Lauren Slater

At the beginning of Prozac Diary, 26-year-old Lauren Slater is severely depressed, suicidal, suffering from OCD, unemployed, and alone. She reveals a lengthy account of her history with mental illness, starting when she was an adolescent. After years and years of struggling to find medication that will alleviate her symptoms, a new doctor puts her on a brand new drug, an SSRI, Prozac. And it works, almost like magic. She is no longer depressed, her OCD is under control, and she is suddenly show more faced with a brand new life that is not dominated by mental illness, but one of productivity, creativity, and new relationships. It is a much welcome outcome, but she struggles with the consequences of a new identity: the sane. She writes about shifting from an “illness-based identity”, to a “health-based identity". Having dealt with mental illness for most of her life, this shift is both a welcome relief as well as well as a challenge - for who is she without the depression that's dominated her life?

There are many, many memoirs about mental illness, specifically depression, but what makes Slater’s memoir stand out is her deft use of language – it is evocative, lyrical, sensual, with some brilliant metaphors thrown in for good measure. Highly engaging, candid, humorous, and poetic. I do love Slater's writing, very much. show less

There is no doubt that Lauren Slater is a gifted writer and storyteller. Lying: A Metaphorical Memoir is a frustrating yet beautifully written book. It's also a tricky book, difficult to pigeonhole (memoir? fiction?), and she makes it clear that it can be no other way. It centers mainly around the author's history of epilepsy, which was diagnosed when she was ten. However, this diagnosis, along with the author's very credibility, comes into question as inconsistencies are revealed - show more inconsistencies that Slater does not deny. Some readers will no doubt find the author's literary obfuscation maddening. Indeed, Slater challenges the reader with her wily and evasive style, but taken on its own terms, Lying raises crucial questions about personal truth and speaks to the healing capacity of storytelling. show less

This was a tricky book to read, because the author/narrator tells you right off the bat that maaaaaaybe she made some things up and maaaaaybe she didn't. Which is, I guess, the truth about most memoirs, but Slater likes to remind you now and then that what you just read might have only happened in her mind. Very tricksy, but not as off-putting as it might sound. This self-consciousness comes off less as po-mo defense tactics than honest representation, because central to the memoir is her show more seizure disorder, which, though a physiological condition, can deep affect perception and psychology. If you just let her tell the story the way she wants, you still perhaps better access her feelings, her insecurities, her personal truths. So in a way it's a memoir about memoir-writing.

I keep defending it because it is geniunely interesting, but sometimes it makes me batty trying to decide if it was freshman b.s. or genius. show less

Slater, a therapist who has suffered from mental illness of her own, recounts stories of treating severely mentally ill patients. She tries to show that the severely mentally ill yearn for friendship, love, and companionship just as much as their healthier counterparts do. This hardly sounds groundbreaking, but it does contradict certain psychological treatises-- most notably, Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Slater works with severely schizophrenic men. These men suffer hallucinations, their show more linguistic abilities have been stolen by disease, they are sometimes catatonic. In these conditions Slater uses talk therapy to find desire for connection, though it is often deeply hidden.

Slater manages to convey the sadness and despair that surround profound mental illness, though there are glimmers of hope too. The writing in this book is too florid at times, but Slater always approaches her subjects with grace and humanity. I enjoyed Slater's discussion of her academic training and the theoretical universe in which she works. Readers get to see how she uses academic training to make treatment decisions. We get to see how she thinks as a practitioner. This is a fascinating memoir, though perhaps not as groundbreaking as it was in 1996. show less