While I had never thought of this world as a secret, perhaps because I had lived it so long that I didn't really understand that it isn't like this for everyone. I knew, but like Slater, I didn't know. I too denied my own epilepsy (for the record, I'm sorry to report that epileptics have terrible issues with compliance when it comes to taking the Phenobarbital or whatever you happen to be on). Slater is able to capture both sides of this coin: the part of temporal lobe epilepsy that is in so many ways, so seductive. As Van Gogh, another with TLE, wrote to his brother Theo, "The sicker I get, the more ill I become, the more I wish to take my revenge by painting."

With his heavy stroke and spirals of heavy paint that seem to spin like so many Catherine wheels, Van Gogh was able to present something of the world he saw, and that was his gift to us. I've often wished I had some device that would print out a strip of negatives that could be unfurled from my ear and show the images in my brain, like a photo negative, burned into the film by electric currents.

The desire to make this world known is a common one among epileptics. Lewis Carroll, who suffered quite terribly with his seizures, dreamt of creating what he called a "memory camera," which entailed laying a large sheet of gelatin and silver-painted glass over the head of a dreaming man, and, as the man dreamt, the images would be etched onto the plate, creating a negative of the man's thoughts. In The Ring, a film with a lot of TLE themes in many ways, Samora, the little girl in the well with the dark-rimmed eyes and glowing white skin, can burn images into MRI film with the power of thought, and who among us can forget the creepiness of the images burnt into the wide-planks of wood on the wall of her high-loft bedroom in the barn; the charred image of a tree or the rocking horse, and all done by thought and concentration and I'm sure, more than a little anger.

What Slater wants to do, it seems is confess, which is actually a very epileptic approach - this need for penitence and religion that is so often seen in patients with this type of epilepsy. But again, this too seems almost too much - like it's something she read and set her mind and pen to spin this tale because, who knows, maybe it provided her with the answers to some things she had done in her life that she needed to rationalize, like the lying, stealing, other things like that. Or maybe she really is epileptic, but it's hard to know. There's something a bit flat about the story, too. For all of its cinematic imagery and consistent with epilepsy symptoms (for the most part,), it's lacking some of the personal detail that I would expect from an epileptic, and also, for someone with temporal lobe epilepsy, a condition for which hypergraphia is a major concern, the book is remarkably short. It's that Slater is almost too perfect in her fucked up, epileptic fugue and the tale she tells that gives rise to doubt.