Rating: 
Summary: I Lie
Review:
I didn't like this book. I'm a liar, so it could be that I did like the book or I liked it a little. I'm an admitted liar, which isn't the same as being a liar because I'm telling you I'm a liar: my statement that I didn't like the book, therefore, is a metaphor for my true feelings about the book. I am an existential reader, floating freely above the inauthentic written word, alongside Sartre, nuns who frolic in the snow, and ant corpses, reading each word with a grain of salt and another of pepper. If I were to tell you my factual opinion of this book, by definition, it couldn't be fully truthful since I have already told you I'm a liar, and how can a liar state her feelings in a way that is anything but metaphorical? This review is a combination of fabrications, metaphors, and truths. Fabrications are really the same as facts, as they are metaphors for truths, so I refuse to tell you which details of this review are facts and which aren't. This is a book review, which is non-fiction; I insist vehemently, clearly smelling cinnamon and freshly-baked bread, that you, reader, accept this review as the truth. Metaphor is the only way I can tell you the truth, so it must be the truth, see? Deer eat from my birdfeeder as I write this; Blue Jays flap patiently, awaiting the deer's departure. Parts of this review are absolutely accurate and other sentences are flatly false; false, a word I smell as foul flowers and the wafted odor of the garbage dump down the road (or maybe it's a few miles away). However false, the preceding sentences are metaphors for my real opinion.
This, reader, is the truth: the way you responded to the above paragraph is how you will feel about the book. Remember, this is only my opinion and I am a slippery person.
P.S. I dislike liars.
Rating: 
Summary: Quick-Sand Rules and Shapeless Places
Review: A shifty, quirky, and brazen memoir of a young girl coming to terms with her own self, complete with self-propelled angst and mental hiatus, as well as coming to understand the world, including its quick-sand rules and shapeless places, Lauren Slater's Lying is ironically honest from the first chapter: "I exaggerate." With those spare words, both a warning and a tease, Slater is off on a remarkable journey. She digs through time, her memories, real not in the factual sense, but in the sense that all memories, literally true or not, are all effectively true in that what we believe has more of a bearing on our lives than what actually is. As Slater picks through her jumbled memories, what she remembers and how she remembers it, and her own confused psyche, always self-diagnosing, as well as self-questioning, she ultimately uncovers the two great loves of her life-her mother and her own mental illness.
The reader, especially the female reader, can see herself on every page of this starkly honest memoir. Slater begins her tale and consistently returns to the universal phenomena of her mother's consistent and many-faceted power over her life. As we all do, Slater first expects and seeks love from her mother. She attempts to please her mother by practicing ice-skating, trying desperately to pull-off the various maneuvers her mother calls out to her from the side-"spin," "leap now." Her mother, like so many of our own mothers, is simply unable to bestow this great, filling love on her only daughter and her reason is the same reason we can see in so many of our own mothers-she is dissatisfied. This dissatisfaction is not necessarily rooted completely in her daughter, although it sometimes shows up there, but instead, it's found in the world-how it doesn't fit with what she has envisioned. The common response is for a mother to shift her dreams to her daughter, but the world is still an imperfect place and so of course, it's impossible for a daughter to live up to all that. Slater sees this; she remembers how her epilepsy was at first admired by her mother who was always skimming the surface of things, never letting go the way her daughter is able to do in her seizures. However, ultimately, Slater, as an adolescent girl, sees that her mother is not able to deliver the kind of approval we all innately seek. She moves on to other places-in truth, it seems that her illness, her writing, her everything is really about one thing-earning approval and by approval, love. And doesn't that sound familiar to every reader?
Her journey leads her to other places. She shines in the love of the sisters at a convent, she steals love in the way of faking her own epilepsy, joins an AA group though she is not alcoholic, and then even trades her words, her talent, for love in the form of a sexual relationship with an older man. Ultimately, this is where she is finally healed--she loses the man but holds onto the words. Now we can see how her sensuality is both what has set her apart from the world in a lonely way, and has freed her to experience the world in a fulfilling and dream-like way. The memoir is therefore a teacher, Slater speaking to the reader, sometimes directly, sometimes metaphorically, and always with lovely language, full of concrete similes and rhythmic wording. The reader learns to understand that there is a difference between the facts and the truth and is refreshed by such an honest look at need-what we all seek in others.
Rating: 
Summary: A strange delight
Review: As someone who has steeped himself in the literature of manifold obessions, not to mention the huge corpus on the history of epilepsy and in particular its relationship to the divine... I have some strong feelings about the narrative Lauren Slater propqagates to such great effect in this book. That much of the narrative focuses on me is not really the point, nor is it at all the point whether we did or did not have anal relations (Lauren and I will continue to disagree on this admittedly inconsequential point, as we are, here, talking about literature, which this book undoubtedly is. Maybe even great literature.)I have rarely, probably never, read a work that so captures what a strange delight it was, it is, when every consummation is a grand mal. Bravo to Ms. Slater for writing a book not only, as was her intent, about epilepsy, but for pinpointing an as yet undiagonosed perversity -- epileptophilia.
Rating:
Summary: Thought-provoking and disturbing!
Review: Having read Prozac Diary, I thought I'd read Lauren Slater's Lying: A Metaphorical Memoir. This is a book about a pathological liar. How far away is fantasy from reality? Is there a fine line between delusion and insanity? It made me realize that there are a lot of people out there that suffer from this complex mental illness. You never know whether or not Slater is telling the truth, which makes this magnificent book one of the most disarming and thought provoking memoirs I have read in a long time!
Rating:
Summary: A good read for people who like mind games
Review: I could read this book over and over again, and I doubt I'd ever get sick of it. If you like symbolism, you'll love this book. Possibly the entire book (which is a non-fiction autobiography) is written as a metaphor, plus the author admits from the very beginning that she's a liar. In the end, the reader is left wondering which parts of this spectacular book are true and which aren't. Moreover, the author challenges the reader to consider what is truly real and what isn't. A worthwhile read, for sure.
Rating: 
Summary: disappointing
Review: I expected much more from such a highly hyped book. The postmodern sheen (am I lying right now? is it possible to tell the truth in memoir) is very thin, and after about 15 pages, glib to a tiresome degree; an essay would have captured it better than this feverishly overwritten and smug performance. Underneath the surface of the fiction about epilepsy you can just see the more complicated story of an eating disorder; writing about *that* would have been far more absorbing, would have enabled Slater to delve into the real psychological preoccupations & complex family relationships that underlie that particular illness--the symptoms would have been more in sych, anorexia in particular is a much better metaphor than epilepsy for the emotions displayed here--and her questions about how possible it is to tell an honest story about oneself would have had more power. Skip this.
Rating:
Summary: Magnificent
Review: I frequently find myself quoting from pages of this book. Anyone who doesn't believe that they can't relate in some way would be, in fact, a liar... to themselves.Whether torn by the duality of Gemini, or having gone through a crisis that makes you question your belief and being, you must identify with this book. The descriptive style and constant jumps from reality to perceived psychosis will keep you turning pages. I can't wait to read more of her work.
Rating:
Summary: Magnificent
Review: I frequently find myself quoting from pages of this book. Anyone who doesn't believe that they can't relate in some way would be, in fact, a liar... to themselves. Whether torn by the duality of Gemini, or having gone through a crisis that makes you question your belief and being, you must identify with this book. The descriptive style and constant jumps from reality to perceived psychosis will keep you turning pages. I can't wait to read more of her work.
Rating:
Summary: beautiful
Review: I loved this book. The barbed review by Janet Maslin in the NYT seems to me to reflect more on Maslin's squeamishness with self revelation than it does on the book itself, which exerts an unsually strong narrative pull while also exploring moral, philosophical and psychological issues. The book begins when Slater, age ten, starts experiencing strange, oftentimes lovely hallucinations, called auras, and then the wracking seizures that soon follow. At the same time Slater manages, slyly but charmingly, to warn us for reasons this book then goes on to explore that she may be making her epileptic illness up. In any case, her seizures worsen, and eventually Slater undergoes brain surgery in order to cure her condition. The surgery works, in that it reduces the seizurees, but she is left still with her auras, and it is in the midst of an especially potent aura that Slater discovers her creativity as a writer. She then goes off to Bread Loaf Writer's conference, only to meet and fall in love with an author some thirty years her senior. We follow Slater, breathlessly, through her illness, her surgery, through her torrid, touching, and at times horrifying love affair, to its painful conclusion, when she is left alone, having to grapple with the emptiness that follows passionate attachment. This book succeeds on multiple levels, which makes for a rich and rewarding reading experience. On the one hand there's the straightforward narrative of illness, cure, and love affair, all compulsively page turning. On the other hand, there's the meta level: throughout the text Slater casts doubt as to the veracity of her story. "Some epileptics," Slater writes, "have the neurologically based need to lie." Or, she offers, maybe she doesn't have epilepsy at all. Maybe she has Munchausen's, a psychiatric disorder in which a person creates illness to get attention and love. Why, you may wonder, would an author on the one hand write such a beautiful tale of epilepsy and love, and on the other hand, cast doubt on its veracity. This question gets to the heart of the book. Truth, Slater is ultimitely saying,lies not in fact, but in what could be called Keat's negative capability, meaning a willingness to dwell in undefined space where nothing is really solid. Reading Slater's work, in the final analysis, is like entering that mysterious space. You don't know what really happened, but in the end it doesn't matter, because the story casts such a sure spell, and we float through it, suspended, in abeyance, guided not by what we know is real, but by what we see, hear, feel, in this richly textured tale.
Rating:
Summary: Not "creative genius" just weird
Review: I must admit that I was somewhat dissapointed in "Lying". The book has a great deal of promise as a tale of dealing with the rigors of epilepsy and various familial dysfunctions but it really doesn't follow through. I will give Slater credit for some marvelously imaginative prose but I finished the book feeling disoriented and duped. After gaining the your interest regarding her coping with her illness and other factors, Slater punishes your emotional investment in her trials by revealing in the last few pages that some or all or none of the entire book is true. Maybe she has epilepsy or maybe its just personality disorder or maybe its neither or maybe she is just a liar or maybe we all are or maybe we are all trying to justfy our existences with "seizures" at reality or maybe . . . etc. While I think all of this was designed to encourage the reader to see life as one big metaphor, it left me with the attitude of simply "yeah, whatever" and I simply ceased caring at all what happened to her. "Lying" is a distracting book that is worth borrowing from someone for its poetic strength but I would skip purchasing this one.
|
