Lying in all Honesty: Capturing Truth in Women's Confessional Memoir

Abstract

This paper explores the requisite of truth-telling in confessional memoir, looking specifically at the female confessant's ability to simultaneously capture and evade the 'truth'. Framed through a case study of Lauren Slater's controversial memoir, Lying (2000), the article explores how Slater's narrator, Lauren, uses the metaphor of epilepsy to describe her own predilection for exaggeration. In exploiting the fallibility of the child narrator, Slater insists on the legitimacy of metaphor in attempts to capture the 'truth' of lived experience: in this case, childhood illness. The result is a confessional text that is more concerned with figurative truth than historical accuracy.