The Unreliable Child Narrator in Lauren Slater’s Lying

This paper explores the slippery nature of illness and diagnosis in Lauren Slater’s memoir, Lying: a Metaphorical Memoir (2000). Speaking from the intersection of childhood and adolescence, Slater’s narrator, Lauren, uses the metaphor of epilepsy to describe her own predilection for exaggeration. In exploiting the fallibility of the first-person child narrator, Slater insists on the legitimacy of metaphor in accounts of childhood illness that are more concerned with narrative truth rather than historical accuracy. The result of this playfulness and general misrule is that Slater writes herself into a double bind: on one side, she is the child narrator who inadvertently misrepresents events and misdirects readers, and on the other side, she is the untrustworthy author who employs metaphor as a licence to lie. In the midst of this double bind, somewhere between the polarities of fact and fiction, Slater creates a safe space for her young narrator that doubles as dangerous terrain for her cautious reader. In this discursive setting where the truth is recognised at least partially through its proximity to risk, the unreliable child narrator undermines the truth-telling requisite in memoir by creating a safe space where she can deliberately distort, and even silence, what is deemed readable or ‘real’.