Lauren Slater’s Lying: Metaphorical Memoir and Pathological Pathography

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 – Slater’s subversion of the autobiographical conventions and imperatives of the genre. Slater, who is both a psychologist and a patient, writes in the antipsychiatric tradition of David 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 seemingly discrete categories of sane and insane and revealed the structuring power of psychiatric labels. In a similar fashion, Lying, an autobiography about epilepsy, challenges and defies readers’ expectations for truth and transparency in memoir and underscores the central role of the patient’s story 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.