the grave, presented as a kind of birth, is nonetheless an apt image of the beginning of her adulthood, and especially of her escape from her mother.
This interplay of the literal/factual with the metaphorical/fictional is made even more vertiginous by Slater's suggestion that epilepsy affects the memory. Is she simply misremembering, a 'poor historian'? Surely memory always is partly reinvention and reconstruction as well as retrieval? Distinguishing between her 'emotional memory' and her 'factual memory,' Slater invites us to reconsider the fundamental assumptions of the memoir genre, and even of all narrative self-disclosure. 'The neural mechanism that undergirds the lie is the same neural mechanism that helps us make narrative. Thus all stories . . . are at least physiologically linked to deception' (164).
This undermining of the reader's security has proven controversial. But one must remember that the book's subtitle is 'a metaphorical memoir.' This is the point: we should not take Slater literally. Just as a metaphor conjures up something not present in order to tell us more about the present object or concept, so Slater creates a story and a condition that cast light on broader realities--those of difficult childhood, of being a patient, of suffering from mental illness (Slater's actual clinical depression is documented in Prozac Diary, annotated in this data base).
The division that results from a severed corpus callosum is also a metaphor for the separations between childhood and adulthood, literal and figurative truths, knowing and imagining, even mind and brain. The reality of experience is, for Slater, so 'subtle and nuanced' she could never convey it with literal description. 'Is metaphor in memoir, in life, an alternate form of honesty,' she asks, 'or simply an evasion?' (192). Factually verifiable or not, there is much that is true in this story, and much that is thought-provoking about the experience of growing up with a chronic illness.
Publisher
Place Published
Lauren Slater Lying Dog
Edition
Lying Lauren Slater Chapter Summary
Page Count