My Lie: A True Story of False Memory

by Meredith Maran

Meredith Maran lived a daughter's nightmare: she accused her father of sexual abuse, then realized, nearly too late, that he was innocent. During the 1980s and 1990s, tens of thousands of Americans became convinced that they had repressed memories of childhood sexual abuse, and then, decades later, recovered those memories in therapy.

Journalist, mother, and daughter Meredith Maran was one of them. Her accusation and estrangement from her father caused her sons to grow up without their only grandfather, divided her family into those who believed her and those who didn't, and led her to isolate herself on "Planet Incest," where "survivors" devoted their lives, and life savings, to recovering memories of events that had never occurred.

Maran unveils her family's devastation and ultimate redemption against the backdrop of the sex-abuse scandals, beginning with the infamous McMartin preschool trial, that sent hundreds of innocents to jail--several of whom remain imprisoned today.

Exploring the psychological, cultural, and neuroscientific causes of this modern American witch-hunt, My Lie asks: how could so many people come to believe the same lie at the same time? What has neuroscience discovered about the brain's capacity to create false memories and encode false beliefs? What are the "big lies" gaining traction in American culture today--and how can we keep them from taking hold?

My Lie is a wrenchingly honest, unexpectedly witty, and profoundly human story that proves the personal is indeed political--and the political can become painfully personal.

Genres: Memoir, Nonfiction, Psychology, Audiobook, Biography, Mental Health, Biography Memoir

272 pages, Hardcover

First published September 20, 2010

About the author

MEREDITH MARAN is the author of more than a dozen nonfiction books, including Why We Write About Ourselves, Why We Write, and My Lie; and the acclaimed 2012 novel, A Theory of Small Earthquakes. She's a book critic and essayist for newspapers and magazines including the Los Angeles Times, the Boston Globe, the Chicago Tribune, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and Salon.com. The recipient of fellowships from the MacDowell Colony and Yaddo, and a member of the National Book Critics Circle, Meredith lives in a restored historic bungalow in Los Angeles.

Reviews

[Fotooh Jarkas · Rating 4 out of 5]

A terrible reading experience and a well written book!

The concept of false memory was on some level well defined to me.
From psychological therapy sessions I used to participate in as a translator and cultural mediator, I can tell how easily could these meetings deviate from the path and lead the client unintentionally to false claims.

Seeking for cloudy memories -sometimes almost putting the words in the patient’s mouth- try therapists to bring ambiguous impressions to the light and trace back every disfunction the person is suffering from to them.
Preparing the clients for the pain that comes along with the telling and mirroring them while they talk, both were so important strategies to validate people's feelings and push them to speak up and tell more. What comes after that was the unconditional support we nurtured them intensely with, so we could gain their trust.
This all took the patients to the point where they start to trust the psychotherapist with their offered confirmations and adopt some unestablished feelings.

In intercultural cases, overpowered women surviving domestic violence and fighting against the male guardianship were stereotypically awaited. Surely we already had many of them , but we deluded -in my opinion- much more!
However still Maran's case so confusing and shocking to me. I never imagined, that this could go so far! Accusing own father of incest is really tragic!

Both my tiny little experience and this book made me question the usefulness of these sessions and doubt their positiv effects.
In addition, this book reflects very well how the mass hysteria can affect our interpretation, decidedly reframe our thoughts and even more manipulate our rooted beliefs .

[Carrie Poppy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Really good.

[Bernadette · Rating 2 out of 5]

Right now I think I'm too angry with the author to write a review. Just read an interview with her, published after she wrote the book about destroying people's lives. Ms. Maran still believes that it is okay for one innocent man to sit in prison if it means that 100 guilty men are there. What? If you're interested in reading about False Memory Syndrome as it relates to sexual abuse, I'd recommend Remembering Satan by Lawrence Wright instead.

I've excerpted an interview with Ms. Maran from Salon.com following her admission that her father did not molest her:

Salon.com: In the middle of the book, while you are still deeply in the mind-set of being molested, there's a notion you agree with that if one innocent man goes to prison, but it stops a hundred molesters, it's worth it. Do you still agree with that notion?

Meredith Maran: I'm fairly close to a man still in prison, and really believe he is innocent. I know how he's suffered. I know he's 80 years old and in ill health. He's spent 20 years in prison, for no reason. If every elementary school child is now taught how to protect themselves from sexual abuse -- and even more to the point, some father or preschool teacher who feels the urge to molest a child will be inhibited from doing so because they think there are guys still in jail for doing that -- but innocent people are in prison, do I have to make that choice? It is a Sophie's choice kind of thing. Would I allow an innocent man to sit in prison if it meant keeping children safe?

Salon.com: So would you make that choice?

Meredith Maran: I think so.

[Ryan Holiday · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a very sensitive book on a very sensitive topic: that most recovered memories are not true. But the author approaches it with an empathy and self-awareness that I did not anticipate. I've said before that one of the things I respect most is when a person turns over a long-held belief. The flip side of that is that we often react vindictively toward the people who held the belief we once did, we lose our sense of understanding of them during our metamorphosis. Moran resists that temptation, even though few characters in her journey probably deserve it. If you end up liking this book or are interested in a broader take on the subject, then try Mistakes Were Made (But Not By Me) by Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson.

[Fred Moramarco · Rating 4 out of 5]

Meredith Maran has written an important book primarily dealing with the mass hysteria that occurred in this country between the mid 1980's when the McMartin pre-school trial dominated America's attention and 1993, when Lawrence Wright published his startling and nationally therapeutic essay, "Remembering Satan" in The New Yorker, (later published as a book of the same title: http://www.amazon.com/Remembering-Sat...). The "recovered memory" movement, which memory expert Elizabeth Loftus calls "the major mental health scandal of the twentieth century," which is no small distinction, since the twentieth century was rife with mental health scandals including widespread use of lobotomies, the overuse of electroshock therapy, the warehousing then releasing to the streets tens of thousands of mentally ill patients during the Reagan era,the atrocious conditions in many county mental health facilities, and many many more. And, as both Loftus and Maran point out, the fallout from this period is far from over.
What makes Maran's book especially important is indicated by the title. She was one of the tens of thousands of women who "recovered" memories that their fathers (or grandfathers or uncles, or brothers, or stepparents) forced her (them) to have sex with him. In "My Lie," she (mostly) repudiates that accusation and sets about to discover how it could have happened. She (once again I need to say "mostly") succeeds. Maran writes lucidly and the story she has to tell is riveting, but it remains unclear to me how a woman of her intelligence could so succumb to the groupthink that characterized the irrationality of the time. Even in the very last chapter (before an epilogue) when she finally gets up the courage to apologize to her father, she seems to retain doubts. When her father tells her that he called her mother to ask her if there could possibly be any truth to what she accused him of, she lets us into to her inner response: "Oh my God. If he's not sure he didn't do it, how can I be sure."
Once a person makes an accusation of this magnitude, it shatters the lives of many people who actually love that person. Maran's stepmother Gloria thought seriously about divorcing her father because living with a pedophile was unthinkable to her. I think we will see more books of this kind, but I hope that some of those books go a bit further in accepting the responsibility for what happened and being more straightforward and consistent with their apologies. The book that spurred many of these individuals (mostly women) to make these accusations is called "The Courage to Heal," (recently published its 20th anniversary edition) and while many of its pop psych superficial generalities have been widely discredited, it continues to mislead. Yet, 110 of 151 customers who reviewed it gave it five stars.
Let me be clear: there is no question that child abuse and incest are very serious problems in this country. But there is absolutely no evidence that people who have been raped, abused, or molested as children repress these memories and are able to recover them much later on. This is why we need to be open to accusations of victims, but not accept them uncritically and without looking more deeply into the events surrounding the accusation.
One more proviso: this book could sorely use an index. Because Maran quotes liberally from sources other than her own experience, there are many very useful passages in the book that readers will want to know more about. But with neither index nor bibliography, these are hard to access.
Comment

[Susan · Rating 5 out of 5]

I found My Lie an excellent account of the child sex abuse panic of 1980s and early 90s. Meredith Maran writes as both a journalist who covered the movement and a daughter who accused her father of molesting her as a child, based on dreams and 'repressed memories.' She is also a feminist with deep sympathies for the genuinely abused, while her skeptical journalist side questioned the recovered memory movement's catch phrases, cult-like behaviour and extremes, such as accusations of Satanic ritual abuse. As a result, her story is remarkably balanced, although those who still believe in the movement probably wouldn't agree.

As Maran comes to think her memories are false, she describes with honesty the pain and estrangement her accusation caused her whole family. At the same time, she quotes other 'retractors' who maintain the damage caused was worth it to bring the issue of child sexual abuse into the open.

I liked the insertions of excerpts on public cases through the book. Many of these involved day care workers accused by children of participating in Satanic sex rituals. Later it became clear that the children's claims could easily have resulted from leading questions by parents, social workers, police and psychologists, who interviewed them. The courts believed the women and children and convicted a number of men. Maran cites one day care worker, who was jailed at age 19 and served a 22 year sentence until he was finally granted a retrial. Another day care worker she is quite sure was innocent was still in jail at the time of the book's publication in 2010.

It's amazing to realize that the public, the media, the psychology profession and the courts were swept up in this movement a mere 25 years ago. At the end Maran reminds us that if we forget our past it could happen again. That's why I think My Lie is an important record of that terrible time.

[Paula Gallagher · Rating 2 out of 5]

Meh. "I accused my emotionally distant, disconnected father of molesting me, but LOOK! it was the thing to do back then. It's completely understandable." I've enjoyed Maran's writing in the past, but this was missing something. I did not like the way she incorporated articles related to molestation and recovered memory in gray boxes dropped into her narration. It was disruptive to the flow of the story.

[Mary Kenyon · Rating 4 out of 5]

I wanted to see how a very intelligent woman could come to believe in a truth that was a lie, and Maran does a good job in sharing her own experience with false memory. Unlike some other reviewers, I actually liked the sidebar information and thought it added to the credibility.

[Evan Micheals · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read this after Maran’s work was quoted by Mark Manson (The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck). I have had an interested in the subject matter since watching the conviction of Peter Ellis from the Christchurch Creche, partly on the evidence of Mental Health Professionals supporting recovered memories. A synopsis is Maran began reporting on the incest epidemic in the early 80’s and began to ‘recover’ memories of her own Father abusing her. She made an accusation that tore her family apart (her mother sided with her ex-husband, saying it could not be true). She later began to doubt her recovered memories and came to the conclusion that the abuse she alledged never happened. This is coming on the heals of a subtle renaissance of ‘recovered memory’ as part of the trauma movement.

Maran documents the slow steps she made to honestly believe in her recovered memories, and then the slow steps she made to disbelieve them. When interviewing her former therapist, her therapist said “There was so much pressure during those years to try and find incest memories in every client” and “In the therapeutic community in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s, incest was the cookie cutter answer to every woman’s problems. If I questioned that, at a conference or even in a private conversation, I’d be accused of being a bad therapist. It was very polarizing”. “There was an atmosphere of certainty about things I couldn’t agree with. People in the field were saying that children never lie, that if a woman had incest dreams, it meant she’d been molested” (p194). I believe we will reach a similar point in the near future. We fail to learn from our masters that dreams are mostly symbolic, powerfully symbolic that bring on real emotions. I take my dreams seriously, but not literally. I see this as a failure to see and think symbolically.

Trauma seems to be the current fad in psychotherapuetic circles and is the current cooker cutter answer to every persons problem. I would be a bad therapist if I questioned this, or challenged someone's ‘truth’. We live with the slogan ‘believe all women’. It will be interest how the Brittney Higgens case plays out. She seemed to be believed by the Australian media without question to the point Lisa Wilkinson was given a Walkely Award for the same actions Wilkinson was threatened with contempt of court.

Quoting another Therapist Maran wrote “people always look for an explanation for their dysfunctional thoughts, feelings, and behaviours. Retractors (people who no longer believe they were abused as children) like you came up with a good one. A colleague of mine called it ‘A-B-C’.

C: you’re crazy. No one likes that explanation for their behaviour, so they go to B.
B: you’re a bad person. No one wants that either.
A: you were abused, so nothing is your fault. Needless to say, that’s the most popular explanation” (p 230).

The work of therapy must have one considering that they may have been bad or crazy as equally likely as they were abused. Being abused is easy in many ways, because the world is cruel and one does not have to do the work to change. I see a lot of potential for collusion between patient and therapist if they both jump to ‘A’, and avoid doing the therapeutic work. I have been thinking about why I have a strong aversion a the leader of the trauma movement Gabor Mate. He is a Romantic in the Rousseauian sense that he believes in the noble savage. All people are good, but have been corrupted by a corrupt society. I rejected the philosophical premise sometime ago. I fall in with Hobbes and Freud, that the purpose of civilisation is to provide the ‘Super Ego’ that stops us descending into the rape and murder of each other. If left to our ‘id’ I suspect that it would be a race to the moral bottom. I do believe that some are truly altruistic, but when Armageddon comes they will be the first that the rest of us kill. If I learned anything from this book it is being cautious in my work, and taking any fad with a grain of salt.

[Dawn Kravagna · Rating 4 out of 5]

I like to read books about people different from myself who’ve also had experiences quite different from my own. Author Maran is brutally honest (or seems to be) about falsely accusing her dad of sexual abuse and her efforts to fix her broken relationship with him and her family.

A lot of interesting information about false or repressive memories and how therapists can manipulate or guide people into believing something that isn’t true.

However, the author equates the Puritans who helped found America with the same ungodly culture that gave rise to the Nazis, which is rather offensive. She is definitely a 60s liberal and it was obvious that her marriage was headed to self destruction because of her self focus on feeling fulfilled, instead of focusing on what was best for her family.

But the book is worth reading for its seeming honesty and look into the life of a person very different from myself. And expose of the repressed memory movement of the 80s and how it damaged so many lives and families.

[Richard Bartholomew · Rating 4 out of 5]

In the popular imagination, false memory is regarded as something exotic and pathological – a "syndrome" brought about by specific techniques of suggestion employed by therapists. Meredith Maran's account of how she came to make a false allegation of child sex abuse against her father in the 1980s makes more ordinary the mental processes of self-persuasion (or self-delusion) by which someone re-writes their past, in this case (as in so many others) bestowing herself with the identity and status of abuse "survivor" based on the supposed "recovery" of repressed memories.

Maran, who resides in California, was seeing a therapist at the time she made her allegation, but this was less decisive than other factors: her social and professional circumstances during a time of general heightened awareness of the reality of incestuous sex abuse (the films Something About Amelia and The Color Purple are mentioned); the ongoing moral panic of the "Satanism scare"; and the influence of books promoting the idea of "repressed memory", most notably The Courage to Heal but also older works such as the 1973 Sybil. Maran gives a sense of this wider zeitgeist with news clippings about the McMartin Preschool case and other relevant developments scattered throughout her novelistic memoir.

Maran’s allegation was triggered by dreams and "flashbacks" that occurred while her professional work as a journalist was already immersing her in incest; her work included interviewing psychologists such as Henry "Hank" Giarretto, sitting in on fraught family therapy sessions and attending Gary Ramona's lawsuit against his daughter's therapists. Meanwhile, following a divorce, her social circle was largely radical feminists, and she had entered into her first same-sex relationship. Maran’s partner believed she had been abused by a Satanic cult, and many of their friends had similar stories. As she writes, she was living on "Planet Incest".

In due course, the details of the Ramona case and the increasingly obvious implausibility of her partner's claims led to doubt, and with news that her father had been taken ill Maran entered into a process she calls "deprogramming". As a journalist she was in a position not only to self-reflect on what she had done, but also to seek advice and feedback from experts. The book includes her accounts of interviewing Pamela Freyd of the False Memory Syndrome Foundation (as of 2020 recently disbanded, to the joy of "repressed memory" proponents), as well as Elizabeth Loftus and neurologists such as Robert Burton, who explained certainty in terms of "involuntary mental sensations" rather than "rational deliberate conclusion". This could come across as looking for excuses rather than answers, but Maran acknowledges this and takes responsibility for her actions even as she sheds light on a malign social phenomenon with antecedents that go back to the Puritan witch-accusations.

Maran's allegation was too old to have become a police matter, and although her father's wife considered leaving him, she stuck by him and it seems Maran's family never quite believed her story. Things could have gone worse. However, Maran caused a painful rift within the family, and even her father started to wonder if he had done what he was accused of and repressed it. Maran retracted while there was still time to make amends, before her father became lost in Alzheimer’s disease. One wonders how many others there are out there who know deep down that they have told and lived a lie, but have gained so much from it in terms of self-image and rewards that they would rather die with it on their conscience than put right an injustice.

[Karen Ebert · Rating 4 out of 5]

I wanted to read this book to learn how someone could spread such awfulness that the rest of the family knows is not true. While my personal experience does not deal with sexual abuse, it was very similar in its path to Meredith's. The people that we surround ourselves with seem to have so much influence over our subconscious. My experience has not come to resolution or making amends, but it gave me hope to read how Meredith eventually came to the truth. The section of her making amends with her children and niece and nephew was heart-wrenching. The regret she showed for causing these special people to hurt...anyone who spreads hatred and vitriol or who has cut off family should read this. It was not just about Meredith, but all the people around her who lost out on so much for many years.

[Aeseyman · Rating 3 out of 5]

Meredith Maran is scrupulously honest and thorough in examining how she came to accuse her father of molesting her, change her mind, and then apologize, not only to him, but to her entire family. She documents the rise of the societal hysteria that persuaded many women and parents of toddlers of widespread incest, sexual abuse and satanic cults in the late 80's and its eventual waning. But she is right that it is NOT over and many families torn asunder continue to live with the fallout.

I agree with fellow reviewer Fred Moramarco that this book would benefit greatly from an index and/or bibliography.

[Jillian · Rating 1 out of 5]

I gave up on this book 20 pages to the end. I would say this author needs to go to therapy to work through her problems, but I think too much therapy is what caused them in the first place, that coupled with zero perspective, little education and a victim/electra complex.

Interesting book, but I couldn't stand the author by the end of it.

[Bleni · Rating 5 out of 5]

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[Paul Black · Rating 2 out of 5]

Maran comes from a not-unusual American family of love and hurt, marriage and divorce, self-involvement and self-sacrifice. In the 60s and 70s, accusations of sexual abuse was frequently dismissed or minimized. Against this background, in the first half of the book Maran relates her gradual "discovery" that her loving, kind father must have abused her as a child. The reader descends with her into her emotional turmoil as she tries to make sense of her life, build a better life for her children, and improve society's response toward sexual abuse.

As she comes to recognize her own doubts about her nightmares, Maran realizes that her memories were completely unfounded - that her father *was* the caring and joyful man she remembered. As an antidote to the abuse "witch hunts", she carefully documents the latest science about memory and therapy. The problem is that abuse *does* occur, all too often. And since it may be the Upstanding Citizen, accusations need to be taken seriously. On the other hand, people, even children, lie. And false memories are disturbingly easy to create. Unfortunately there is no reliable way to confirm true instances of abuse and refute incorrect accusations.

Two quotes from page 141 are indicative.

"The American Medical Association released a policy statement on recovered memory:
The AMA considers recovered memories of childhood sexual abuse to be of uncertain authenticity, which should be subject to external verification. The use of recovered memories is fraught with problems of potential misapplication.

The American Psychiatric Association weighed in, too:
There is no uniform "profile" or other method to accurately distinguish those who have sexually abused children from those who have not. . . . It is not known how to distinguish, with complete accuracy, memories based on true events from those derived from other sources.

Memories also can be significantly influenced by a trusted person (e.g., therapist, parent involved in a custody dispute) who suggests abuse as an explanation for symptoms/problems, despite initial lack of memory of such abuse."

[Stacie Spaunhorst · Rating 4 out of 5]

Okay so this book tells the author’s personal story, and it’s compelling, but how she details the societal context is the real hook here. I think the framework she describes is an essential thing to reflect on: if you came of age around or in the decades after repressed memories saturated news stories and therapy sessions and bookshelves, you probably believed or knew someone who believed that repressed memories could be resurrected full and intact.
Y’all, that’s old, debunked science. It makes me sad how much we have misunderstood, miscategorized, and misinterpreted how our brains store and retrieve memories. This book shows the massive damage those mistakes can cause and have caused.
Be ready: the narrow and intense focus on abuse memories and accusations may be too much for you, or, on the other hand, may seem not relevant to your own life. Then skip this read. But if you’ve ever wondered how the hell any sane person could be convinced that they were horribly abused when, in fact, there was no abuse at all … or if someone shared with you what they identified as recovered memories from their childhood and you felt an uneasy distrust you were ashamed to voice, or if you’ve carried a truth for decades that you’re beginning to think may not be your truth after all … dig in, friends.
For real: I do believe and this book supports the reality that horrendous abuse is out there. And that we can even forget terrible things that will still damage our psyches, and those wounds need deep deep healing. I just no longer believe that the ongoing, intensive act of recreating a forgotten story will ever bring anything but more pain.

[Brad Bevers · Rating 4 out of 5]

Have had this one on my shelf for a long time, finally got around to it. It's the memoir of a woman who becomes convinced in middle age that her father abused her as a child, and ends the relationship with him. Ten years later, she realizes that she was wrong and reunites with him before its too late. If you have not read anything on false memory before or the 'satanic panic' of the 1980's, this is a definite must read. I would start with Remember Satan by Lawrence Wright, but this account from someone who experienced a false memory and then recanted is worth a read as well.

For those who haven't read anything about this before, it's worth the time . . . it's still happening today and seems to ebb and flow in our society. We spent years prosecuting people of outlandish things that never happened (the most famous case involved accusation in court of a preschool that was using underground tunnels to funnel children back and forth to Mexico).

[Ken Orton · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fascinating story of a woman who in her 50's was convinced by friends, crackpot psychologists, psychiatrists and counselors that the source of all her problems was that she must have been molested as a child by her father, whom she almost sent to prison before discovering it was all a lie. Now this is not a spoiler - you know that right away in reading the book. It's the process that's both interesting and terrifying. Statistically childhood abuse probably continues to increase and is much higher incidence than anyone ever thought. At the same time, a ridiculous fiction know as "repressed memory", elicited by so-called professionals has been established and has sent thousands of innocent fathers, grandfathers, uncles and brothers to prison long after the incident supposedly happened. The book is also out-of-print so it's hard to get a copy of but worth the effort.

[Lau Riva Palacio · Rating 4 out of 5]

I don't think there was any valid reason for her accusation, I think she made far more damage by acting without any solid proof (not even being sure of here memories or having any indication of the abuse happening). But well.. people make mistakes. At least she had the time and opportunity to ask for forgiveness.

Regarding the book I liked how it was written since it made me feel the frustration she felt as well as the feelings everyone near her probably had.

[Mehrnaz · Rating 4 out of 5]

Despite the main story of the book which was very sad and disturbing, the facts about false memory are very intresting, mind-blowing, and at the same time confusing. Our brains could be manipulated in a way that we really believe something has happened to us in the past, despite the fact that it never happend!! how can we make sure that we are not manipulated now??

[Andrew Mills · Rating 5 out of 5]

A thought-provoking and disturbing book. Although the time frame it covers is 1980s-1990s, it's not difficult to see how similar dynamics echo in the present day-- and I suspect that's rather the point.

[Redwan Zabir · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is very beautiful whenever I get time I try to read this book again.

[Emily · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is truly a roller coaster. Not a pleasant topic, but really gets you thinking to what is the extent of this issue—- as well exploring a panic that we may have overlooked/ must not be repeated

[Maggie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Woof. An “easy” read for such a difficult topic. I don’t know why I did this to myself, but I do find repressed memories super interesting… sigh.

[Deb · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book is okay as far as narrative goes, but also sad and disturbing. Some wrongs are hard to make right, maybe even impossible. It's good the author tries to repair the damage she causes to her family through her selfish actions. False accusations are terrible and destructive. It makes me grateful I don't have her regrets and helps me consider the effects of my own parents and parenting. I'm glad to know neurology is uncovering more about how memories and how the mind work. Self deception is easy. I come away feeling sorry for the author and those she hurt. False allegations make it more difficult for people who suffer real abuse to be heard. It's sad that she added to that problem, but good that she admits it and sheds a little more light about true sufferers as well as the falsely accused.

[Jess Scott · Rating 5 out of 5]

I enjoyed the narrative, confessional style of the writing. It was not written in a "sensational" way to leverage on "shock value," just with a flow of honesty and precision with analyzing the events of this "true story of false memory" (as the subtitle states).

I thoroughly enjoyed the journalistic touch to the book, such as the media clippings in between the main text, and the fierce investigation for the facts (justified according to the criteria of the time being perpetuated as the truth, such as having symbolic dreams) behind the author's beliefs for having repressed memories. This eventually culminates in an admission on the author's part that she had perpetrated a devastating injustice upon her own family, as a result of this modern-day episode of mass hysteria.

As I wrote in a comment on one of the reviews on Amazon, I do not think that Ms. Maran is speaking for people who have had genuine, recovered memories of abuse. This does not mean she does not care for these people, or discounts their memories entirely. The book is an account of [HER] LIE--a story of false memories, and believing that one was a victim of childhood sexual abuse, when in actual fact, one wasn't. She is sharing her experience, and people who went through this same "brainwashing"/"Planet Incest" experience, will be able to identify with her account. Nowhere in the book does she state that "and therefore, this means that those who did experience real sexual abuse, are all liars (because I realized I was falsely convincing myself into believing I'd had repressed memories of unspeakable childhood abuse)."

The two situations are completely different, and should be clearly distinguished in a person's mind, before they accuse the author of being hypocritical towards those who truly did have recovered memories. What about those who, like the author, were subject to this mass hysteria, and led themselves to believe that they had repressed memories of childhood sexual abuse? Those are the people who have been through trauma as well--based on public psyche and the whole "sex-abuse panic."

This book is one account of an individual who came to an eventual realization of the deception, and had the courage and clarity of conscience to take steps to rectify the damage she and her loved ones suffered, as a result of the deception (which was encouraged by psychologists/therapists of the time--such was the fashion, then). And it's a brave, intense, well-written account. It is evident that those who went through a similar experience appreciate this memoir.

"My Lie: A True Story of False Memory"--there couldn't be a more accurate title and subtitle. Best wishes to Ms. Maran.

[Allison Dunlap · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was at times repugnant but also intensely riveting for me. It's the true story of a journalist caught up in the fever of the times when so many were making claims against parents, teachers and pre-school workers of incest and satanic ritual abuse. Her "proof" was repressed memories manifested in her dreams and facilitated by her therapist during her post-divorce therapy. The damage and estranged relationships she inflicts by this claim on her whole family seems irreparable. Years later she investigates the new evidence in the psychological community of "False Memory Syndrome" and the aftermath of innocent people who were incarcerated by child witnesses who as adults, recant their testimonies. She painfully and bravely confesses her own lie, and makes restitution with her father and other family members.
It was a complete fluke I found this book on the shelf at the library. I was just looking for a good biography to read which I find more satisfying than fiction but I have no doubt I needed to read this book now. I gained new perspectives as well as great hope.

[Emily · Rating 4 out of 5]

Meredith Maran made a terrible mistake in a time of mass hysteria and had the bravery to share her story in My Lie. I really enjoyed reading this and was able to get through it in just a day. It is a readable documentation of the incest/molestation/Satanic cult paranoia of the mid to late 80's and the regret that followed for the author and for many others caught up in the storm. At the conclusion of the book nothing is particularly black and white, and I appreciated that - many people are victim's of sexual assault/molestation, but many at the time were overwhelmed with the stories they were hearing at the time and bought into the story for themselves. It isn't always clear which is which, and the author doesn't attempt to speak for anyone else. The combination of news articles interspersed into her personal account enhanced my understanding of the time period and the mentality.

[Meg Clayton · Rating 5 out of 5]

I can't remember the last time I stayed up far too late into the night for a book of non-fiction, but My Lie had me doing just that. From the title, I expected an intimate tell-all memoir, and I did get that. But I found it a surprisingly - and refreshingly - measured and balanced one. Part of what made this revelatory story so compelling was the mix of personal story with societal examination. Yes, there are children who were abused. But there are also families that were torn apart by 'memories" that never actually happened. Meredith Maran's intimate telling of her own personal story, mixed with considerable discussion of the science of the brain and press clips from sources including Time Magazine, The New York Times, and The Washington Post, puts the issue of "recovered memory" into a context that made me think, and want to know that which isn't, unfortunately, always knowable.