I am driven to write nonfiction because I have stories to tell, and in those tellings I am figuring my life out. I am also deeply afraid of personal nonfiction, because I fear I will never actually be able to share it outside of a classroom.

Creative nonfiction is defined by what it isn’t: not fiction. But I have learned to define fiction by what it isn’t: not truth. I know, of course, that there are always truths within fiction, but for me they find a home within nonfiction. Truth versus nontruth. When I write, I am either choosing to write about myself and my experiences, or I am actively choosing to delay these truths. My own, personal truths.

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After our class discussion last week, I was curious about whether or not Dr. Hayward Kreiger (the philosopher who supposedly wrote the introduction for Lying) was real. So, as I always do when I question the authenticity of an introduction in a highly-contested memoir, I turned to Google.

This is what I found: a New York Times Book Review journalist, wondering the same thing, called the University of California to inquire about Dr. Krieger and found that there was no such person. Then, a few weeks later, that same journalist received a handwritten letter from—who else?—Dr. Kreiger. The letter states, “Identity has always been a fragile phenomenon, but that it now rests upon the report of overworked operators at a university switchboard is perturbing, and we should all beware.” According to the letter, Dr. Kreiger had simply left the university. But here’s the real kicker: the return address on the letter was for the clinic Slater worked at, and the phone number listed under Dr. Kreiger’s contact info belonged to Slater’s husband. Continue reading →

Classification of genre does not matter in the sense of story. Whether it be creative nonfiction or fiction, the authorial intent is the same, to create a story of meanings to their audience; to tell a story that may be related to the lives of others whether it be completely made up, or written in strict factual evidence. We as humans crave acceptance, attention, and love. All these matters are written about in this story as Slater must learn to come to terms with her sexuality, her relationship with her parents and most importantly, learn to live with herself as she is not as she is-not. Lying should most definitely be classified as memoir, though it could be fictional, it still merits such classification as it is the telling of a life story through the eyes of an individual with physical and psychological problems and how they perceive the world around them. Continue reading →

The human genome is about 50% identical the genome of a banana. I’ve been told this fact since before I knew what a genome actually was, and I always thought “How could that be? Humans are not like bananas at all.” And we aren’t really. Bananas don’t have societies or governments or reality television. We don’t grow in bunches on a tree.   So what makes us similar to bananas? Continue reading →

Everyone tell lies. In many cases, lies, whether severe or small, are used to deceive a person into feeling a certain way. Sometimes, lies are told to benefit not the liar, but the person or people that they are lying to. Other times, lies are told to benefit the liar, like that time in 10th grade when you came home past curfew and your excuse to your parents was that you, “forgot how late it was.”

Now to focus on a liar who entraps her readers by establishing a theme challenging our minds to see what is truth, and what is fiction. Lauren Slater is the main attraction in her “factual” memoir, where she gives us a first row seat to all of her most intimate memories as she grows from a helpless child, to a young woman. Continue reading →

Lauren Slater’s Lying occupies an interesting space within the world of creative nonfiction. Why, you ask? No, it’s not because it’s about a disease. No, it’s not even because Slater is an unreliable narrator.

In short, Lying is so special because, contrary to popular belief, it is quite possibly the single most honest creative non-fiction work in existence.

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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 →