Eva Hoffman grew up in post-holocaust Poland. At the age of 13, because of anti-semitism, her family emigrated to the west coast of Canada. And she spent the bulk of her middle years in the United States before she came to live here in England. She tells us in Lost in Translation that she felt very rooted in Krakow, Poland – her life was flourishing, and against her will she was transported to a different country and a different language. So there is the trauma of someone who for a certain period in her life feels that she is – she uses the word “oxymoron”. “Could I be an oxymoron?” she asks, “or could I be a hybrid?” If biography is to be an art, language is important. It’s not just facts, it’s how they are stated. I think it was a brilliant idea to approach one’s past through language.

She feels that a different language impacts upon her sense of identity?

Yes. There’s a telling detail in the middle of the biography, a section titled “Exile”, when she is very shaken by the complete destruction of the “me”. Her’s is a searching mind. She is an intellectual. Looking for the meaning of existence, she feels that language makes it. That you can’t search for meaning without the language in which meaning is encased. She decides to keep a diary, and she is in the space between two languages, a kind of no-man’s land. She thinks of keeping the diary in Polish, because that is her real self, that’s where her kernel lies. But she decides she’d better keep it in English, because Polish is now the past and English is the present.

She admits in this powerful passage that she doesn’t fully write as herself in English. She writes a language of abstraction. Later on, she says that Polish feels to her a warm language, full of emotive words. She uses the word tesknota, which she says is “nostalgia” but with tonalities of sadness and longing – that’s the Polish Eva speaking in her native language. To her, English is a language of will and abstraction. Only a foreigner can tell you that. For you and me, English is filled with all our emotive output, because it’s not a language of just will and abstraction – but it’s interesting that an outsider to English sees it that way. She writes:

“The diary is about me, and not about me at all. On one level, it allows me to make the first jump. I learn English through writing, and in turn writing gives me the written self. Refracted through the double distance of English and writing, this self, my English self, becomes oddly objective. More than anything, it exists more easily in the abstract sphere of thoughts and observations than in the world. For a while this impersonal self, this cultural negative capability, becomes the truest thing about me. When I write, I have a real existence that is proper to the activity of writing. This language is beginning to invent another me.”

That seems to me the critical sentence. It is through writing and speaking English that she begins to invent her English self.

How is memoir different to biography? Telling one’s own story instead of someone else’s.

The advantage with memoir is it can be endlessly introspective. But Hoffman is also disciplined. There’s a lot she doesn’t tell you about her life. She tells you more deeply about her past, because it’s over. We learn about a young man whom she adored and was parted from forever. That is a deep sorrow in the book, and she can write about him. But she doesn’t reveal intimate details in the last part of the book, in America. She chooses very carefully what she writes about. I admire the book for being the opposite to a misery memoir. It’s not slam-slam, tug-tug, feel-feel. It’s refined in its intellectual cogitation.

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Eva Hoffman recommends:

I came across Lying by happenstance, and I thought it was fascinating. Lauren Slater is now a psychotherapist, although that comes as a very unexpected revelation given the book. It’s the memoir of a young woman who has temporal lobe epilepsy and a very dysfunctional mother. So on the face of it, it would seem to be a misery memoir. There has been such a deluge of misery memoirs in America that I have started to think of the genre as being abuse, abandonment, trauma and dysfunction. In a sense, Lying is about that, but it is also a sceptical deconstruction of it on various levels.

Lauren Slater has epilepsy. Epilepsy apparently makes people very prone to imagination – as we know from examples like Dostoevsky – but also to lying, we are told. So we are never sure, and she is never sure, whether she is lying or telling the truth. Sometimes this is on a very factual level, but more interestingly it is on a metaphorical level. In other words, she has very acute sensations and experiences, which she describes metaphorically, and sometimes we’re not sure whether the metaphors are describing real events or not. At one point she falls off a precipice – the whole memoir is about the notion of falling, as you do in epilepsy. But did she really fall? Or is this a metaphor for these states of falling?

The book is subtitled “A Metaphorical Memoir”. It’s also very much a reflection on the metaphoric character of language altogether, and how it is impossible to give a pure, unmediated account of yourself. The truth of the self is always mediated through language.

How well does having an openly unreliable narrator work? Other memoirists may be just as unreliable, only they don’t acknowledge it.

It’s fascinating. She is telling you that this is how memoirs are. There is always an element of self-construction, self-invention, exaggeration. On the very first page, she simply says, “I exaggerate.” Then she says she has epilepsy – or thinks she does. But we don’t know if she really has epilepsy. She might have bipolar disorder instead, or Munchausen syndrome. We don’t know. She doesn’t know. She cannot be sure. In the middle of the book is a page which says “The End”. It’s an end to this narrative of epilepsy, and then she begins in another vein.

Finally she finds a vein of straightforwardness and sincerity. Even though she continues questioning, she acknowledges the need for a stable sense of self, and to say what you mean. But the memoir is about how ambiguous the notion of self is. She says that we invent and construct ourselves. In a sense she is talking about all memoir.

So how closely are memoir and memory related to fiction?

We all create our own lives, don’t we? We construct them, we imagine them. We have to imagine how we want our lives to be in order to live. And we revise ourselves very often. Sometimes we think the past was like this – our mother treated us terribly – and at a later point we think no, our mother treated us perfectly well. We revise our memories in the light of the present, and in the light, one hopes, of deepening knowledge.

But I do think that it is different to fictionalisation. Lauren Slater takes us fascinatingly close to the boundary where memoir and fiction meet. I myself feel that there is a responsibility to simple, naïve, factual truth in a memoir. I don’t think that one should invent things that did not happen. But that aside, any memoir writer could write any number of narratives of their life. We’re constantly engaged in self-interpretation, and that interpretation very often changes.