Lying
by Lauren Slater
It’s the memoir of a young woman who has epilepsy and a very dysfunctional mother. She takes us fascinatingly close to the boundary where memoir and fiction meet
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“I came across Lying by happenstance, and I thought it was fascinating. It is by Lauren Slater, who is now a psychotherapist, although that comes as a very unexpected revelation given the book. It’s the memoir of a young woman who has temporal lobe epilepsy and a very dysfunctional mother. So on the face of it, it would seem to be a misery memoir. There has been such a deluge of misery memoirs in America that I have started to think of the genre as being abuse, abandonment, trauma and dysfunction. In a sense, Lying is about that, but it is also a sceptical deconstruction of it on various levels.” Read more...
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Eva Hoffman, Memoirist
