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Dr. Lauren Slater is a practising psychologist with degrees from Harvard and Boston University, as well as an award-winning creative writer, having won the New Letters Literary Award in Creative Nonfiction in 1993. In her first memoir, Welcome to My Country: A Therapist’s Memoir of Madness (1996), she writes a series of short sketches of patients she has treated in her career as a psychologist. Welcome to My Country exemplifies an important feature of the traditional writing mandate of the memoir —the concentration on the other—yet it uses that concentration to authorize a story of the self. In the last pages of the text, as Slater constructs an anecdote in which she visits a psychiatric hospital ward to see a patient, she confesses that “from [ages] fourteen to twenty-four, I spent considerable portions of my life inside th[is] very hospital … and even today, at thirty-one years old, with all of that supposedly behind me, with chunks of time in which to construct and explain the problems that led me to lockup, I find myself at a loss for words” (181). Yet Lauren Slater is not long “at a loss for words,” in a publication sense, as two memoirs swiftly follow Welcome to My Country. Slater’s confession at the end of Welcome authorizes her to tell a more personal story in Prozac Diary (1998), which gives an account of her mental illness and the drug therapies that allow her to function, and this more personal document leads to Lying: A Metaphorical Memoir (2001), where she searches backward in time in a coming of age story which becomes a meditation on the nature of truth in writing. Thus, the personal life further authorizes a therapeutic and spiritual journey that does not depend on traditional modes of external authorization by way of a historically verifiable 33 helen m. buss Authorizing the Memoir Form Lauren Slater’s Three Memoirs of Mental Illness fact base. I propose that Slater’s three books represent not only a patient/ therapist’s autobiographical account of mental illness in contemporary times, but also a writer’s exploration of how form shapes truth, and how fact and fiction, self and other, history and literature, science and art can be aesthetically shaped to authorize the changing nature of one’s selfknowledge . In constructing these steps in authorization of the autobiographical story, a serial autobiographical practice leads beyond self-accounting to self-creation, the authorization of the self through the special writing advantages of the memoir form. “Authority,” as G. Thomas Couser reminds us, has been located in an “extratextual reality” in traditional formulation and in the “self-determining agency of language” in postmodern terms. Couser proposes that, in autobiography, authority is contested and negotiated between “autobiographers and others—collaborators, editors, critics, biographers, historians , and lay readers” (75). I find the authorization of memoir to be located in all three of these areas: external reality, the agency of language, and the negotiation of the text between interested parties. However, I would like to bring attention to the authorization that takes place as the result of the negotiation between the writer and the typical, formal elements of the memoir form. In making my case for these books as experiments in authorizing the memoir form as a vehicle for public discourse as well as for private healing and self-revision, I will first take up the function of the significant other as a hallmark of memoir in Slater’s first memoir; secondly , I will deal with the strategic function of the “diary” and “letter” formats as part of memoir writing in Prozac Diary; and thirdly, I will take up the implications for the authorization process in “memoir” implied in the title of Slater’s most recent text, Lying. In treating the three texts as serial in nature, rather than as quite different, even contradictory stories of the self, I will also be proposing that these various pieces are necessary to the fuller performance of Slater’s subject positions. These concerns reflect my continuing interest in the memoir as a literary discourse, as I explored in my book Repossessing the World: Reading Memoirs by Contemporary Women, where I propose that the memoirist whose text uses identification through the other as its primary strategy of self-performance is particularly “useful to a provisional and contingent subjectivity unable to buy into traditional constructions of the self.… The narrator finds her own self-performance through the exploration of the biography of...

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