Lying Read online

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  I went outside. I walked far, far into a field. I had anger in me. I had no facts, only fictions. When I turned, the lit windows of the monastery were tiny as the tips of stars.

  In Boolean math, 1 plus 1 does not equal 2. It equals 10. In Riemann geometrics, the shortest distance between two points is not necessarily a straight line.

  When I die, and am judged, either by myself or by the spirit that seeps through the universe, what will be said? Will I be considered brave for the fog I’ve tolerated, or too cowardly to face the bright light of truth, or, simply, too crippled, my brain too broken? It’s not my fault, I say.

  If it is not my fault, if I cannot even claim my own faults, the splits in the center of my skull, then I really have given myself away.

  It is my fault. This is something I can claim. My fault. My split. My guilt. Here. Here is where I am.

  Thus, myself. My memoir, please. Nonfiction, please.

  I laughed out loud, then. An owl answered me.

  I was alone, in a far, far field, and then I walked farther, and the monastery disappeared.

  It started snowing, even though the season was summer, and all the flowers were in bloom. Snow fell on the flowers—the wild roses, the dark berry bushes, the purple peonies, the Queen Anne’s lace, snowdrops and lemon drops, and then the universe turned over twice. A great hole opened up in the ground, a hole that Lewis Carroll himself had dug. He was an epileptic, and when he wrote about Alice dropping down the hole, we know he was really writing his own memoir, the disease sucking all solidity away. You could just cry over that. You could just cry and seize at whatever solid shreds there are, but isn’t that the biggest lie of all? The world is flat. The world is round. East, west, north, south, it’s always changing; clutch at what? You tell me.

  Like this. You throw your legs out at the hip and give in. You say “snow,” and turn into snow. You give up the ground, which you never really had to begin with, and something else takes over, and that something, with or without a face, beyond proof or even theory, that’s the one fact I will ever and only have. I have the fact of falling, this is a story, finally, of falling, thank you Sister Julia, thank you Sister Patricia, I can stop seizing now; so can you. Open your fists. Go girl. Cheer for me madly. I will not win. If I am on a horse, we will both fall into the hole. If I am a gymnast, I will miss my mark, and fall, in my pale blue leotard, straight into the hole. Alice is there. The queen is there. My mother is there. Oh, Mom, I miss you. Give me a kiss good-bye. Cheer for me madly. Out in that field, I heard it happening. The trees cheered, the stars cheered, the monks and nuns and friends and family cheered as I went down, legs hurled out at the hip, I fell, and gave up the ground, and for that split second, spinning in utter space, I was nowhere, I was nothing, my mouth open round, like a zero, like 0, out of which the baby is born, the words spill, the planet pops, the trees grow, everything rising; real.

  AFTERWORD

  In Lying I have written a book in which in some cases I cannot and in other cases I will not say the facts. I am, after all, the grandchild of Kant, of Heisenberg, someone who came of age just as the postmodernists were in their full flower. Postmodernism may have many problems, but it also has at least one point, a point that has been driven into my heart and the hearts of many of my contemporaries, and the point is this: What matters in knowing and telling yourself is not the historical truth, which fades as our neurons decay and stutter, but the narrative truth, which is delightfully bendable and politically powerful.

  Lying is a book of narrative truth, a book in which I am more interested in using invention to get to the heart of things than I am in documenting actual life occurrences. This means that the text I’ve created uses, in some instances, metaphors, most significantly the metaphor of epilepsy, to express subtleties and horrors and gaps in my past for which I have never been able to find the words. Metaphor is the greatest gift of language, for through it we can propel what are otherwise wordless experiences into shapes and sounds. And even if the sounds are not altogether accurate, they do resonate in a heartfelt place we cannot dismiss. That is why it is in this book, although it is not always factually correct, that I feel I have finally, finally been able to tell a tale eluding me for years, a tale I have tried over and over again to utter, the story of my past, of my mother and me, the story of the strange and fitful illnesses claiming most of my moments, the humiliating birth of sexuality, my love of myths and proclivities toward deceit. I have told it all and it is a relief. A relief to put it to rest.

  And still. You want to know. What are the real facts about the condition I call epilepsy in the story.

  All I can give you is this. I take anticonvulsant medication daily. I have had auras all my life. I have had several symptoms that doctors have diagnosed as consistent with temporal lobe epilepsy. However, diagnosis itself is a narrative phenomenon, because the same symptoms that doctors saw as epilepsy in one era of my life, they saw as borderline personality disorder in another era of my life, and then as post-traumatic stress disorder in yet another era, and as bipolar, and as Munchausen’s, and as OCD, and as depression and, once, even, as autism. Autism!

  All I know for sure is this. I have been ill much of my life. Illness has claimed my imagination, my brain, my body, and everything I do I see through its feverish scrim. All I can tell you is this. Illness, medicine itself, is the ultimate narrative; there is no truth there, as diagnoses come in and out of vogue as fast as yearly fashions. Line up all the DSMs, the book from which mental health professionals draw their diagnoses, and you will see how they have changed, how they have radically altered from decade to decade, depending upon the Zeitgeist. In this time, right now, in psychiatry, there is a quiet revolution taking place concerning depression. The current story is that depression is a disease springing from a biochemical imbalance. The new story forming is that the evidence for a biochemical imbalance is very poor indeed, and depression may in fact have negligible chemical origins. And so the pendulum swings back.

  Therefore, despite the huge proliferation of authoritative illness memoirs in recent years, memoirs that talk about people’s personal experiences with Tourette’s and postpartum depression and manic depression, memoirs that are often rooted in the latest scientific “evidence,” something is amiss. For me, the authority is illusory, the etiologies constructed. When all is said and done, there is only one kind of illness memoir I can see to write, and that’s a slippery, playful, impish, exasperating text, shaped, if it could be, like a question mark.

  For Tyler and Weld—

  in gratitude

  ALSO BY

  LAUREN SLATER

  Prozac Diary

  Welcome to My Country

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Lauren Slater has a master’s degree in psychology from Harvard University and a doctorate from Boston University. Her work was chosen for The Best American Essays/Most Notable Essays of 1994, 1996, 1997, 1998, and 1999. She is the winner of the 1993 New Letters Literary Award in creative nonfiction and of the 1994 Missouri Review Award. She lives with her husband and daughter in Massachusetts.