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Spasm:
A Memoir with Lies
(Paperback - 2000)
Between the ages
of 13 and 17, Lauren Slater was epileptic. Surgery
stopped her seizures; but by then the psychological
reflex was ingrained - the habit of invention to fill
the gaps in her memory and experience. She'd learned
to lie. She may even have lied about her epilepsy.
She may never have had it at all. Her memoir is a
work of nonfiction that uses the freedoms of fiction
to shape the story of its author's life. It embroiders
and embellishes, exaggerates and imagines.
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Above all, it builds
on metaphor, most significantly the metaphor of illness,
to express complex truths about the self that simple documentary
fact could not describe. It is an autobiography with an
unreliable narrator: an exploration of growing up with gaps,
or truth in fits, and a meditation on the meaning of autobiography
itself.
More
Lauren Slater Books
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