'You were only being true to yourself': Subjectivity, Truth and Illness in Lauren Slater's Lying
In her recently published autobiography Lying: A Metaphorical Memoir, Lauren Slater details her supposed struggles with epilepsy, a disorder she refuses to disclose whether or not she actually suffers from.
Slater's refusal to explicitly reveal the "truth" of her experience reflects a handful of prominent trends in current autobiography theory. Her book both critiques the humanist subject and questions the relationship of truth and narrative. Drawing from postmodernism, Slater participates in the current reformulations of subjective truth, authenticity, and experience.
Lying forces its readers to confront questions such as, what is the meaning or role of truth in the genre of autobiography and what does it mean to have an authentic or real self?
However, Slater's memoir pushes these questions one step further. Her examination of lying and metaphor as both forms of subjectivity and narrative allows her to explore the relationship of lying and metaphor to self-authenticity. Furthermore, by participating in the genre of pathography (a genre often characterized by confessional narratives of extreme truth-telling), Slater questions the role of truth in illness and illness narratives as well as the difficulties of attempting to narrate a self-experience that is factually unrepresentable. If, as Paul John Eakin claims in How Our Lives Become Stories: Making Selves, "narrative functions as the signature of the real, of the normal,"
Lying presents one possibility of how one writer has managed to explore the concept of "the real" in order to force her readers to confront issues of illness and normality.
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