An Expert in Insufficiency

Lauren Slater, Lying: A Metaphorical Memoir (2000)

It’s difficult to get a hold Lauren Slater’s Lying: A Metaphorical Memoir. Is it a postmodernist novel playing with all the conventions of traditional story-telling meant to assure you that what is fiction is in fact the truth? Is it a memoir filled with lies? A meditation on lying itself?

Eventually, Slater resolves the uncertainty, but by then she’s lied and prevaricated and fabricated so much it’s hard to put much faith in her claim that she captured the truth of her life—which was largely about lying—by piling on more lies. There’s no way the reader could settle for that, not only because there’s no basis for trust at this point, but because we have by now touched down on Cyprus and are among the lying liars who cannot possibly speak the truth. Once we are disoriented, that is, we might not wish to come back to the regular grid pattern of everyday America. It would be vastly preferable if this were ficiton.

But whether it’s just lies or fiction or lies organized into a higher truth—a truer truth just like the metaphorical literalness of the 17th-century Platonists—one thing is certain: Slater knows about self-loathing. Her book, for all its layers of deception and obfuscation and evasion, lays bare the squirming horror of exposure that drives the loathsome soul.

Slater tells a story of a reasonably normal family in which she is the only child. The father plays second string, out of weakness in the face of a rather overwhelming mother, a fact for which perhaps he is too easily forgiven. The mother, who would have been a much happier person with a job, something to give purpose and structure to her overabundant personality, resorts to drink, either all the time or occasionally. It’s hard to tell. One fateful day, the story goes, the mother gets herself into a horrific and very public embarrassment, not only embarrassing herself but embarrassing her daughter. It touches off an epileptic seizure—or whatever comes to ail this child, in body or mind—the first in a long fit that dominates the rest of her childhood and the early years of her adulthood.

The possibility that she was indeed epileptic is slim. Perhaps she had Munchhausen’s instead. However, all we know comes from an avowed liar, and quite possibly there was never anything wrong with her besides an unwillingness to go along with the reality that lay in wait for her in a family rather more ordinary than she wished it to be. But the lying to cover up the insufficiency of who she is and then the shame that dogs the liar’s footsteps rings so deeply true it’s painful to read.

With it goes a relational abjectness made up of equal parts abasement and arrogance. Who is the perpetrator and who the victim in the first sexual relationship she comes upon is not so easy to say—her lover is old enough to have known better, but she (while clearly not knowing better) has enough edge and enough hunger to make her victim status a rather questionable affair, not least because of a breath-taking egocentricity that is perhaps just normal for teenagers but which sounds sick—not only to the reader but to the protagonist as well, it would seem.

Whatever the truth may be and whoever Lauren Slater is, she is an expert in that fundamental insufficiency. Not so much in where it comes from, because God knows where it comes from besides the roiling fog of all origin. But an expert in where it will take a young person of more than usual gifts.

All of this would be impossible to read if it weren’t for the fact that Slater has a marvelous voice—by turns lyrical and tough—and flashes the reader a sometimes whimsical, sometimes laconic wit in the most unexpected places. The reading is driven forward by a rush of joy as well as the compulsiveness with which we bother a sore tooth or take a hangnail down the road from bad to worse.

Marijke Rijsberman

More to read:
- Here's an excerpt from the book: Learning to Fall
- Catherine Belling offers an annotation on the book in the rather weird Literature, Arts and Medicine Database. The book received quite a bit of notice in the medical community.