A centenary is often an excuse for reminding people of la fin des siècles, and there seems to be recurrent revivals of interest in the psychological, the mysterious, and their related medical syndromes. Only history will tell if the same occurred at the turn of the millennium, but to date there does not appear to be a flood of novels equivalent to, for example, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, in which the two opposing poles of the human psyche are laid out with dramatic effect. At that time there was much interest in hypnosis, automatisms, sonambulism, and their relationship to human happenstance. However, there have been recent novels about Tourette syndrome, such as Johnathan Letham's Motherless Brooklyn. There may also be a revival of interest about epilepsy, and two recently published novels are of particular neuropsychiatric relevance. The first is Lauren Slater's Spasm, and the second Mark Salzman's Lying Awake.

The subtitle of Spasm hints at what is to come. It is a “Memoir With Lies.” Chapter 1 begins with the words “I exaggerate.” The tale is an autobiographical account of the growing up of a young girl with seizures, diagnosed as epilepsy, and who is put through all the traumas associated with the disorder. With auras of strange smells and seizure descriptions that would be called partial and secondarily generalized seizures, she gets examined by her pediatrician, given phenobarbital (600 mg!), has psychotherapy, and goes to a special school run by nuns. However, her seizures are relentless, she sees a neurologist who stimulates her cortex and recommends that she has a corpus callosotomy, which she then undergoes.