Overview

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.

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9780470502143

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Reviews

In this terrifying, haunting, and controversial memoir, award-winning journalist Meredith Maran delves into the fascinating subject of the recovered memory movement... Maran's not just shockingly honest, she's also funny. Her refusal to whitewash her own behavior, her fierce ability to expose all sides of the issue (she doesn't deny that horrific abuse does occur and should be punished), and her compassion for the abused as well as those still falsely imprisoned as abusers opens up a dialogue about memory, belief, and past- and present-day culture that is as riveting as it is important. (Boston Globe, September 21, 2010) Maran's story is so tension-filled that I want to keep some of the twists out of this review, allowing readers of this remarkable book to discover them apart from me. (San Francisco Chronicle, September 19, 2010)

Author Information

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.

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