Rating: 
Summary: I Lie
Review:
I didn't like this book. I'm a liar, so it could be that I did like the book or I liked it a little. I'm an admitted liar, which isn't the same as being a liar because I'm telling you I'm a liar: my statement that I didn't like the book, therefore, is a metaphor for my true feelings about the book. I am an existential reader, floating freely above the inauthentic written word, alongside Sartre, nuns who frolic in the snow, and ant corpses, reading each word with a grain of salt and another of pepper. If I were to tell you my factual opinion of this book, by definition, it couldn't be fully truthful since I have already told you I'm a liar, and how can a liar state her feelings in a way that is anything but metaphorical? This review is a combination of fabrications, metaphors, and truths. Fabrications are really the same as facts, as they are metaphors for truths, so I refuse to tell you which details of this review are facts and which aren't. This is a book review, which is non-fiction; I insist vehemently, clearly smelling cinnamon and freshly-baked bread, that you, reader, accept this review as the truth. Metaphor is the only way I can tell you the truth, so it must be the truth, see? Deer eat from my birdfeeder as I write this; Blue Jays flap patiently, awaiting the deer's departure. Parts of this review are absolutely accurate and other sentences are flatly false; false, a word I smell as foul flowers and the wafted odor of the garbage dump down the road (or maybe it's a few miles away). However false, the preceding sentences are metaphors for my real opinion.
This, reader, is the truth: the way you responded to the above paragraph is how you will feel about the book. Remember, this is only my opinion and I am a slippery person.
P.S. I dislike liars.
Rating: 
Summary: disappointing
Review: A shifty, quirky, and brazen memoir of a young girl coming to terms with her own self, complete with self-propelled angst and mental hiatus, as well as coming to understand the world, including its quick-sand rules and shapeless places, Lauren Slater's Lying is ironically honest from the first chapter: "I exaggerate." With those spare words, both a warning and a tease, Slater is off on a remarkable journey. She digs through time, her memories, real not in the factual sense, but in the sense that all memories, literally true or not, are all effectively true in that what we believe has more of a bearing on our lives than what actually is. As Slater picks through her jumbled memories, what she remembers and how she remembers it, and her own confused psyche, always self-diagnosing, as well as self-questioning, she ultimately uncovers the two great loves of her life-her mother and her own mental illness.
The reader, especially the female reader, can see herself on every page of this starkly honest memoir. Slater begins her tale and consistently returns to the universal phenomena of her mother's consistent and many-faceted power over her life. As we all do, Slater first expects and seeks love from her mother. She attempts to please her mother by practicing ice-skating, trying desperately to pull-off the various maneuvers her mother calls out to her from the side-"spin," "leap now." Her mother, like so many of our own mothers, is simply unable to bestow this great, filling love on her only daughter and her reason is the same reason we can see in so many of our own mothers-she is dissatisfied. This dissatisfaction is not necessarily rooted completely in her daughter, although it sometimes shows up there, but instead, it's found in the world-how it doesn't fit with what she has envisioned. The common response is for a mother to shift her dreams to her daughter, but the world is still an imperfect place and so of course, it's impossible for a daughter to live up to all that. Slater sees this; she remembers how her epilepsy was at first admired by her mother who was always skimming the surface of things, never letting go the way her daughter is able to do in her seizures. However, ultimately, Slater, as an adolescent girl, sees that her mother is not able to deliver the kind of approval we all innately seek. She moves on to other places-in truth, it seems that her illness, her writing, her everything is really about one thing-earning approval and by approval, love. And doesn't that sound familiar to every reader?
Her journey leads her to other places. She shines in the love of the sisters at a convent, she steals love in the way of faking her own epilepsy, joins an AA group though she is not alcoholic, and then even trades her words, her talent, for love in the form of a sexual relationship with an older man. Ultimately, this is where she is finally healed--she loses the man but holds onto the words. Now we can see how her sensuality is both what has set her apart from the world in a lonely way, and has freed her to experience the world in a fulfilling and dream-like way. The memoir is therefore a teacher, Slater speaking to the reader, sometimes directly, sometimes metaphorically, and always with lovely language, full of concrete similes and rhythmic wording. The reader learns to understand that there is a difference between the facts and the truth and is refreshed by such an honest look at need-what we all seek in others.
Rating: 
Summary: Thought-provoking and disturbing!
Review: Having read Prozac Diary, I thought I'd read Lauren Slater's Lying: A Metaphorical Memoir. This is a book about a pathological liar. How far away is fantasy from reality? Is there a fine line between delusion and insanity? It made me realize that there are a lot of people out there that suffer from this complex mental illness. You never know whether or not Slater is telling the truth, which makes this magnificent book one of the most disarming and thought provoking memoirs I have read in a long time!
Rating:
Summary: A good read for people who like mind games
Review: I could read this book over and over again, and I doubt I'd ever get sick of it. If you like symbolism, you'll love this book. Possibly the entire book (which is a non-fiction autobiography) is written as a metaphor, plus the author admits from the very beginning that she's a liar. In the end, the reader is left wondering which parts of this spectacular book are true and which aren't. Moreover, the author challenges the reader to consider what is truly real and what isn't. A worthwhile read, for sure.
Rating:
Summary: Magnificent
Review: I frequently find myself quoting from pages of this book. Anyone who doesn't believe that they can't relate in some way would be, in fact, a liar... to themselves.Whether torn by the duality of Gemini, or having gone through a crisis that makes you question your belief and being, you must identify with this book. The descriptive style and constant jumps from reality to perceived psychosis will keep you turning pages. I can't wait to read more of her work.
Rating:
Summary: Not "creative genius" just weird
Review: I must admit that I was somewhat dissapointed in "Lying". The book has a great deal of promise as a tale of dealing with the rigors of epilepsy and various familial dysfunctions but it really doesn't follow through. I will give Slater credit for some marvelously imaginative prose but I finished the book feeling disoriented and duped. After gaining the your interest regarding her coping with her illness and other factors, Slater punishes your emotional investment in her trials by revealing in the last few pages that some or all or none of the entire book is true. Maybe she has epilepsy or maybe its just personality disorder or maybe its neither or maybe she is just a liar or maybe we all are or maybe we are all trying to justfy our existences with "seizures" at reality or maybe . . . etc. While I think all of this was designed to encourage the reader to see life as one big metaphor, it left me with the attitude of simply "yeah, whatever" and I simply ceased caring at all what happened to her. "Lying" is a distracting book that is worth borrowing from someone for its poetic strength but I would skip purchasing this one.
Rating: 
Summary: Trust your instincts when you read this book.
Review: Is this a coming of age with epilepsy story? Or is it a coming of age with Munchausen's story? Or is it a stunning example of postmodern fiction, which is neither of the above but written simply to mess with our minds? [I vote for the latter.] Whether you believe this is fiction or nonfiction, you are certain to have a strong reaction to the protagonist. I am a certified medical transcriptionist with 18 years of experience in acute care hospital work. Over the years, through both my work and my voracious reading, I have received quite a medical education. When I read Lying for the first time, certain of the medical details struck me as odd. Slater includes an analysis of her epilepsy and its subsequent surgical treatment written by her treating neurologist. In it, the author states that LJS had eliopathic epilepsy. Hmmm, I thought. I've never encountered that term before; I'd better look it up. In another chapter, Slater describes presurgical testing; she explains her doctor will make a small incision in her scalp then stimulate different areas of her brain. That's odd, I thought; it's not quite that simple. Our brains are not enclosed in only our scalps -- there's another layer involved, our hard, bony skulls. Still I read on, on some level distrusting my thoughts. Yet when I finished the book and understood as much as I could, for there is much information the author does not, will not supply, I didn't feel manipulated. I felt instead awe. Don't take the chapter about marketing the book at face value. Ignore the author's insistence on categorizing this work as nonfiction. Forget that you found it shelved with the other illness memoirs. Slater has written the best piece of fiction I've read since I devoured J.K. Rowling's first novel. I hope she writes many more.
Rating:
Summary: nacreous
Review: Lying is both intellectually exciting and in some ways, psychologically helpful. It promotes the view of the influence of behavior and talk on mental illness, i.e., in this book, epilepsy. Lauren Slater is actually remarkably close-mouthed in many instances (through her reliance on emotionally based rather than realistic, connect the dots, event by event narration) for a person able to write countless memoirs, concerning her own mental illness, and she could have epilepsy--but I don't think so, just the fact that this is "A Metaphorical Memoir" and she talks about what her metaphor of epilepsy actually means very strongly indicates the fact, that she is talking about her mental illness. Her metaphorical lying about epilepsy also extends to the both escapist and hurtful tendencies of borderline personality disorder which go along with her depression. To be able to look at such feelings as influenced by behavior is freeing in a sense because with a change of behavior and biochemistry a new person can be shaped. A little lying is still nice anyway in a person who is able to be psychologically dependent or interdependent, as it creates an effervescent, "nacreous" (this appears to be one of Slater's favorite words) fiction such as this.
Personally, I think that this book is less scary than Prozac Diary, and more helpful to me as a person, simply seeking ways to deal with life. Of course, scaring and disgusting and making a person afraid of even herself can have its uses and is not a hallmark of bad literature---but it was more alienating than instructive.
Also, I am proud of Lauren Slater for going from tell-all-literature to a more novelistic postmodern style, despite the fact that this is still a memoir. I hope that she writes more books: hopefully, ones that are not autobiographical. I would prefer novels, but if she wants to write psychological tomes that's cool too. This is the kind of book that I could definitely see a college professor assigning in class and I rather would like that idea if I were the author.
The people who say this book is unreadable are probably those readers who liked her through her other book, Prozac Diary, which is in a fairly different style. Certain people like certain styles. I prefer this style. It's classier.
I wonder who Christopher Marin is? It's cool that he wrote a review.
Rating:
Summary: Fascinating but peculiar "memoir"
Review: One finishes this book with many questions about what has actually happened during the life of Lauren Slater. Did she have temporal lobe seizure disorder? Or was she so traumatized during her childhood and adolescence by something or someone that she substitutes the seizure disorder for some other form of mental or physical illness? We are told that this is supposed to be a memoir not only about her illness -- whatever it was or is -- and the development of her creative abilities, but also about her relationship with her mother. We are given relatively little information about this relationship, except to be told about the mother's cold, distant method of "showing love" to her young daughter, her drinking problem, and her narcissistic personality. Could her mother have been so unloving that Slater could simply not write any more about a relationship that barely existed? It is difficult to review a work in which so much information seems to be withheld from the reader. This reader hopes some of these questions will be answered in future works by the author (and, meanwhile, feels rather frustrated with this "nonfiction" book which seems to be more like fiction!).
Rating:
Summary: A brilliant synthesis of neurology and psychology
Review: This is Slater's best work yet. It's a novel, a memoir, a neurological thriller, a fantastic flamboyant merging of genres. Slater tells the compulsively readable story of a young girl's epilepsy.(Her own? Maybe, maybe not, it hardly matters,) and the fascinating neurologically based states that result: auras of every color, scintillating smells; here, in this work, Slater examines fully the poetic possibility of disease, and, also, the way we use disease not only as an art form, but as a conduit for love. The scenes involving brain surgery and electrical brain probes are especially haunting and ironically accurate for a book which claims it's rooted in deception. It may be, but if so, than Lying, a splendid tour de force, illumintes for all of us how close truth and trickery really are.
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