Eireen Manow
16 March 2010
Birds of a Feather Reluctantly Flock Together
I remember my first kiss. He strode up to me, stopped and slowly tilted his head toward my
face. His lips were chapped, but wet as if he had just licked them. I could feel the wind trying to
blow through my two inch tall, Aqua Net filled bangs. Our lips parted. He smiled, and then ran
away. The truth is I don’t remember if it happened this way. I only have a general idea of how it
happened based in part on how I felt, and plausible assumptions I can make based how old I was,
and my schema of how first kisses typically are. In Lying: A Metaphorical Memoir, Lauren Slater tells
the story of her life in much the same way. Instead of focusing on the details of her past, Slater
embraces the vagrancy of memory, impressing upon the reader the importance of meaning over
facts. Through metaphor, she illustrates that the way in which memories are stored, including the
influence of emotion, and the way they are retrieved, pulled from networks and various parts of the
brain and then reassembled, suggests that truth in memoir is inconsistent at best. By pointing out
the inconsistencies in memory, the metaphor drives Slater’s overall theme of truth in the meaning of
an experience rather than the details. Furthermore, Slater’s emphasis on meaning mirrors a
psychological theory, which states that human memory has a natural predilection toward gist over
detail; she is successful in hoodwinking the audience into seeing only the meaning she wishes to
portray.
Slater’s concentration on the unpredictability of memory is seen in the bird theme present
throughout her childhood. The images of birds serve to illustrate how malleable, inconsistent, and
prone to partiality memory is. As Slater ages and gathers experience, she is susceptible to the
transgressions present in the storage and retrieval of memory. The bird metaphor provides the
reader with a concrete representation of this abstraction.
One such illustration of memory is seen when Slater receives an owl from her mother (48).
Before Slater, a Jewish girl, is sent to a Catholic school for falling, her mother gives her an owl.
While at school, Slater finds that the owl’s eyes are “glowing,” and perhaps even watching what is
going on around her. This owl is representative of Slater’s mother’s influence on her and
subsequently on her memories. Slater’s personality and perceptions are shaped by her past, by the
ideas her mind creates over time and through experience. Her perception, in turn, effects how her
memory categorizes events. Anderson describes this as natural categories, information about the
world that is acquired over time through learning. He goes on to exemplify the creation of natural
categories through the learning of younger children. If an adult tells a child that one type of living
organism, a human for instance, contains a certain body part, the child will assume that all similar
organisms, animals, also contain that body part (167). The child’s perception and processing of
other animals is influenced by the information provided by the adult. Slater’s perceptions are
influenced by information she has received from her mother. The owls glowing eyes imply that she
is seeing and processing her surroundings through eyes that are influenced by her upbringing.
While the owl illustrates how outside influences affect memory, Slater’s reference to another
species of bird demonstrates internal effects on memory. When Slater tells of the beginning of her
experience with epilepsy, she imagines a cardinal who gets inside of her, and badgers her to continue
(29). It appears that if only Slater could free herself of the cardinal, she would be able to succeed.
This parallels emotional effects of memory as described in Grinley’s lecture about Spotlight Theory.
Spotlight Theory compares attention to a spotlight. Several things influence the power source of a
spotlight, including affect. A person’s poor emotional health can put a drain on attention causing
memories to be poorly stored and possible irretrievable. As Slater tries to cope with her disease, her
troubled emotions are impeding her ability to reliably store memories.
Instead of trying to control her emotions in order to remember detail, Slater embraces the
emotional meaning behind the detail. Later, when she describes falling, the cardinal is released from
her body. This release follows the first passage where she admits to telling a story that reflects how
she felt rather than what actually happened. Slater makes up a scene in which she falls into a grave.
She admits in the very next page that she had only imagined falling into the grave, but spends very
little time on the facts and instead continues the description of her imaginings (58-60). The reader is
forced to dismiss the facts and instead focus on the truth Slater wishes to portray. Instead of
portraying an impatient child mildly disrupting a funeral, she describes a child loosing control and
greatly disrupting the funeral. While she describes some of the details of the actual funeral, it is
likely that she remembers very little of it. She does, however remember how she felt; she
manufactures her details in order to portray the meaning of the event.
Some could contend that Slater is arguing instead for the importance of detail, that her desire
to fabricate her story is in fact an attempt to fill in the blanks of a memory that is incomplete. This
line of reasoning can be supported by her blatant use of every form of bias Schacter lists. Slater uses
bias to help fill in the details of her experiences; it is these details that propel her overall theme and
the truth found in the story. While it is possible that details are important, Slater herself points out
that truth is found in the meaning of incidents, expressly those incidents that are completely made
up.
If details were important, Slater would allow her untrue accounts to become more of a
distraction to the reader. As a psychologist, she must be aware of the human brain’s predisposition
to processing gist over detail, and that not only are people more likely to process gist, focusing on
the meaning of an event can manipulate our recollection of events. One way in which the mind
demonstrates this has been shown in recall tests of themed lists. For instance, in a Scientific
American film Alan Alda hosted, Schacter read a list of words to him. All of the words were related
to sleep but the word “sleep” was not listed. Even though Alda was aware that this was a test of
memory and that there was likely a trick, when asked to recall as many of the words as he could
remember, the first word he said was sleep. This misremembering illustrates what the text calls
plausible retrieval, the misremembering of plausible information based on the context of the
information (Anderson 218). The brain naturally stores the gist of sensory input and, when trying to
recall details, refers to the stored associations of the meaning and draws plausible information.
Slater’s story is filled with plausible details, which serve only as a vehicle to portraying the meaning
of her story.
Slater must understand that her readers are unlikely to accept the meaning of her story if her
details are not believable. This is expressly demonstrated in the correlation of one of her lies to the
story of a rather famous bird. During one portion of the book, which Slater implies did not actually
happen, she refers to Chicken Little, the chicken that traversed his home telling everyone the sky
was falling. Slater in this chapter has had a seizure and has fallen through the ice while practicing
figure skating. She has, in fact, imagined that she has fallen through the ice, and when she realizes
that she has not drowned, she is incredulous. She writes in response to her doctor’s optimistic
prognosis, “How could I believe that, though, when Chicken Little, who was supposed to be a silly
chicken all in a dither, was really right?” (30). The correlation of an experience she felt was real to a
story of a bird that was considered a liar draws the questions of factual truth versus meaningful
truth. The telling of the story the way it actually happened, falling onto the ice, could not fully
illustrate the terror Slater felt. The real truth is perhaps better explained by her nearly drowning in
the icy water. Maybe Chicken Little really did think the sky was falling. Why, though, is Slater
effective at convincing her audience, when Chicken Little is not?
Slater, when writing about falling in the lake, is providing a story of meaning, but uses details
that make her experience seem more believable. The ice could have broken and Slater could have
fallen into the lake and nearly drowned. The fear she feels as she imagines drowning is real. If she
had told the story by first describing a fall onto the ice, the reader would have not felt her meaning.
While it may be possible that Chicken Little felt as if the world was falling apart around him, he
failed at getting his meaning across because his story was not plausible.
The plausibility of Slater’s stories is not the only thing that drives her theme. Through
metaphor, she repeatedly illustrates the complexities of human memory in a way that emphasizes its
predilection for meaning. In fact, further analysis of the bird metaphor reveals that it extends to
bird offspring, eggs. Slater’s father cooks her an egg to comfort her and later she envisions many
young girls in many homes eating eggs with toast made by their mothers (39). The eggs represent
the individual pieces of memory and how they can be stored. The image of multiple little girls eating
an egg can be seen to display the networks created by memory. Semantic networks are associations
that the brain naturally creates to organize perceptual information. One particular type of network,
called schemas, sort concepts into identifying features (Anderson 154-157). When a person
perceives and registers a new experience, information can be stored in these networks. Additionally,
new events can be explained by information already contained in these networks. The networks
systematically store sensory information, but they also influence how a person categorizes and
perceives it.
These networks, as represented by Slater, are directly related to a person’s natural inclination
to perceive the gist rather than the details of an experience. Anderson refers to two studies that
make this apparent. The first relates to a person’s perception of verbal stimuli. When given a
sentence, people are more likely to remember changes in meaning rather than changes in style. The
same is true for visual stimuli. People are more likely to remember changes related to the meaning
of a picture rather than a meaningless detail (142-143). This fact directs why schemas become
necessary. Since the brain is less likely to remember the details of an event, schemas exist to provide
those details. Moreover, the comparison of schemas to eggs implies that each schema is unique, a
product of the memory, and the person to which the memory belongs. Slater points out her mind’s
creation of these schemas, her bird memory’s eggs, in order to further demonstrate just how
significant the meaning of her story is, a story that is very much about her memory. It also prepares
the reader to accept the generalities she will use to fill in the details.
An apparent example of Slater’s use of contrived details to fill in the blanks of memory is
found in what Schacter calls bias. Schacter describes bias as a method human memories have of
using “general knowledge and past experience” to explain and provide understanding of our world.
Stereotype bias specifically involves the employment of stereotypical or traditional perceptions of
events (158). Slater further disputes the validity of memory and truth in memory with blatant
displays of this bias. A prime example of this is present in Slater’s description of the convent that
hosts the falling school. She describes a strict work schedule, grandiose religious statues, and
imposing nuns (46-48). Slater is a child when she visits the school. It is unlikely that she has
retained such a detailed memory of the experience in her adulthood. She has more likely filled in the
details with her schema for Catholic churches. When encountering the convent Schacter took what
it represented or meant to her, Catholic church, and applied details, like grandiose statues, from her
schema. Since the details are likely derived from a schema, there is no way to ascertain whether the
facts or description of the convent are accurate or even if the convent exists at all. Yet the reader
does not feel the need to question the validity of the story. Because most human minds are guilty of
bias, Slater’s details are familiar, and it is this familiarity that the reader embraces and trusts.
It is due in part to this familiarity that memory suffers one of the most persistent and
recognizable handicaps. Slater again uses the bird metaphor; this time to address an aspect of
retrieval that all memory is subjected to. As Slater watches the sun set on the plane ride home, she
sees it “burn up a bird” (20). The image is almost identical to her description of the sun rising on
her flight to Barbados (12). The idea of the bird being “burned” by the sun reflects the idea of
retroactive interference. Anderson describes interference as one memory’s ability to interfere with
another memory, especially if the memory is similar (210). Schacter reports that people often
overwrite or combine memories of similar event, such as an average workday (32). During lecture,
Grinley specified new memories that impede the retrieval of old memories are specified as
retroactive. The bird being burned on the return flight is a visual representation of interference
theory. The new memory of the sunset on the plane ride from Barbados is similar to the old
memory of the sunrise, and therefore, interferes with retrieval of the old memory. Slater
subsequently relies on the images of the new memory to describe the old memory. Again, it is her
use of specifically familiar details that draw the reader instead to the meaning of the moment.
Whether she is watching the sun rise or set, the event is the same, the meaning is the same. It is
perhaps this aspect of the metaphor that most successful drives Slater’s overall message. The details
of memory cannot be trusted; facts can be manipulated. The truth of a single life can only be found
in a meaning derived from the event. Therefore, Slater tells her story the only way she knows how,
letting the meaning rather than facts compel her story.
In Lying, Slater drags the reader through a series of stories that make him perceive her life, as
she wants him to. She uses birds as a metaphor to describe just how tricky and inconsistent memory
can be, and then utilizes these inconsistencies in order to coerce the reader into unwittingly
perceiving events according to the meaning she has built for him. Her story stresses truths beyond
what simple facts may be able to provide. Slater’s blatant disregard for fact implies that the real
importance of her memory is found in meaning, not detail, and mirrors a psychological theory that
the brain naturally perceives gist over detail. In fact, the story’s strength relies on the brain’s
minimal processing of details. The mind’s attention on meaning allows the reader to forget one
detail, that Slater is lying. The facts become irrelevant as the reader discovers the universal truths of
Slater’s story. One of which is that we are all liars.
Works Cited
Anderson, John R. Cognitive Psychology and Its Implications. New York: Worth Publishers, 2005. Print.
Grinley, Melissa. “Chapter 7: Retrieval.” North Seattle Community College. 23 Feb 2010. Lecture.
“Make Up Your Mind.” Scientific American Frontiers. PBS. 2002. DVD.
Schacter, Daniel L. The Seven Sins of Memory. New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2001. Print