Lauren Slater’s Lying: Metaphorical Memoir and Pathological Pathography
1 As public awareness of antidepressant medication surged in the 1990s, Lauren Slater’s Prozac Diary became the quintessential auto-pathography, documenting her life with major depression and her dramatic “cure” with the wonder-drug Prozac. However, Slater’s pronounced ambivalence about the drug’s side effects and her treatment was largely ignored by a culture swept up by Prozac enthusiasm. Slater’s more recent “metaphorical memoir,” Lying, on the other hand, is not so easily appropriated. A parody of the illness narrative, a pathological pathography, Lying is the dark sister text of Prozac Diary; Lying is Slater’s subversion of the autobiographical conventions and imperatives of the genre.
2 Yet such subversions are not widely appreciated. As the controversy over Jim Frey’s A Million Little Pieces illustrated, [1] Frey’s “memoir,” A Million Little Pieces, a recovery narrative about his drug and alcohol addiction, was an Oprah’s Book Club selection, much increasing the book’s already phenomenal sales. However, as reported by The Smoking Gun.com, parts of Frey’s memoir were only loosely based on the truth, much embellished, or at worst, invented. For example, Frey spent only a few hours in jail, not the three months that he writes about so extensively (“A Million Little Lies”). Oprah eventually dropped her endorsement of the book, and in response to accusations of fraudulently marketing fiction as memoir, Frey’s publisher, Random House, eventually offered purchasers refunds. many readers expect the truth from memoirs, even if those memoirs are written by recovering drug addicts like Frey or psychiatric patients like Slater. Slater’s first memoir, Prozac Diary, was ostensibly just what it purported to be: a diary, an honest and truthful account of her experience with depression and of her treatment with Prozac. The promotional blurbs on the paperback cover of Prozac Diary emphasize this selling point: “Prozac’s most honest narrator yet,” says Elle magazine. “Brutally honest and brave,” says Entertainment Weekly. Slater’s next memoir, Lying, is quite the opposite: A “postmodern book that challenges our understanding of truth,” says the San Francisco Chronicle. “Tricky,” says The Washington Post.
3 Slater’s project in Lying, I will argue, is more than simply an exercise in pushing the boundaries of the memoir genre, and her work in general raises issues that are central to the study of medical humanities, disability studies, and feminist critiques of psychiatry. Slater, who is both a psychologist and a patient, writes in the antipsychiatric tradition of David L. Rosenhan’s “On Being Sane in Insane Places,” the infamous 1973 study in which sane “pseudopatients” were incorrectly diagnosed with mental illnesses after feigning symptoms. By becoming a patient himself, Rosenhan called into question the supposedly discrete categories of sane and insane and revealed the structuring power of psychiatric labels. In a similar fashion, Lying, an autobiography seemingly about epilepsy, challenges and defies readers’ expectations for truth and transparency in memoir, and underscores the key role of the patient’s story in the clinical encounter and the metaphorical nature of illness itself. Lying is a literary form of hysteria, a conversion evoking the complicated past of women, mental illness, and the authenticity of psychiatric diagnoses.
Rosenhan Revisited
4 In 2004, Slater published Opening Skinner’s Box: Great Psychological Experiments of the Twentieth Century, a book designed to translate historically significant work in psychology for a mass-market readership. This project was a natural next step for Slater, a writer with deep personal and professional connections to mental health issues. Her first book, Welcome to My Country: A Therapist’s Memoir of Madness (1996), was a series of case studies/stories and drew upon her experience as a therapist and her interactions with her mentally ill patients. Her second book, Prozac Diary (1998), focused on her own experience with major depression, including her successful treatment with Prozac, which in turn had made her graduate work in psychology at Harvard possible. Slater is, furthermore, a prolific free-lance writer: she has contributed pieces to National Geographic, New York Magazine, and even popular women’s publications such as Self and Elle. Her essay on the unconventional plastic surgeon Joe Rosen, “Dr. Daedalus,” which was originally a cover story for Harpers, was included in Best American Science Writing (2003). Considering her talents and her background, a book about past research in psychology would seem the perfect subject for Slater. In the introduction to Opening Skinner’s Box, Slater traces the source of this book back to her graduate education in psychology:
I [...] read the classic psychological experiments [...] in academic journals, mostly, replete with quantified data and black-bar graphs—and it seemed somewhat sad to me. It seemed sad that these insightful and dramatic stories were reduced to the flatness that characterizes most scientific reports, and had therefore utterly failed to capture what only real narrative can—theme, desire, plot, history—this is what we are. The experiments described in this book, and many others, deserve to be not only reported on as research, but also celebrated as story, which is what I have here tried to do. (2-3)
Slater’s celebration of story and dramatization of science, however, proved to be a difficult and controversial endeavor.
5 Opening Skinner’s Box drew almost immediate criticisms. Interview subjects complained of being misquoted or misrepresented; reviewers complained of factual errors and sloppy research (see Lee). Even the title of the book contained a controversy. Slater opens with a chapter on B. F. Skinner, the behaviorist famous for his theory of positive reinforcement, and Slater’s version of the “baby in a box” urban myth—a cruel tale of how Skinner raised his daughter Deborah in an experimental box, without the comforts of the crib, and the daughter’s resulting madness and suicide. Though Slater claims to have searched for Deborah, she never succeeded in contacting her, and Slater depicts her as “missing” in the conclusion of the book and muses about her mental health: “Is she dented or damaged in some way? I don’t know” (250). As Slater would learn later, Deborah Skinner Buzan is alive and well, and not at all pleased with Slater’s book and the resurrection of old and arguably mean-spirited gossip about her beloved father’s parenting skills: “I am not crazy or dead, but I’m very angry,” she writes (7). Slater, some would argue, misled her readers by repeating, rather than putting to rest, unsubstantiated rumors about Deborah’s supposed childhood abuse and mental illness. In the words of one critic, Slater created “a bogus miasma of mystery around Deborah’s fate” (Miller 31).