Lying: A Metaphorical Memoir Book

Uninteresting Lies

Slater is controversial for her mixture of truth and fiction: this book is a memoir about her epilepsy, but apparently she did not have epilepsy; in another book, she has written novelized histories of actual psychological experiments. She also presents herself as a liar, saying at first it is a typical symptom of epilepsy, but then, when it emerges that she may not have been an epileptic, the lying becomes a narrative strategy for getting at underlying truths.

Slater has been reviewed and discussed widely, but mainly outside literary circles. I can think of several reasons why she hasn't been reviewed as a serious fiction writer:

1. Her strategy of "lying" is only controversial if the books are read as nonfiction or as historical scholarship. The blending of fiction and nonfiction "to get to the heart of things" (p. 219; cp. p. 192) is not controversial in the domain of writing. What novel isn't about "narrative truth"? What memoir isn't entwined with fiction? What history isn't narrated? What story isn't a lie? Slater's book is peppered with undergraduate-style allusions to "postmodernism," Heidegger, and others, as justifications for what she's doing: but the very presence of those gestures shows how far she is from literary practice. There are no references to Barth, Barthelme, Auster, Angela Carter, Muriel Spark, and others who have asked the same questions. (Not to mention Ali Smith: wonder if Slater has seen her speech at ?)

2. Her writing lacks nuance. It's black and white, and the emotions and scenes are sensationalist. In one episode, her mother berates a hotel pianist for having "heavy hands," and he asks her to sit down and play in his place. Everyone watches as the narrator's mother sits at the piano with a great flourish, and then realizes she actually can't play anything except rudimentary melodies. Her mother then retreats in silence. The next line in the book informs us that Slater had her first epileptic fit that night. There are few scenes in the book that end ambiguously. Slater doesn't evoke or suggest: she dramatizes. The emotional temperature is on high from the first page to the last.

3. She isn't especially reflective, even about ideas that are central to the book. There are a couple of pages in which deeper concerns are voiced, but they pass by quickly. In one scene her doctor is interested to learn that she has become interested in religious issues. She gets annoyed at being compared to Saint Teresa and others, because that would mean that her illness was creating her interest. Is religion itself a symptom? she asks. "Look," the doctor answers, "it's no an either/or thing. Who knows, maybe the disease is God's way of reaching certain people." (p. 201) His thoughts, and her reactions, go to the heart of difficult issues about faith and mental states, and they should be central for Slater, but she has nothing else to say about them. It's almost as if Slater can't keep her mind on the problem.

Perhaps it would be better if she wrote about just one day, preferably an uneventful day, and her attempts to understand it. It's clear she has been struggling to understand her life, and it is a sign of her distress that what counts as understanding a problem is usually coming to a workable solution. Often, I think, that's what she has needed. But it's not what readers need, unless of course they are reading her books as self-help manuals -- in which case they will be annoyed, as they often have been, by her so-called "lying." A deeper, more interesting lie, is the one that presents this book as reflective fiction.