None of This Is True: A Novel

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2023

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Prologue-Part 1, Chapter 7

Part 1, Chapters 8-14

Part 1, Chapters 15-21

Part 2, Chapters 22-28

Part 3, Chapter 29-Epilogue

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Book Club Questions

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Discussion Questions

Themes

The Need for Control

Control is important to Josie, and as the story develops, she attempts to reassume what she sees as lost control over her life by exposing her truth through interviews with Alix. However, Josie’s need for control extends far beyond her own life, for she also seeks to control the people around her: a trait that Alix doesn’t realize until it is too late. Although the podcaster is warned by a number of people in Josie’s life, Alix doesn’t realize the extent to which Josie seeks to insinuate herself into her life and control her. She doesn’t understand, until it is too late, that under the guise of offering Alix freedom, Josie has attempted to assume control of her life.

One of the first interviews presented in the novel is of Josie’s childhood friend, Helen, who offers an assessment of Josie that will be supported by others throughout the novel. Helen states that Josie “was always a bit odd. Controlling? She didn’t like it when I had other friends. She always wanted to make things about her. ‘Passive aggressive’ is the term these days” (56). This interview emphasizes the fundamental role that control plays in Josie’s actions and decisions. Even the ways in which Josie initially engages with Alix, by proposing a podcast about herself, places Josie at the center of their relationship. In addition, she controls their relationship through the podcast by choosing what she reveals to Alix and when, offering her own version of the truth even when confronted with conflicting facts.

When Walter comes with Josie to Alix’s house, he takes the opportunity of a moment alone to further warn Alix about Josie, saying, “Believe me, I know Josie better than anyone, and she’s a control freak. And you don’t even realize you’re being controlled until it’s too late” (163). The irony here is that later, Alix discovers that Josie has overheard this conversation, and it was one of the things that precipitated Walter’s murder later that night. After speaking to Walter, Alix begins to be suspicious of Josie, but she continues to let Josie control the nature of their relationship, to the point that Josie gains daily access to Alix’s life by moving into her house under the guise of needing refuge from her allegedly abusive husband.

As Josie insinuates herself deeper and deeper into Alix’s life, the theme of control grows even stronger, for she continues to use the podcast as leverage to keep Alix involved with her despite the protagonist’s deep misgivings. Even when Alix becomes aware of this dynamic, she is powerless to change it, still intent on completing her project at all costs. Too late, Alix realizes that even Josie herself warned Alix, but Alix willfully ignored the red flags For example, when reminiscing about her teenage years, when her relationship with Walter began, Josie reflects, “I miss that power in some ways, […] when I was still in control. I miss that sometimes. I really do. And what I’d like, more than anything, is to get it back” (54). Looking back at this conversation, Alix realizes that Josie gave her the clues she needed to both understand Josie’s motivations and predict her actions.

Josie’s final attempt to control Alix’s life comes when she kidnaps Alix’s husband, Nathan. She claims to have done it because she is “trying to be helpful, trying to show [Alix] how much better [her] life could be without him” (321). However, in making decisions about Alix’s life, convinced that she knows what Alix needs to do to make her life better, Josie once again attempts to assume an unacceptable level of control. In the end, Josie’s need for control and Alix’s inability to recognize it despite numerous warnings result in Nathan’s death and the reshaping of Alix’s entire life.

The Sisterhood of Women

In None of This Is True, Lisa Jewell explores the complicated relationships between women in a variety of ways, from Alix’s existing network of relationships to the new connection that Josie contrives to forge with her. At the beginning of the novel, it is significant that Josie admires Alix and her sisters as they walk down the street together:

They are all tall and angular and a split second later she realizes that one of them is Alix and the other two look just like her and that they must be her sisters: one has dark blond hair down to her waist; the other has strawberry-blond hair in a top knot. They are a mass of hoop earrings, big leather bags with tassels, flip-flops, black nail polish, long skirts that swish when they move, suntans from other countries (72).

Even in this early stage of the novel, Josie recognizes the bond between these women and sees them as a single unit rather than as individuals. Through Alix’s perspective, Jewell shows that she and her sisters support and depend on one another; however, the author also explores the ways in which this sisterly bond pressures Alix, thereby complicating the idea of sisterhood. With Zoe and Maxine’s support comes expectations, and Alix feels the weight of them whenever her husband fails to live up to acceptable standards of behavior. She therefore keeps her difficulties with Nathan a secret, feeling that her sisters “would judge him, and they would judge her for putting up with him” (123). Alix knows what her sisters would say, because she herself would say the same to a friend; in fact, when faced with Josie’s confessions, Alix, while supportive, also pressures her to take action to change her own life.

Within Alix and Josie’s increasingly warped relationship, Jewell explores the concept of sisterhood from another angle, focusing on Josie’s callous use of this bond to manipulate Alix into bending to her will. To this end, Josie draws upon the implied intimacy between women, as “sisters,” to pull Alix deeper into a contrived friendship. When Alix shares her marital difficulties, Josie shakes her head, saying only, “Men,” and adopting an “us-versus-them” stance in reaction to Nathan’s alcohol addiction. Josie argues that Alix can do better than Nathan, and her shows of solidarity soon veer into the realm of an overbearing pressure that feels more like judgment than support. In Josie’s case, however, that pressure goes deeper—she uses the situation and Alix’s confidences to insinuate herself into Alix’s life, while framing her manipulations as emotional support.

Even as Josie conspires to kidnap Nathan, she maintains that her plan is ultimately intended to benefit Alix. She frames it as such when she recruits Katelyn to help with Nathan’s abduction, telling her that she would be helping Alix to uncover proof of Nathan’s infidelity. The theme of sisterhood is reinforced from an unusual angle when Katelyn later tells Alix that she agreed to help because, as she says, “I thought I was doing something for the sisterhood” (350). Despite the part that Katelyn played in Nathan’s death, Alix likes her, partly because of the way that she recenters the concept of sisterhood around support rather than judgment.

However, even Alix herself cannot escape culpability for the double-edged nature of sisterhood. When Josie first reveals the details of her life, Alix reacts judgmentally despite her role as a journalist. This judgment is rooted in their connection as women and mothers, rather than that of interviewer and subject. In fact, Alix admits that she began the project with Josie because she wanted “to bear witness to the dark truth of another woman’s marriage” (42). In the novel, Alix bears the brunt of Josie’s twisted version of sisterhood; however, Jewell holds Alix accountable as well, reinforcing the complicated nature of sisterhood through their shared interactions.

Discerning Good Versus Evil in an Ambiguous World

One of the main features of None of This Is True can be found in the author’s tendency to shift reader’s perceptions of every member of the Fair family as the narrative unfolds. She uses the character of Alix Summer, who is a stranger, to stand in for the reader’s reactions, and as the narrative moves forward, the author’s portrayal of Josie, Walter, Roxy, Erin, and even Josie’s mother, Pat, shift dramatically. With this strategy, Jewell creates a story in which, each member of the family appears at some point to be a victim, and yet in the end, not a single one of them is innocent. Each member of the Fair family contributes to the toxic dynamic, and through their interactions, Jewell demonstrates that in real life, people aren’t just good or evil—the real truth is much more complex.

In the beginning, as Josie’s interviews with Alix unfold, the story she tells is horrific, and Alix has no reason to doubt her perspective. However, when Walter speaks to Alix in confidence, he offers a different perspective on Josie, telling Alix, “Jojo’s got what you might call an elastic relationship with the truth. […] when she doesn’t like the reality of things, she finds a reality she prefers” (163). Knowing Walter only from Josie’s description of him, Alix feels an initial resistance to his perspective. As the narrative states, “She’d put it down to the behavior of a gaslighter; she’d assumed it was all part of his act” (227). However, she tries to strike a balance between these conflicting perspectives, understanding now that the story isn’t as black and white as Josie is presenting it, for “as much as her gut tells her to believe a woman who says she has been abused, it also tells her that Josie is not to be trusted” (227). With the statement that Josie can be both a target of abuse and a dishonest woman at the same time, Jewell pushes back against a more simplistic perspective and shows how multi-faceted the truth of events can be. Alix’s perspective on Josie shifts further through her interactions with Josie’s mother, Pat, in which she soon realizes that Josie was raised by a narcissist. Alix’s shifting understanding of Pat informs not just her understanding of Josie’s mother, but of Josie as well. Combined with her own evolving understanding of Josie and her family, this revelation again complicates the story, for Josie now seems to be both victim and villain, making Jewell’s point again that perhaps she can be both.

In the final chapter, Jewell even casts doubt upon Erin and Roxy who, until this point, seem to be mainly victims of their family’s dysfunction. She offers the outside perspective of two women on the bus who have watched the Netflix documentary, one of whom notes, “[T]hey seemed a bit shady to me. […] I just wondered if they were maybe in on it all” (363). Although it might be tempting to set their comments aside as uninformed gossip, Josie’s actions support this interpretation when she reveals another version of the way that Brooke died—that Roxy had accidentally killed her, and the family cooperated to hide the body. In this final paragraph of the novel, Jewell again shifts the perspective on Josie and her family, reinforcing the idea that family dynamics are nuanced and complex, for no matter how much Josie wants to portray herself as the victim and place others unequivocally in the villain role, the truth is never that simple.