Regardless of the actual truth, Slater does have a talent for drawing us in, even admitting just enough lies that we think maybe she's being truthful, and though we sense we are being lead properly down the garden path, and some of the things she admits to doing are truly disturbing (like saying she had cancer because it sounded more heroic somehow, which is just sick and insulting and hurtful to people who are really suffering with and dying from cancer), the book nonetheless enchants. Lying reads more like poetry, with snapshots of vivid and haunting images than a real medical memoir.

Whether she is faking epilepsy or really has it, no one, other than her doctor perhaps, can say for sure. What I can say is that she knows her shit - what she writes, for the most part, is true of temporal lobe epilepsy: it may not be true of her - this may all be stuff she read and researched and knows cold and just laid over her life to make sense of things that didn't otherwise make sense. Or, it may indeed be genuine, first hand experience, either way, it is a seductive book, at once leading and full of a quiet charisma and charm and stories so vividly painted, that it's easy to get drawn in. Her writing is quick and fast and sneaky, like the handwork of the guy who runs a shell game at a local carnivore and we keep watching to see if we can catch his moves.

We're all rubes in this drama of Slater's, and there is a distinct tone of superiority and preciousness that at times, is off-putting. The memoir that she calls "slippery" is indeed that, but more than this, it's downright greasy and the truth, whatever that is, is elusive and will slither out of your grasp like a dark and thrashing eel. In the final account, for all she tells us - for the confessional tone and even, at times, atonement she seems to feel, really very little is confessed.

It's hard to discern fact from fiction in this book. Any real details about her illness (whatever it is) or even about epilepsy, there are these vague impressions that seem more like they are lifted or are impressions that come from reading of it seizures, not necessarily experiencing them. She states of the book herself, "... even those things that are not literally true about me are metaphorically true about me, and that's an important point."

You can just tell that Slater wants or wanted to be that girl in high school that was "different," who called herself "the weird one" as if this were a badge of honor, or the "funky, artsy" one, because in reality, maybe she just wasn't that fucking interesting and so contrived things to make herself so. Maybe I misjudge, but this is subjective, and that's the point. A good example, after all the high-drama of her jasmine seizures (and as I said, beautifully written at times) and romanticized, flowery descriptions, we find Lauren in a room having a fight with her beau when she has a "real" seizure. Action! (Begin Excerpt)