Spasm: A Memoir with Lies

Description

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 non-fiction that uses the freedoms of fiction to shape the story of its author's life. It embroiders and embellishes, exaggerates and imagines. 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.