Lauren Slater’s Lying is easily the most ambiguous texts that I have read thus far. Slater keeps the readers engaged throughout the entire memoir by using memories that she is recalling from her childhood. The reader is initially warned by the validity of the memoir by the title “Lying: a metaphorical memoir”. The word metaphorical makes the reader question what the metaphor is and why would she expose her so called memoir as a metaphor?  As the book begins, Slater chooses to make the first chapter only two words: “I exaggerate”. By putting this as the first chapter, the entire validity of the memoir is questioned. What is she making up? What actually happened?

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When an author admits to exaggerating and lying in her own memoir, can his or her memoir still be considered nonfiction? In the book Lying: A Metaphorical Memoir, Slater talks about her own emotions and thoughts throughout the whole book, so for me there is no doubt that Lying is classified as creative nonfiction/memoir. Blaming Slater for not giving the reader factual truth would be like blaming your worst enemy for writing bad things about you in his/her diary. Yes, it would be morally wrong (in my opinion) to curse someone even in one’s personal diary, but few people would actually blame the writer for saying negative things about the person he or she hates (unless you knew the people involved perhaps, but that is irrelevant to my point). Readers should simply not expect Slater to give them factual truth, especially when Slater constantly reminds us to be cautious in what we take in as fact throughout the book Continue reading →

Hayward Krieger, the nonexistent philosophy professor of the forward, brings up an elusive conception of truth that supposedly underscores Lying: namely, Heideggerian truth. I won’t propose to sufficiently understand Martin Heidegger—a difficult existentialist thinker just like Jean-Paul Sartre and Søren Kierkegaard, two other philosophers she alludes to the text—but his conception of truth is a curious and complex one when read in detail. To tentatively simplify, though, he proposes that truth is consistent with the “openness of being.” In particular, he focuses on art—specifically van Gogh whom Slater references as another accomplished mind haunted by epilepsy—as a medium through which people might illuminate this conception of truth. This early allusion at oncesets a precedent for existentialist thought in Lying and, further, puts us as readers in a more developed position to dig deeper into Slater’s philosophical inklings as memoirist and individual.  Continue reading →

We don’t know what’s true or what’s false in Lauren Slater’s creative memoir Lying. Slater dedicates an entire page/chapter to the statement “I exaggerate,” which is the only statement we can comfortably take at face value, given the nature of the statement. Our author makes many claims, confirming none, but going back on enough that we as readers are forced to assume that everything she says is a lie. So why read what she has to say? What’s the point of reading a memoir if almost none of it is true? Well, first, we should understand why we read memoirs at all. What’s the point of reading a memoir? How is a memoir different from an autobiography? Continue reading →

I’ve just finished reading the Huffington Post article Virginia To Compensate Victims of Forced Sterilization. This particular paragraph stirred up the most emotions in me:

“The Virginia eugenics law was upheld in the 1927 Supreme Court case Buck v. Bell, in which Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., writing for the majority, famously declared: “Three generations of imbeciles are enough.” (paragraph 16)

disabled (adj.)
(of a person) having a physical or mental condition that limits movements, senses, or activities (Google)

It sickens me that people would think people with “disabilities” are any less than people without “disabilities”. What right do you have to look down on people who are overcoming obstacles in their daily lives that you never have to go through? Besides, the truth is, we all have “disabilities”, and many of us have much more serious problems than those whom we label “disabled”. For me, the girl who is obsessed with taking 999 selfies every day is more blind than a person with eyes that cannot see. Her mental condition (self-centeredness, vanity) limits her senses of true beauty and her ability to love herself and others despite their appearance. People who cannot view “disabled people” as people of value have more “disabilities” in their thinking than all those people they look down upon. Continue reading →

Joan Didion’s portrait of the “hippie movement” is not just that, but it is a portrait of a changing America.  Within a story of “trips” and runaways, Slouching Towards Bethlehem is an example of the generational differences in the late 1960s.

Speaking to young runaways at a Grateful Dead concert, she hears of the different ideologies they have than their parents.  Chores seem to them a daunting and unnecessary task.  Consequences for below average grades were “a bummer.”  The teens tell of how they aren’t going to plan for the future, “we’re just gonna let it all happen.”  You can tell that Didion feels some sort of sympathy towards their naivety. When she writes “I finally ask it. I ask them to think back to when they were children, to tell me what they had wanted to be when they were grown up, how they had seen the future then.”  It’s as though their innocence is lost, and with it, all sense of direction.  Didion’s readers would have felt a heart-wrenching feeling of how they could be their children someday, look at what the hippies have done to them. Continue reading →

When I was in the Poetry Workshop last semester with Lytton Smith, we read two poetry collections with documentary or journalistic elements–one of which was Erika Meitner’s Copia. In her collection, Meitner intervweaves personal anecdotes about materialism, desire, and home with researched information on Detroit and, even, a verbatim interview with a Detorit automobile factory worker.

Recently, Lytton asked if I’d be interested in doing a documentary poetry reading and discussion at this year’s GREAT Day. All last semester, between taking Steve’s Lyric Essay class and Lytton’s Poetry workshop back-to-back, I was researching and writing about Sonyea’s Craig Colony for Epileptics for a directed study and a lot of what I was learning transferred over to both my essays and my poetry. And, sometimes, an essay would prompt a poem or a poem would help inform an essay. Because of this, I’ve realized how fluid the borders separating creative nonfiction and poetry really are (just look at a lyric essay or a prose poem and you’ll know what I mean). Continue reading →