Lying by Lauren Slater

versed in what Adorno so aptly called “the jargon of authenticity.” Munchausen’s patients have learned to convey authenticity to their audiences precisely by admitting to a limited number of lies. This young girl, for instance, admitted to exaggerating some of her epileptic seizures, but she maintained the baselineveracity of her disorder. In the case of this young patient, and of the many other Munchausen’s sufferers, epilepsy seems to be the disease most able to capture and express conflicts with repressed sexuality, poor body image, and deeply impaired sense of self mastery.
    Well, that should prove my point. You can fake epilepsy. I admit I sometimes faked my epilepsy, but I also really had it. Still, once I realized I could set off seizures at will, I did it at all the right times and in all the right places. The Peter Bent Brigham. The Lying-In.
    Tiring. And how dislike yourself. From my bout with Munchausen’s, I now know for a fact we are moral creatures, and that to be anything but is to violate our most basic physiologies. The lying hurt, physically. My head felt on fire, and yet my skin seemed snowy and far away. I started taking baths, long hot soaks, my skin turning tender and red;
here I am
.
    I fixed my face up carefully when I went to see Dr. Neu. Back then there was a line of products called Love’s Baby Soft. I used all Love’s Baby Soft products, rouge in two small circles on my cheeks.
    Is it possible that Lauren loved him if there was no Lauren? Was it Juliette who loved him, or Bobby with her floral smells? Who cried in her heart when he touched her head? Dr. Neu was Dutch, and his words had a feathery feel to them. I loved him for no other reason, perhaps, than his voice, how he made every word warm.
    My mother, father, and I went in for a meeting with himone Tuesday at 3:00 P.M . Summer had arrived, and the air was so hot it hung between the trees like breath.
    I remember the heat, and I remember the cool clasp of air as soon as we entered the lobby, the switch so sudden it was almost painful.
    “Come in,” Dr. Neu said. He took us not into his examining room but into his office, where serene music played.
    “Sit,” he said.
    “She needs an operation,” he said. “I have thought about it carefully. I have explored the physiology of her seizures and, despite their eliopathic nature, I think a sectioning of the corpus callosum is warranted.”
    “Oh,” we all said.
    He went on to explain. He would cut the corpus callosum in my brain, thereby disconnecting the left and right hemispheres, a very common procedure in epileptic children with some, but few, significant side effects. With the brain split, the seizures starting in one side would not spread to the other, and so I should experience a real reduction in illness.
    But wait a minute
, I wanted to say.
I’m not as ill as I seem
.
    “You mean to tell me,” my mother said, “that you want to perform a lobotomy on my daughter?”
    “It’s not a lobotomy,” he said. “Surgery is sometimes the method of choice when the pediatric patient does not respond to medication. The procedure will have no effect on her IQ or on her social skills. The side effects are very subtle.”
    They all had a long conversation then about subtlety and side effects, but I had stopped listening. I noticed my motherlooked worn down, and sometime, over the years, grooves of disappointment had deepened by her mouth. She had had such high hopes, she must have entered life with such a lunge, and now, at this midpoint, what? A daughter with a brain disease, a husband in the bakery business, and all the while she with the scent of perfume that trailed her like a scarf. Once she had fought my illness with fists and money, but I had been younger then, and so had she. Once she had watched me seize with something like love in her eyes. But I had been younger then, and so had she. I think, that day in the doctor’s office, she just decided to take a rest. I applaud