My Lie: A True Story of False Memory »

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.

Praise for My Lie

"Meredith Maran is fearless. She's also a wonderful writer, and My Lie is a shockingly honest, stunningly nuanced book. Every parent, and everyone who has a parent, should read this searing father-daughter story."

—Ayelet Waldman, author of Bad Mother and Red Hook Road

"My Lie is the brave and riveting 'inside story' of the most devastating mental health controversy of the century. I couldn't put it down."

—Elizabeth F. Loftus, PhD, former president of the Association for Psychological Science; coauthor of The Myth of Repressed Memory

"Meredith Maran is a wonderful journalist and storyteller, profoundly honest, direct, witty, savvy, and compassionate."

—Anne Lamott, author of Grace (Eventually) and Bird by Bird

"Only a writer as fierce and incisive as Meredith Maran could have written a book as intimate, dark, bracing, and revelatory as My Lie."

—Michael Chabon, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay and Manhood for Amateurs

"This marvelous, searing book held me in its thrall from the moment I read the Prologue, and never let go. Meredith Maran has written a page-turner of a memoir, at once brave and heartbreaking. Who among us hasn't questioned her own memory? In navigating her family history, Maran becomes a detective, and My Lie reads like a mystery all the more suspenseful because the writer has taken great care to tell the truth."

—Dani Shapiro, author of Devotion: A Memoir

Author's Note.

Prologue: The Same Thing Happened to Me.

Introduction: One in Three.

Part One 1576-1982.

Chapter One Desperate Housewife.

Chapter Two In Feminism We Trust.

Part Two 1983-1993.

Chapter Three Please Question Your Child (and Your Childhood).

Chapter Four Breaking the Silence.

Chapter Five Daddy Can't Come Home Again.

Chapter Six Remember.

Chapter Seven Did He or Didn't He?

Chapter Eight In Therapy We Trust.

Part Three 1994-2009.

Chapter Nine Doubt.

Chapter Ten Deprogramming.

Chapter Eleven What Was I Thinking?

Chapter Twelve Eternal Sunshine of the Recovered Mind.

Chapter Thirteen In Neuroscience We Trust.

Chapter Fourteen Amends.

Epilogue: Grace.

Acknowledgments.

About the Author.

Book Group Reading Guide.9780470502143