Sometimes I Lie

The premise of the novel is simple: Amber struggles to recall how she ended up in a coma. Truth, the reader may presume coming into the story, is good; we need a simple, clear, clean line of explanation, accountability, and clarity. That narrative line, however, is upended by characters who invest an enormous emotional energy in covering up what they have done, a dynamic that in turn creates distrust and sustains paranoia in both the characters and the reader.

The fiery deaths of Amber’s parents, who were, apparently, killed in a Christmas Day housefire set, apparently, by Amber’s friend Claire at her unspoken but implied request, creates the foundation for the lies that have become part of Amber and Claire’s relationship. Within this dynamic, the diary that Claire keeps, because it speaks a simple and clear truth that is itself open to interpretation (Amber/Taylor directed her to kill Amber/Taylor’s parents), becomes a weapon, an instrument of powerful persuasion whose presence becomes an immediate threat. Lies become a strategy for emotional survival.

Within this wonderland world where truth is a threat, everybody harbors secrets. If they are not outright lies, they are at least the withholding of critical information that, in turn, makes revelation itself, the recovery of truth, a danger. The novel exists on the thin edge of imminent revelation, the uneasy feeling that everyone is hiding something, and that revelation will cost them everything. Paul disappears for days at a time and tells Amber nothing. The reason is apparently innocent. He says he is tending to his stricken mother, but by not sharing that with Amber, he creates the paranoia that drives Amber to suspect Paul and Claire are having an affair. There is the sexy lingerie she finds that is not her size; there are the phone messages that she cannot explain and white wine in the refrigerator. Paul explains each one, the foggy feel of secrecy hangs. Amber, meanwhile, struggles to decide when to tell Paul she is pregnant. Edward creates the illusion of a chance encounter with Amber, his ex-girlfriend, while for 10 years harboring his obsession with her. Claire waits years to tell Amber she engineered Edward’s professional downfall. Amber never reveals to anyone at the studio why she applied for a job she had no interest in.

The novel becomes a tight, claustrophobic webbing of misdirections, delayed confessions, half-truths, and outright lies. Within that environment, the novel warns, the salvation of love, friendship, family, and marriage is rendered inaccessible, indeed ironic.

Sometimes I Lie was marketed, quite successfully, as a mystery thriller. The genre assumes a baffling labyrinth of clues that enable the main character (and the reader) to move happily and steadily toward revelation and the satisfying feeling of absolute and reassuring closure—someone did something for some reason. That Feeney is a practicing BBC journalist whose job requires connecting dots, taking the events of the real world and rendering them into a narrative complete with causation and transparency—narratives that are tailored to strategies that must ignore any evidence that might compromise the integrity of the story told—may explain why in the novel even the most determined efforts to constellate a clear and coherent explanation for any event remains incomplete, ultimately ironic. The journalist concedes to the curve of the novelist, underscored in the novel by Paul the novelist in his shed-world happily immersed in a world of made-up characters doing made-up things.

The core mystery in the novel rapidly accumulates: What caused Amber’s accident? It is inevitably a series of questions—who was driving, why the odd neck marks on Amber, why do the police suspect Paul, who is the little girl in the pink dress—that quickly escalate into much wider questions about Paul’s infidelity, Claire’s motivations, the relationship between Amber’s boss and Claire’s family, the motivation for Edward’s creepy behavior, and the relationship between Amber and Claire. Scrolling through the reader threads on numerous websites reveals how the novel’s readers have struggled with the plot twists, the red herrings, the switched identities, the outright lies, and how in the end no single explanation of events can withstand close interrogation. Readers have been in turn intrigued, bothered, and even angered by the novel’s refusal to reveal all.

The closing paragraph—Amber’s discovery of the bracelet on the serving tray at their hotel—detonates any tidiness. Where did it come from? Who put it on the tray? Why does the bracelet bear Amber’s birthdate? It is left a mystery. In a novel that refuses to gift the reader with awareness and clear answers, the thematic drive must be that such elegance, such tidiness, such simplifications are the stuff of novels, not real life—a theme a practicing journalist would surely confirm.