LAUREN SLATER
IN OSCAR WILDE’S 1889 ESSAY “THE DECAY OF LYING” you’ll find this memorable bit of wisdom:
Bored by the tedious and improving conversation of those who have neither the wit to exaggerate nor the genius to romance, tired of the intelligent person whose reminiscences are always based upon memory, whose statements are invariably limited by probability, who is at any time liable to be corroborated by the merest Philistine who happens to be present, Society sooner or later must return to its lost leader, the cultured and fascinating liar.
After many more nuggets of wisdom you’ll want to write down—“No great artist ever sees things as they really are”; “the moment Art surrenders its imaginative medium it surrenders everything”—Wilde goes on to conclude that “the final revelation is that Lying, the telling of beautiful untrue things, is the proper aim of Art.” That assertion can’t help but be an earthquake beneath the feet of the staid realists who contend that literature is supposed to reveal ourselves as we truly are.
It’s also an assault upon our instincts, since even a toddler can tell you that lying is wrong. “You’re a liar” is everyone’s favorite indictment because each of us has a stake in the truth. Of all the platitudes with which we are daily assaulted, “the truth matters” is the one we should never tire of hearing. But that doesn’t mean that imaginative literature can’t be replete with “beautiful untrue things,” with its own particular cosmos of truth, a psycho-emotional truth every bit as vital as the facts we’ve been taught to laud. That’s exactly what Wilde means by “the proper aim of Art”: the truth should trump the facts.
A tempestuous, hard-driving, semi-delusional mother; an uxorious schlub of a father, mostly absent; an epileptic illness at once thrilling and life-threatening; a young girl dazed in a world that writhes between shadow and light: this is Lauren Slater’s memoir Lying, and it becomes, in its coy and mythomaniacal execution, a dynamic reverie on truth and art. Slater is so charismatic and wise, with such a gift of phrase, you won’t much mind that the nucleus of this memoir, her debilitating epilepsy, is complete fiction. Slater never had epilepsy: she fakes herself into its electric grip because she wants “an illness so existential, so oddly spiritual,” wants to be “stuck out into the stratosphere with Sartre and Kierkegaard.”
The first chapter contains two words: “I exaggerate.” (And bear in mind Wilde’s formulation “the wit to exaggerate.”) Later, she’d like us to know: “Epilepsy shoots your memory all to hell, so take what I say, or don’t.” And the facts? “The facts, the facts, they probe at me like the problem they are.” Her mother’s maddening role in all this? “From my mother I learned that truth is bendable, that what you wish is every bit as real as what you are.” Prior to a surgery to sever her corpus callosum—a procedure that lessens the extremity of seizures by cleaving the brain so that one side can’t talk to the other—Slater is terrified because she knows she has embellished and aped her symptoms: “I had always believed there could be two truths, truth A and truth B, but in my mind truth A sat on top of truth B, or vice versa. In this instance, however, I had epilepsy, truth A, and I had faked epilepsy, truth B.” The name we have for faking the truth is the title of this memoir.
That cemetery scene: at ten years old, Slater attends a funeral for a neighbor, and to everyone’s gut-punching horror, she collapses into the empty grave, six feet into the newly dug earth. You can imagine for yourself the screams, the scrum of aghast mourners clamoring to rescue this poor child from death’s pit. The scene lasts three pages, and then Slater gives you this:
This is a work of nonfiction. Everything in it is supposed to be true. In some instances names of people and places have been changed to protect their privacy, but the essential story should at least aim for accuracy, so the establishment says. Therefore, I confess. To the establishment. I didn’t really fall into the grave. I was just using a metaphor to try to explain my mental state.
There’s the essence of Lying: a heterodox excavation of the psyche through metaphor. Or, put another way: fiction.
Soon you’ll see excerpts from mock medical papers written by fictional physicians—written by Slater herself; doctors don’t write that well—and published in fictional journals. Then she fibs about being struck by cancer in order to get invited to a popular girl’s party, and just as you begin to suspect that what ails Slater is not epilepsy but Munchausen syndrome—a condition in which an individual feigns sicknesses for attention—she anticipates your suspicion and complicates the picture:
Now we get to a little hoary truth in this tricky tale. The summer I turned thirteen I developed Munchausen’s, on top of my epilepsy, or—and you must consider this, I ask you please to 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.
There’s the admission, less than halfway into Lying—a “hoary truth,” two very loaded instances of “perhaps,” that crucial term “pretender,” and the final clause that vanquishes all doubt: “because she knows no other way of telling her life’s tale.”
Chapter seven is Slater’s letter to her editor, a letter she might or might not have sent, nineteen bullet points about how to market this wily book wedged between genres. That letter and the stunning afterword, taken together, are the best encapsulation you’ll ever find about the fiction/fact combat in literature. As the book proceeds apace to its denouement—as we learn of a toxic though thrilling affair with a much older, married writer, and then her comical stint in AA pretending to be an alcoholic—Slater discloses more and more of her murky and metaphorical truth: “Is metaphor in memoir, in life, an alternate form of honesty or simply an evasion?” The answer, of course, is both, has always been both—the evasion becomes the honesty. What we evade speaks to what we want.
A feigned epilepsy was Slater’s notice-me retreat from the pressures of an overdetermined world, pressures infamous for cracking many a troubled teenager. Her life of “thrash and spasm,” those days of “the real and the reflected,” was a life in hiding from an existence essentially “ahuman,” by which she means an existence hostile to human happiness and striving, an existence whose stipulations oscillate between the ineffable and the interminable—“a place where the real turned to waves, and washed away.” At one vital juncture in the narrative, she does not say “I remember” but rather “I think I remember,” and knowing what scientists now believe about the protean personality of memory, “I think I remember” is the only accurate way to preface our recollections.
Despite the title and the admissions of fraudulence Slater does grant us—epilepsy is “just a clenched metaphor, a way of telling you what I have to tell you: my tale”—she almost admits that everything in Lying is untrue. There need be few guessing games as to what really happened and what didn’t because she flirts with the possibility that none of it happened. Her prose tells us so—prose always tells us so—when it begins its novelistic describing in the process of a supposedly factual recall. It’s glaringly improbable than an adult writer would remember verbatim conversations from her childhood, or the multicolored specificity of certain scenes, details down to size and time and smell. This is what critics of autobiography mean when they claim, quite rightly, that there’s never been a consummately honest memoir, that all memoirs are fictionalized to one degree or another: the memory’s intrinsic fallibility makes an accurate book unattainable from the start.
So we are not meant to trust Slater’s telling when she remembers that someone’s car “smelled like cigarette smoke and strawberry lip gloss,” or that an appointment with a doctor was “one Tuesday at 3:00 p.m.” Or this detail, during the surgery to sever her corpus callosum: “I felt him sawing at my skull, Jesus, and then the suck of something lifted, like the lid from an airtight cookie jar.” Those are the novelist’s details, not the memoirist’s, since it’s unlikely that a grown woman would recall such facts from her tenth year. And of course there’s the impossibility of believing that such an operation would be performed on a conscious girl who was quite obviously miming her epilepsy. In college, when a male counselor informs her that she never had such an operation as a child—when he calls her a liar—Slater becomes incensed and tells college authorities that the counselor attempted to fondle her.
But Slater will confess, too, that maybe “it’s just certain narrative demands” that compel her to pair events that might have no link, to forge details that never were. This artful, ludic weaver of yarns who, when speaking of her kleptomania, says that she “never once stole from a store,” immediately after admits in a parenthetical, “All right, once.” At one point she writes, “Understand, I am mentally ill”—not was, but am, and even as that makes sense, both practical and narrative sense, it, too, is a fabrication, because the mentally ill rarely possess the acuity to recognize or acknowledge the fact. The mentally ill are also infrequently capable of such smooth wisdom, such finely calibrated and memorable sentences: “The sun went down in a pool of red, and all the flowers smelled like lotion,” or “Churches are places for the two-tongued and the fainters,” or “Dignity counts more than delight.”
Students are simultaneously enthralled and enraged by this book. Students don’t like guessing games. Students prefer not to read puzzles. If Slater is lying about only some things but not others, how on earth are they to know which? They feel bamboozled. And how, they’d like to know, is Slater’s memoir any different from the deceitful shenanigans of James Frey? But the title, I remind them, is Lying, the subtitle A Metaphorical Memoir. No bamboozlement is under way here, people, no false advertising, no intent to deceive. Slater everywhere confesses to her chicanery, confessions both veiled and bald. Still, students wish to read a true story. True stories are worth more than—than what? What is the opposite of true in their minds? False, of course. False stories are the opposite of true ones, and everyone knows that truth is preferable to falsehood. And that’s when I have to tell them, my delicate charges: “Slater’s is the truest story you’ll ever read.”
We must acknowledge the conceptual and semantic difference between a fact and the truth: the opposite of the truth is necessarily a falsehood but the opposite of a fact is not necessarily a lie. The scientist or detective asks What is true? but the philosopher or writer must ask What is truth? and the distinction between the adjective and the noun is more than a mere linguistic discrepancy. In other words: epistemology is at its center a semantic pursuit, which is precisely what Hobbes means in chapter four of Leviathan when he asserts that “True and False are attributes of speech, not of things.”
You’ll recall what Algernon quips in Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest: “The truth is rarely pure, and never simple. Modern life would be very tedious if it were either, and modern literature a complete impossibility!” It’s a sentiment Slater has annexed, expanded, made her own. In Don Juan, Byron begins stanza 37 of Canto XI with: “After all, what is a lie? ’Tis but / The truth in masquerade, and I defy / Historians, heroes, lawyers, priests to put / A fact without some leaven of a lie.” Stanza 38 begins: “Praised be all liars and all lies!” You might say that Byron was being typically Byronic, exuberant and seditious, if not for the fact that the sanest man in letters, Ralph Waldo Emerson, writes in his Journals that “truth is beautiful, without doubt; but so are lies.”
Shakespeare’s sonnets are unambiguous about the beauty/truth duet: in Sonnet 14, “truth and beauty shall together thrive,” and in Sonnet 54, “O, how much more doth beauty beauteous seem / By that sweet ornament which truth doth give!” Herbert might have beaten Keats to the beauty/truth duet by nearly two hundred years—in his 1633 poem “Jordan (I)” he asks, “Is there in truth no beauty?”—but it’s the Keatsian belief in truth’s beauty, in the interchangeability of beauty and truth, from “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” that has endured. Two years before he composed “Grecian Urn,” Keats wrote a superb letter to friend Benjamin Bailey in which he speaks of “the truth of Imagination. What the imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth—whether it existed before or not.” Keats there sounds impressively like both artist and scientist when you consider mathematician Ian Stewart’s claim that “in mathematics beauty must be true—because anything false is ugly.”
Pragmatists such as William James and John Dewey believe that the truth always produces correct results—the truth works, in other words—whereas falsehood is typically broken, slanted, skewed. Kant, for one, asserts that lying is a personal and social wrong because a lie can’t help but hurt someone. He thinks it “the formal duty of an individual” always to tell the truth, and yet he knows that not all lies are poisonous. Everybody lies, every day, for reasons large and small. We’re a lying animal, and the behaviorists and evolutionary psychologists will tell you that our ability to lie, to deceive ourselves and others, is an indication of our intelligence and one of the adaptions that enabled us to survive in a world of tumult and tricks. James Baldwin: “We live by lies.” Yes we do.
But what could Mark Twain mean, in a 1907 speech, when he says, “I don’t know anything that mars good literature so completely as too much truth”? He means what Slater means when she writes, “Just because something has the feeling of truth doesn’t mean it fits the facts.” In George Santayana’s 1935 work The Last Puritan—a mostly unreadable book which carries the maddening subtitle A Memoir in the Form of a Novel, and in which Santayana tries and fails to channel Proust—one character says, “We’ve got to change the truth a little in order to remember it.” Or, to put it more precisely: in order for it to be meaningful. We alter, adorn, tweak the truth because the truth seldom, all by itself, makes for a compelling and memorable story.
In a piece called “Truth of Intercourse,” Robert Louis Stevenson scribbles this: “A lie may be told by a truth, or a truth conveyed through a lie. Truth to facts is not always truth to sentiment,” and you can hear Slater quite clearly in that assertion. Stevenson goes on to say that “to tell truth, rightly understood, is not to state the true facts, but to convey a true impression; truth in spirit, not truth to letter, is the true veracity.” Truth in spirit: that remains Slater’s nagging, steadfast concern—“my emotional memory, which is not the same as my factual memory.”
And to those for whom Slater’s smoke and mirrors will always be deception? Too bad. The truth of our lives is always smoke and mirrors. Christ’s admonition in the Gospel of John, “the truth will set you free,” is both dogma and doggerel, as meaningless and misleading as saying, “the free shall set the truth.” And yet that word on a book’s cover, “novel” or “memoir,” is a contract with readers, a dignified taxonomy to which all readers are entitled. And the only method, the only hope you have of getting away with a memoir that isn’t really a memoir is to mobilize the originality and ingenuity of Lauren Slater, who had the fearlessness to write “a slippery, playful, impish, exasperating text, shaped, if it could be, like a question mark.”
—Poets & Writers, JULY/AUGUST 2014