3. Question number two: Is it possible to narrate an honest nonfiction story if you are a slippery sort? I, for one, am a slippery sort, but I believe I’m also an honest sort because I admit my slipperiness. And, therefore, to come clean in this memoir would be dishonest; it would be to go against my nature, which would be just the sort of inauthenticity any good nonfiction memoirist, whose purpose is to capture the essence of the narrator, could not accommodate. I truly believe that if I came completely clean I would be telling the biggest lie of all, and at heart I am not a liar, I am passionately dedicated to the truth, which, by the way, is not necessarily the same thing as fact, so loosen up! Something can be both true and untrue—it’s a paradox—the same way Jesus Christ can be both man and god, and when you try to sell this little book I suggest you pitch it to the public as such, jacket copy to read, perhaps, a book that takes up residence in the murky gap between genres and, by its stubborn self-position there, forces us to consider important things.
4. Even, however, if I choose not to tease apart the fabrications from the facts, I’d like to, at the very least, lay out the possibilities. They are as follows: A) I have epilepsy as I’ve described. Ninety-nine percent of what I’ve told you is accurate, with a few glitches, due mostly to the memory lapses and altered consciousness that accompany the split-brain patient. B) I have epilepsy, but due to the very nature of the epileptic personality, the need to exaggerate and all that, you should believe only selectively what I have recorded here. C) I don’t have epilepsy at all, not a shred, not a sliver, but I do have Munchausen’s, and what you have here before you is a true portrait of a fabulist, a sick mind under siege, the webs we weave, the glistening tales, all matter turned to myth, yes. D) I have neither Munchausen’s nor epilepsy nor a TLE personality style, but I did grow up with a mother so wedded to denial, so inclined to twist and even outright lie, that I became confused about reality and also fell in love with tall tales.
5. Before I submitted the manuscript for your approval, I gave it to four friends, five acquaintances, and six strangers. All the strangers, who know nothing about my slipperiness, took it all quite literally, like it was just one more true account of yet another disease. Well, it’s not. If you read it that way, I will feel I have failed.
6. My good friend and novelist believes a book can qualify as nonfiction only if the literal facts are for the most part accurate. Therefore she thinks I should call this book fiction, but I disagree. After all, a lot, or at least some, or at least a few, of the literal facts are accurate. Second of all, even those things that are not literally true about me are metaphorically true about me, and that’s an important point.
7. Sometimes I look at my foot and I can’t believe it belongs to me. That’s my foot, my foot, my foot, I repeat, but it doesn’t seem attached to me, and if you asked me who I was at that moment, I would tell you many things, including the fact that I am footless. Why is what we feel less true than what is? Supposing I simply feel like an epileptic, a spastic person, one with a shivering brain; supposing I have chosen epilepsy because it is the most accurate conduit to convey my psyche to you? Would this not still be a memoir, my memoir? After all, if I were making the whole thing up—and I’m not saying I’m making the whole thing up—but if I were, I would be doing it not to create a character as a novelist does, but, instead, to create a metaphor that conveys the real person I am.
8. Sometimes, my confusions tire and depress me so much, I want to sleep forever.
9. Nevertheless, confusions and all, Kate, I think I am a nonfiction writer, and I would like to be known as such. I record my life, sifting and trying to separate what is real from what I’ve dreamed. I have decided not to tell you what is fact versus what is unfact primarily because (a) I am giving you a portrait of the essence of me, and (b) because, living where I do, living in the chasm that cuts through thought, it is lonely. Come with me, Kate. Come with me, reader. I am toying with you, yes, but for a real reason. I am asking you to enter the confusion with me, to give up the ground with me, because sometimes that frightening floaty place is really the truest of all. Kierkegaard says, “The greatest lie of all is the feeling of firmness beneath our feet. We are at our most honest when we are lost.” Enter that lostness with me. Live in the place I am, where the view is murky, where the connecting bridges and orienting maps have been surgically stripped away.
10. Together we will journey. We are disoriented, and all we ever really want is a hand to hold.
11. I am so happy you are holding me in your hands. I am sitting far away from you, but when you turn the pages, I feel a flutter in me, and wings rise up.
12. Dr. Neu once told me a fascinating fact.
13. This is true.
14. The neural mechanism that undergirds the lie is the same neural mechanism that helps us make narrative. Thus, all stories, even those journalists swear up and down are “true,” are at least physiologically linked to deception.
15. When I was a child, in the fifth grade, I realized I was telling a lot of lies, and so I made a lie chart, a notebook in which I recorded, at the end of the day, every lie I told. My goal was to get to the point where I had nothing to record, and so absolve myself of sin. The first week I recorded ten pages of lies, and the lies so interested me that I illustrated them; and then the second week nine pages, the third week four pages, until, months later, I got to the end of the week and had nothing to record. I stared at the blank page, and maybe it was at that moment I became a writer. My heart quickened in my chest, and I felt fear. I was falling into whiteness. A terrible silence surrounded me. I wanted to mark the page, but I couldn’t think of a thing to say, or who I was, or even how to spell my name, now that my stories were gone.
16. My name is Lauren. I go by no other. In the story you have before you, I am not a novelist’s character; I am my best approximation of me. I am not a fiction, but nor am I a fact, because a fact implies literalness, a fact implies permanence, and someday I shall die. And when I do, I hope to have my life laid out, the soul of the story articulated at last, it is true, yes. This is true, yes.
17. My memoir, please. Sell it as nonfiction, please.
18. Look here.
19. This is where I am.
PART FOUR
THE STAGE OF
RECOVERY
CHAPTER 8
AMAZING GRACE
What a metaphor expresses cannot be said directly or apart from it, for if it could be, one would have said it directly. Here, metaphor is a strategy of desperation, not decoration.
—Sally McFague, Models of God
I was born from nothing and to nothing I will return. The biological explanation of birth is that sperm meets egg, a single cell divides: oocyte, zygote, bone. The spiritual explanation is that God sends a spark down, and the spark takes full flare as a human. The biological explanation of my epilepsy is that a small scar formed on the left temporal lobe of my brain; the spiritual explanation is that God, in sculpting me from paste, nicked his nail against my gray matter, a small mistake, an error born of love and touch.
I have always loved churches. My father, Paul David, was a Hebrew School teacher and a man in the bakery business. My mother, Anita Ann, was a Zionist and a believer in Aliyah. But I, Jewish by blood, have always preferred churches, because a seizure in a synagogue means disruption and embarrassment, whereas a seizure in church is part of the holy atmosphere. Churches are places for the two-tongued and the fainters, for broken bodies. Christ himself had his body broken, his back snapped on the board of the cross, little nails driven right through his lifelines. He died up there, stinking and bloody, and tell me this: Where in a synagogue can you find such a sight, a synagogue all clean and quiet, smelling of bleach and law?
The first church I ever went to was before my epilepsy, when I was only seven years old. I went with a Catholic friend of mine, and when the music began, many doors in me opened, and my blood pressure rose, and I rose too, hitched a little higher toward grace.
The second church I ever went to was at the falling school, and this church was intricate and magical, drops of gold on scepter tops, saints walking in all the windows.
The third church I ever went to was after Christopher Marin, when I was in the darkness. There are two kinds of darkness, the first so full of breath you know you are close to God. The second is the darkness of distance, of plugged-up tunnels and exhaust. In this you are far from God, and it was into this that I fell, when I left Christopher on that snowy Vermont morning.
In real time, darkness might last eight hours, but in psychological time, it can go for vast stretches. After Christopher, I felt lost. Even with my magazine acceptance, I still had a hole in my heart. I experienced an allover heaviness, and so I slept more.
Halfway through my freshman year I left my Israeli roommate, whom I could not come to love or even deeply like. I moved off campus, but I still ate at the cafeteria. Comfort came through foods, hot plates of spaghetti, the satisfying snap of a potato chip in my mouth.
At first, I would have said the breakup with Christopher caused my depression, but, after a while, I stopped missing him, and still the heaviness wouldn’t leave. It got worse. Then I thought perhaps I’d lost my epilepsy, because, since the seizure in the hotel room in Vermont, I hadn’t had an episode. A successful surgical intervention!
What had I lost? I had lost the cherry tree, the toads in the woods, my house, the ants that crawled in a line in front of my house, the grainy golden sandbox of my childhood, the honesty of my childhood—had it ever been?—before I’d learned to fake and clutch and seize at an unstitched world.
I was halfway through my freshman year, then, and I lived off campus, in a studio apartment in Waltham, right at the tip where Waltham blends into Weston, a much wealthier town. My apartment was tiny, with a gas burner for heat, and a leaded glass window. In bad weather, rain streamed down the leaded glass, leaked in under the sill, and sometimes I tasted the puddles, because I was hungry, and thirsty too.
• • •
Eventually, after Christopher, I stopped going to classes. I couldn’t think why in the world I should go to classes. They were all in lecture halls, and I was not noticed. I wrote papers that TAs handed back with the briefest of comments, and even if the grades were good, no one thought me special. I was used to being probed and pondered, hated or loved, and the vast neutrality of college life—well, it just wasn’t for me. When “The Cherry Tree” got accepted, there wasn’t even a particular person to tell. I was reading The Paris Review Interviews then, and I decided I should submit an interview like that to the campus newspaper. I said my name was Juliette Epstein, and that I had interviewed this student by the name of Lauren Slater, the promising young talent on campus. The interview went like this:
JE: Could you tell us a little bit about your creative process? How many hours a day do you write, in the mornings or evenings, things like this?
LS: My writing is linked to my epilepsy. Epileptics have things called auras, and when an aura descends on me, I often feel the desire to write. It can be anytime, morning or night. I write very quickly; I can usually compose a story in an hour or less.
JE: I wasn’t aware you have epilepsy. Many writers, it seems, struggle with sickness in one way or another. Would you say your epilepsy is essential to your creativity?
LS: Most definitely. I can’t separate the two. I don’t have many seizures anymore, because, when I was thirteen, I had an operation called a corpus callostomy, split-brain surgery. My left brain was separated from my right brain, so my seizures wouldn’t spread. After an experience like that, of course you need to write about it. Also, many artists are epileptics, like van Gogh, Dostoevski, Shakespeare.
JE: Do you mind my asking, what is it like to have a split brain? I know we’re off the subject of creative writing here, but it’s pretty fascinating.…
LS: It sounds much more dramatic than it actually is. I do have side effects though. For instance, with my left eye closed, I can’t think of words, say words, read words. I am languageless. I have memory lapses, but these may have more to do with the auras and the epilepsy than with the corpus callostomy. The fact is, though, that I have two independent brains up in my head, and in some philosophical and also physical sense, I am two separate people, just like me and you.
JE: You must feel very different from other people, given your physical condition. Is writing one way you have of reaching out to others?
LS: Absolutely.
JE: Do you feel that through your writing you are able to communicate with other students on the Brandeis campus?
LS: I don’t mean to insult anyone, but I find Brandeis a tough place. Everyone here is from the suburbs.
Everyone here is premed. I would like to start a group for students who have an interest in the creative process, and who also have epilepsy.
JE: So, do you have any potential members?
LS: Not yet, but if anyone’s interested, even professors, I can be reached at 931-0434. I would love to be called.
JE: Thank you. It sounds like it could be a wonderful group. And I, for one, am really looking forward to “The Cherry Tree” when it comes out in print.
Six weeks later, “The Cherry Tree” came out in print. The interview did not come out in print. Of course, no one called.
• • •
I went for walks then. I saw a dwarf. Another day, I saw a man with no nose. I saw a child with pink eyes and white floss for hair. In the CVS, I stared at my own face in the magnified mirror. My face looked horrendous to me, all tilted and pocked.
I signed up for some treatment at the Brandeis Counseling Center. I didn’t know how to adjust to college life. On the day of my first session, I brought Dr. Neu’s paper with me, so the psychologist would get an idea of my complexities.
I should have known from his office. It was all orange leather, a bad sign. He asked me a million questions, like I was applying for a passport, and he scribbled all my answers down on a form. “Born where?” he said. “Mother’s maiden name?” he said. “Ethnicity?” he said, and as the time ticked by I got mad. I was there for help. “Age?” he said.
“Seventy-three,” I said, and then he looked up.
He blinked behind his glasses, smiled. “I’m sure you feel that old,” he said. “You look tired.”
“I am tired,” I said. “And I have depression too.”
“A lot of freshmen experience depression,” he said. “It’s quite common. The adjustment can be overwhelming.”
“It is overwhelming,” I said, “and more so for me because I have epilepsy and my past has been difficult, which I think you should know.” I handed him Dr. Neu’s paper.
He read it, and then he looked at me. In my opinion, he read it very, very quickly, like maybe thirty seconds, a minute tops, so keep that in mind.
“This,” he said, “this paper,” he said, “is not real.”
“It looks real to me,” I said. I had absolutely no idea what he meant.
“I think you should understand,” he said softly, “that I am confrontational in style. And so it is entirely within my style to say that there is no way this paper was written by a doctor, or anyone even remotely connected to the medical profession.” He paused. “There is no such part of the brain,” he said, “as the ‘temporal amygdalan area.’ There is no such thing as,” and he pointed to the second page, “ ‘eliopathic epilepsy.’ ” He smiled. “I think you meant to write idiopathic. Is that what you meant?”
“How am I supposed to know,” I said, “what Dr. Neu meant?”
“I’m sorry,” he said, “but there is no Dr. Neu. What I mean by that,” he said, “is that there is no Dr. Neu anywhere in the world who would perform a corpus callostomy on a patient with TLE. It’s just not done.”
“What do you mean it’s not done?” I said. I felt my voice get very loud and high while the whole room turned to glass. “It was done to me.”
“We should probably talk,” he said
, “about why you need to tell this story, what it really means.”
I looked at him, the little skunk. The whole room stank.
“I think,” I said, “I am going to have a seizure right now.”
“What happens to you,” he said, “when you have seizures?” He looked concerned.
“I feel my hands get big,” I said. “My hands are feeling very big and floaty right now.”
He nodded. “I see,” he said. “And is that floaty feeling often accompanied by an excess of saliva in the mouth, what we call ptyalism?”
“Yes,” I said. “I’ve been diagnosed with ptyalism many times.”
“Ptyalism,” he said, “is never a symptom that accompanies seizures. It is a symptom of pregnancy. Could you possibly be pregnant?”
I started to cry. “You,” I said, and then I was whispering. “You are a bad man.”
The room got very quiet.
“I have epilepsy,” I said.
“Perhaps you do,” he said, “I have no way of knowing. However, this operation,” he said, “this operation is definitely beyond what I can call credible, unless,” he said, and then he was leaning toward me, reaching his hands out toward me, “unless you can show me your scar.”
And that’s when I understood. His hands reaching out toward me. The suggestion of pregnancy. He was a pervert. He wanted to touch me. I jerked away.
“Leave—me—alone,” I said. I stood. “I’m going to report you,” I said. “I don’t lie,” I said. “Ask anyone.” And then I ran.
• • •
He was a pervert, and I did report him. I wrote a long letter to the head of Brandeis Counseling about how he had tried to touch me and how he had displayed some deep-seated sadistic need to question my disease and to deny its treatment, possibly because he was threatened by the very things his profession called upon him to confront. It is well known, after all, that a great many mental health practitioners are emotionally unstable, even to the point of playing cruel games with their patients.
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