My Lie : A True Story of False Memory

by Maran, Meredith

• ISBN13: 9780470502143
• ISBN10: 0470502142
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2010-09-14
• Publisher: Jossey-Bass

Summary

This is a dramatic expose, an intimate memoir, and riveting personal journalism that includes:*How a young woman evolves from a NYC street radical activist to a married, then divorced feminist, who falls under the spell of the recovered memory industry and comes to believe that her father abused her as a little girl.*What happens after she realizes her memories of abuse are false, implanted, delusional, and how she painfully repairs her relationship with her aging father and other family members.*Why the author's journey is typical of countless women who went through the evolution from baby-boomer to post-feminists, often marrying, having children, divorcing, trying partners, forming short and long new relationships. In the author's case she has a husband she loves but leaves in the movement toward independence and risk-taking lifestyle.* How neuroscience has discovered that the brain remembers things that haven't happened through hypnotic suggestion, brain-washing, deep-rooted unresolved psychological conflicts -- and how every time we think about something we remember it differently.* The resolution of Meredith Maran's personal quest that includes a stable, long-term relationship, well-launched, self-reliant children , and a professional life dedicated to telling what she thinks is "true", and what isn't.

Author Biography

Meredith Maran is an award-winning journalist and the author of several best-selling nonfiction books, among them Dirty, Class Dismissed, and What It's Like to Live Now. Her work appears in anthologies, newspapers, and magazines including People, Self, Family Circle, More, Mother Jones, the San Francisco Chronicle, and Salon.com. A member of the National Book Critics Circle, she lives in Oakland, California.

Table of Contents

Author's Note	p. xi
Prologue: The Same Thing Happened to Me	p. 1
Introduction: One in Three	p. 5
1576-1982
Desperate Housewife	p. 15
In Feminism We Trust	p. 23
1983-1993
Please Question Your Child (and Your Childhood)	p. 39
Breaking the Silence	p. 57
Daddy Can't Come Home Again	p. 77
Remember	p. 93
Did He or Didn't He?	p. 113
In Therapy We Trust	p. 129
1994-2009
Doubt	p. 147
Deprogramming	p. 165
What Was I Thinking?	p. 181
Eternal Sunshine of the Recovered Mind	p. 201
In Neuroscience We Trust	p. 219
Amends	p. 233
Epilogue: Grace	p. 251
Acknowledgments	p. 255
About the Author	p. 257
Book Group Reading Guide	p. 259
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