Lauren Slater – författare

The world of the schizophrenic, the depressed, the suicidal can seem a foreign, frightening place. Now, a brilliant writer/psychologist takes readers on a mesmerizing journey into this enigmatic world. As readers interact through Slater with patients Lenny, Moxi, Oscar, and Marie, they come to understand more about the human mind and spirit. First serial to Harper''s.

"The beauty of Lauren Slater''s prose is shocking," said Newsday about Welcome to My Country, and now, in this powerful and provocative new book, Slater brilliantly explores a mind, a body, and a life under siege. Diag-nosed as a child with a strange illness, brought up in a family given to fantasy and ambition, Lauren Slater developed seizures, auras, neurological disturbances--and an ability to lie. In Lying: A Metaphorical Memoir, Slater blends a coming-of-age story with an electrifying exploration of the nature of truth, and of whether it is ever possible to tell--or to know--the facts about a self, a human being, a life.                 Lying chronicles the doctors, the tests, the seizures, the family embarrassments, even as it explores a sensitive child''s illness as both metaphor and a means of attention-getting--a human being''s susceptibility to malady, and to storytelling as an act of healing and as part of the quest for love. This mesmerizing memoir openly questions the reliability of memoir itself, the trickiness of the mind in perceiving reality, the slippery nature of illness and diagnosis--the shifting perceptions and images of who we are and what, for God''s sake, is the matter with us.                In Lying, Lauren Slater forces us to redraw the boundary between what we know as fact and what we believe we create as fiction. Here a young woman discovers not only what plagues her but also what heals her--the birth of sensuality, her creativity as an artist--in a book that reaffirms how a fine writer can reveal what is common to us all in the course of telling her own unique story.                 About Welcome to My Country, the San Francisco Chronicle said, "Every page brims with beautifully rendered images of thoughts, feelings, emotional states." The same can be said about Lying: A Metaphorical Memoir.

Beginning with B. F. Skinner and the legend of a child raised in a box, Slater takes us from a deep empathy with Stanley Milgram's obedience subjects to a funny and disturbing re-creation of an experiment questioning the validity of psychiatric diagnosis. Previously described only in academic journals and textbooks, these often daring experiments have never before been narrated as stories, chock-full of plot, wit, personality, and theme.

The author of the acclaimed Welcome to My Country describes in this provocative and funny memoir the ups and downs of living on Prozac for ten years, and the strange adjustments she had to make to living "normal life."           Today millions of people take Prozac, but Lauren Slater was one of the first. In this rich and beautifully written memoir, she describes what it''s like to spend most of your life feeling crazy--and then to wake up one day and find yourself in the strange state of feeling well. And then to face the challenge of creating a whole new life. Once inhibited, Slater becomes spontaneous. Once terrified of maintaining a job, she accepts a teaching position and          ultimately earns several degrees in psychology. Once lonely, she finds love with a man who adores her. Slater is wonderfully thoughtful and articulate about all of these changes, and also about the downside of taking Prozac:  such matters as  dependency, sexual dysfunction, and Prozac "poop-out."         "The beauty of Lauren Slater''s prose is shocking," said Newsday about Welcome to My Country, and Slater''s remarkable gifts as a writer are present here in sentences that are like elegant darts, hitting at the center of the deepest human feelings. Prozac Diary is a wonderfully written report from inside a decade on Prozac, and an original writer''s acute    observations on the challenges of living modern life.From the Hardcover edition.

A stunning new book about the role of animals in our lives, by a popular and acclaimed writer From the time she is nine years old, biking to the farmland outside her suburban home, where she discovers a disquieting world of sleeping cows and a “Private Way” full of the wondrous and creepy creatures of the wild—spiders, deer, moles, chipmunks, and foxes—Lauren Slater finds in animals a refuge from her troubled life. As she matures, her attraction to animals strengthens and grows more complex and compelling even as her family is falling to pieces around her. Slater spends a summer at horse camp, where she witnesses the alternating horrific and loving behavior of her instructor toward the animals in her charge and comes to question the bond that so often develops between females and their equines. Slater’s questions follow her to a foster family, her own parents no longer able to care for her. A pet raccoon, rescued from a hole in the wall, teaches her how to feel at home away from home. The two Shiba Inu puppies Slater adopts years later, against her husband’s will, grow increasingly important to her as she ages and her family begins to grow. Slater’s husband is a born skeptic and possesses a sternly scientific view of animals as unconscious, primitive creatures, one who insists “that an animal’s worth is roughly equivalent to its edibility.” As one of her dogs, Lila, goes blind and the medical bills and monthly expenses begin to pour in, he calculates the financial burden of their canine family member and finds that Lila has cost them about $60,000, not to mention the approximately 400 pounds of feces she has deposited in their yard. But when Benjamin begins to suffer from chronic pain, Lauren is convinced it is Lila’s resilience and the dog’s quick adaptation to her blindness that draws her husband out of his own misery and motivates him to try to adjust to his situation. Ben never becomes a true believer or a die-hard animal lover, but his story and the stories Lauren tells of her own bond with animals convince her that our connections with the furry, the four-legged, the exoskeleton-ed, or the winged may be just as priceless as our human relationships. The $60,000 Dog is Lauren Slater’s intimate manifesto on the unique, invaluable, and often essential contributions animals make to our lives. As a psychologist, a reporter, an amateur naturalist, and above all an enormously gifted writer, she draws us into the stories of her passion for animals that are so much more than pets. She describes her intense love for the animals in her life without apology and argues, finally, that the works of Darwin and other evolutionary biologists prove that, when it comes to worth, animals are equal, and in some senses even superior, to human beings.From the Hardcover edition.

'Poignant and lyrical...Slater's experience makes her a convincing travel guide into the history, creation and future of psychotropics.' – The New York Times Book Review A groundbreaking and revelatory story of the psychotropic drugs that have shaped our minds and our reality. As our approach to mental illness has oscillated from biological to psychoanalytical and back again, so have our treatments. With the rise of psychopharmacology, an ever-increasing number of people throughout the globe are taking a psychotropic drug, yet nearly seventy years after doctors first began prescribing them, we still don’t really know exactly how or why they work – or don’t work – on what ails our brains.In The Drugs that Changed Our Minds, Lauren Slater offers an explosive account not just of the science but of the people – inventors, detractors and consumers – behind our narcotics, from the earliest, Thorazine and Lithium, up through Prozac, Ecstasy, 'magic mushrooms', the most cutting-edge memory drugs and neural implants. In so doing, she narrates the history of psychiatry itself and illuminates the signature its colourful little capsules have left on millions of brains worldwide, and how these wonder drugs may heal us or hurt us.Praise for the book: 'A powerful new book' - The Daily Mail 'The messy history and brave future of psychotropic drugs' – O Magazine'Vivid and thought-provoking' – Harper's Magazine'Ambitious...Slater's depictions of madness are terrifying and fascinating' – USA Today'Vigorous research and intimate reflection…highly compelling' – Kirkus

'The messy history and brave future of psychotropic drugs' – O Magazine'Vivid and thought-provoking' – Harper's Magazine'Ambitious...Slater's depictions of madness are terrifying and fascinating' – USA Today'Vigorous research and intimate reflection…highly compelling' – Kirkus As our approach to mental illness has oscillated from biological to psychoanalytical and back again, so have our treatments. With the rise of psychopharmacology, an ever-increasing number of people throughout the globe are taking a psychotropic drug, yet nearly seventy years after doctors first began prescribing them, we still don’t really know exactly how or why they work – or don’t work – on what ails our brains. In The Drugs that Changed Our Minds, Lauren Slater offers an explosive account not just of the science but of the people – inventors, detractors and consumers – behind our narcotics, from the earliest, Thorazine and Lithium, up through Prozac, Ecstasy, 'magic mushrooms', the most cutting-edge memory drugs and neural implants. In so doing, she narrates the history of psychiatry itself and illuminates the signature its colourful little capsules have left on millions of brains worldwide, and how these wonder drugs may heal us or hurt us.