Literature and Medicine II

16 Price, an astute reader of Slater, describes Lying as “counter-diagnosis”: “In counter-diagnosis, the autobiographical narrator uses language [...] to subvert the diagnostic urge to ‘explain’ a disabled mind” (17). A counter-diagnosis is oppositional, yet also feeds off of the power of diagnosis: Slater’s Lying “neither embrace[s] diagnosis as truth nor reject[s] it as useless: instead [...] [it draws] power from the shape-shifting nature of counter-diagnosis, accepting, rejecting, mimicking, and contesting the diagnostic urge in various ways. Counter-diagnosis is an oxymoronic form” (17). As a counter-diagnosis, Lying purposefully manipulates readers’ desires to diagnose the problem that is Lauren Slater.

17 It would be a mistake, however, to read “epilepsy” as the counter-diagnosis or metaphor that Slater offers in place of or as a substitute for “depression.” Lying cannot be reduced to a mental illness memoir dressed up as an epilepsy memoir: Slater’s story is a complex hysterical conversion that translates the experiences of her childhood in indirect ways. “Epilepsy,” if it can be pinned to anything specific in this text, is a metaphoric vehicle or conceit that describes Slater’s relationship to her mother, not a specific medical condition or disorder. Slater’s mother is a central if spectral figure in the text: “She was a woman of grand gestures and high standards and she rarely spoke the truth. She told me she was a Holocaust survivor, a hot-air balloonist, a personal friend of Golda Meir. From my mother I learned that the truth is bendable, that what you wish is every bit as real as what you are” (5).

18 In Lying, Slater’s epilepsy is engendered by her mother: first grand mal seizure occurs on New Year’s Eve in Barbados when she is ten. Her mother has just embarrassed herself by creating a scene in the hotel restaurant: loudly making disparaging comments about the hotel piano player: “He doesn’t have much Mozart in him”; “Such heavy hands”; “You’re a sweet man with many sweet things in you, but with no thunder. A man should have thunder” (17). When the pianist calls her bluff and asks her to play, she takes the bench, places her hands carefully, and freezes. Although she owns her own engraved Steinway and fancies herself a great pianist, Slater’s mother knows only one song, “Three Blind Mice.” She excuses herself as the crowd watches. Later that night, Slater has her first seizure: “you grit your teeth, you clench, a spastic look crawls across your face, your legs thrash like a funky machine, you hit hard and spew, you grind your teeth with such a force you might wake up with a mouth full of molar dust, tooth ash, the residue of words you’ve never spoken, but should have” (19). Slater’s seizure is the awful show-stopping performance that her mother avoids: “Sometimes, after I’d woken up from a seizure, I felt so sorry for her, I felt it was really she who’d had the seizure, she whose muscles really ached, and over and over again in my mind, I brought my mother milk” (37). And later, the seizures seem like a form of possession in which the daughter is the medium for the mother’s repressed energy: “all her energy was really deadness; not me. I was a girl in motion. I was wrong and dark and full of smells. When a seizure rolled through me, it didn’t feel like mine; it felt like hers—her ramrod body sweetening into spasm” (24).

19 Although Slater eventually comes to embrace her own individual identity as an epileptic, this illness is always linked to her relationship with her mother: “I was not a girl at all, but a marionette, and some huge hand—my mother’s hand?—held me up, and for a reason I absolutely could not predict, that hand might let the strings go slack” (31). So Slater begins to take control of her illness by purposefully having seizures in the emergency rooms of various Boston hospitals: she wakes up to hands reaching out to her, providing her with the nurturing touch and care that her mother cannot or will not give her. These actions complicate Slater’s story even further:

Now we get to a little hoary truth in this tricky tale. The summer I was thirteen I developed Munchausen’s, on top of my epilepsy, or—and you must 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. Munchausen’s is a fascinating psychiatric disorder, its sufferers makers of myths that are still somehow true, the illness a conduit to convey real pain. (88)

Slater poses the possibility that her illness is both neurological and psychogenic, both physical and hysterical. Or—since Munchausen’s is a real psychological disorder involving physical illnesses that are not present—a real metaphorical illness. Slater would like to have it both ways or, rather, as many ways as possible. She writes, “[t]he neural mechanism that undergirds the lie is the same neural mechanism that help us make narrative. Thus, all stories, even those journalists swear up and down are ‘true,’ are at least physiologically linked to deception” (Lying 164). Lying and narrative, therefore, are biologically indistinguishable both in the body and in Slater’s text; this is a clever scientific explanation with dubious value in this context, if fact finding is your mission. “The counter-diagnostic story,” Price writes, “does not merely parallel or replace the conventional diagnostic story: it ruins it altogether, attacks its foundations, queers it” (17).

20 In the professional diagnostic literature, such as the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders and the World Health Organization’s International Statistical Classification of Diseases (ICD), Munchausen’s is part of a class of “factitious” disorders, a term that is especially evocative in the context of Slater’s Lying. In a chapter entitled, “How to Market This Book,” which takes the form of a memo to her editor at Random House, Slater discusses the generic classification of her book:

We have to call it fiction or we have to call it fact, because there’s no bookstore term for something in between, gray matter. If you called it faction, you would confuse the bookstore people, they wouldn’t know where to put the product, and it would wind up in the back alley or a tin trash can with ants and other vermin. You would lose a lot of money. (159-60)

Both “factitious” and “faction” are portmanteau words that describe a patient’s/writer’s manipulation of the factual and the fictional, and each gains its respective meaning from, in the case of “factitious,” the dynamics of the clinical encounter and from, in the case of “faction,” the generic conventions governing the memoir writer’s contract with the reader. There is a sense in which all illness narratives are forms of a clinical encounter, in which the writer is the patient who presents and performs her symptoms for the reader. If the reader’s approach to the text is heavily structured by the diagnostic gaze, then the narrative can become the equivalent of a case study, read primarily to provide information about an illness. It is this type of reading and objectification that Slater attempts to resist. To read Lying “literally, like it was just one more true account of yet another illness” is a mistake: “If you read it that way, I will feel I have failed” (161-62). Slater insists that the book is properly a memoir: “My memoir, please. Sell it as nonfiction, please” (165). Whether Slater’s negotiation of the demands of the marketplace is successful is arguable, and her strategic use of epilepsy and malingering is certainly risky and problematic. Nevertheless, reading Lying ultimately forces us to examine the multiple ways in which our experiences and ideas are pathologized and categorized, the ways in which we are complicit in that process, and the limited terms of our possible rebellion.