The Lies I Tell

“If you’re one of my targets, know that I’ve chosen you carefully. It’s likely you’re in the midst of a major life change—a lost job, a divorce, the death of a close family member. Or a heated run for elected office that you’re on the verge of losing. Emotional people take risks. They don’t think clearly, and they’re eager to believe whatever fantasy I feed them.”

Meg’s statement directly to the reader makes her seem like a force to be reckoned with, and she is. However, Meg doesn’t prey solely upon people in the midst of a major life change. She has many other criteria for choosing her victims that make this otherwise ominous introduction more palatable. Keeping the notion that Meg targets her victims due to their abuse of power a secret until later in the book makes readers wonder what Meg is capable of. It’s also reflective of Kat’s perception of Meg, since she fails to understand who Meg is and why she does what she does at this point.

“I’m far away from where I grew up, but beneath all the layers— all the identities I’ve held, the years that have passed—I’m still the person I was when I left. A woman on the run, flush with the power of knowing I could become anyone. Do anything. All I had to do was tell a man what he wanted to hear.”

Meg reveals a bit of her inner core to readers here, that she isn’t a con artist down to the bone. Her facades are layers she puts on. Once again, the broader, more ambiguous language like “flush with the power” and “[d]o anything” makes Meg seem like a potential antagonist, and at this point in the narrative, she is Kat’s primary antagonist without even knowing it.

“There was no room for error. I couldn’t afford to get a parking ticket, or a cavity, or even a cold sore. I was one UTI away from the homeless shelter.”

Meg’s all-or-nothing thinking is what has led her to such dramatic ventures because her life has been all-or-nothing. She literally can’t afford a single financial misstep or bump because she’s living up to her neck in her mother’s funeral debt, even while sleeping in her car and doing her laundry at work. This hardship and resilience makes Meg a much more sympathetic character and lends some ideas as to why she may go to the extreme lengths she does. It’s partially accurate that she uses men to get a meal or for money, but it’s something of a misdirection because Meg’s true cons aren’t focused on self-benefit. She seeks to help others. Of course, she makes sure she has something to show for it too.

“Hands that gripped too tight. Bruises in places easily hidden. It didn’t happen often, but when it did, I’d learned how to compartmentalize. To turn off my thoughts and go somewhere else in my mind until it was over.”

Not only has Meg endured a harrowing past and lives in poverty, but she has also had to endure abuse at the hands of men she misjudged. Because she has been on so many dates, she is better at desensitizing herself from trauma and looking for the signs that a man may snap.

“Convenience and comfort aren’t worth settling for. We can earn what we need; we don’t need a man to hand it to us. If money is tight, we work harder.”

Meg’s mother’s statement is ingrained in Meg, but Meg lives defiantly (and somewhat shamefully) against it. Meg does work hard, but she cons men for meals and stability. Nothing that Meg does, however, is convenient or comfortable. She has to put herself in many inconvenient and uncomfortable situations to get by, and she works very hard to pull off the cons she does, even if she thinks her mother wouldn’t be happy about it.

“Good fortune and second chances. Everyone wants to believe those are real.”

Meg plays upon wishful thinking and well-loved tropes to pull off her con on Cory Dempsey. Since she applies this statement universally, she knows these tricks would work on almost anyone, but Meg doesn’t target just anyone, and this once again proves her to be discerning in her targets.

“Meg Williams seemed to be whoever she wanted you to think she was, twisting and turning in your mind like a hologram, never solid, never fully clear.”

The simile compares Meg to a hologram because Kat sees her as fake at this point, and this isn’t incorrect: Meg isn’t who she’s pretending to be. Kat sees Meg as something beyond her comprehension, something she just can’t pin down, and that foreshadows that Kat fails to understand Meg at this point in the novel.

“But I wouldn’t be human if I didn’t admit I’m nervous. I’ve spent years vilifying him in my mind. Making him out to be the monster who stole my childhood. Now I’m going to need to cozy up alongside him and engage in flirty banter, openly admire him for his business acumen and intellect. Allow him to define who he thinks I am and then live inside that assumption. It will require a level of acting I haven’t had to do since I discovered the truth about Cory.”

Meg recognizes the difficulty of what she’s about to do and how the imagination and memory can leave impressions of a person that are more like caricatures than reality. Still, what Ron Ashton did to her family was unscrupulous, and she is going to have to swallow her pride and get to know the man to be his undoing. The allusion to Cory suggests just how embedded and involved Meg plans to be in Ron’s life.

“Instinct is a funny thing, a whisper of trouble that we can never quite name, never quite define, that allows us to locate danger. Women are taught from a young age to ignore theirs. We’re forced to justify our instincts with evidence, or we’re taught to ignore them—as a way to keep the peace, to prioritize other people’s comfort over our own.”

This statement addresses the systemic problems that keep women from being safe. Behaviorally, women are told to ignore their intuition, and this is exactly what Kat does with Scott. By not trusting herself, she fails herself, and it is because society failed her.

“And because she’ll be so close, it’ll be impossible for her to see the whole picture. Like standing under the Eiffel Tower—when you’re inside of it, it’s just a bunch of crisscrossed steel. It’s only from a distance you can see it for what it really is.”

This simile demonstrates how Meg orchestrates her plans and how she sees Kat being involved in them. Even though Kat is lying to her, Meg doesn’t intend to harm Kat but obfuscates the truth until it’s too late. But the truth, like the Eiffel Tower, is a sturdy work of love: Meg is enacting justice for her family, and she can’t let anyone interfere with that.

“And I can’t help but wonder if I’ve got a blind spot. Never before has a job been so personal. So raw. Never before have I had so much invested in the outcome. This is my magnum opus, and I am flat-out stalled.”

Meg’s usually self-assured persona falters here, and rather than making her appear weak, it shows how important this mission is to her. Taking down Ron Ashton so he can’t hurt anyone else the way he did her family is her culminating work, and because of that, so much is at stake for her.

“Irritation passes through me, and I put on a stony expression most women would recognize, ready to pretend I don’t hear the sexual harassment being hurled our way by boys who have already learned that their passage through life will be largely unobstructed.”

Kat’s reaction to catcalling is common, and she draws out sympathy from the reader by suggesting “most women would recognize” the meaning behind her expression. Women are taught to ignore it or be polite when men behave in a way that is sexually harassing, and they must do this because it can be dangerous to be confrontational. The boys in the car are young and just acting the way they think they should, and Kat acknowledges how these boys test their power here. When they aren’t deterred, they can grow up into problematic men. Meg, however, doesn’t match Kat’s stony expression. She invites danger because she knows these boys are just testing the waters. When she embarrasses them, they drive off. Kat realizes formative moments like this can help teach young people a lesson society refuses to deliver.

“I’d left my coat at home on purpose, remembering the one Meg always kept in the back of her car. Michigan winters leave an impression, she’d once told me.”

This is one of the first times Kat reveals how cunning and deceptive she can be as she plots to search Meg’s car under an innocent ruse based on previous information she learned about Meg. This foreshadows Kat’s eventual arc into becoming a con artist.

“I miss Jenna with a near physical ache, and I imagine what it would be like if she were here instead of Meg. To be able to let my guard down and enjoy a concert and a piece of pie without needing to secure all my edges. Without needing to think through how much or how little to say. Instead, Meg sits across from me. A woman who looks like a friend. Acts like a friend, but is not a friend.”

Kat’s friendship with Jenna allows her to contrast what feels wrong about her friendship with Meg. She likes Meg, but both of them are lying. The repetition of “like a friend” shows the significance of this feeling, and the final “but” statement acts as a reminder to herself that she and Meg are not friends. They can’t be because they are both lying to each other.

“I wanted his imagination to run with that, puzzling out different scenarios, each one more outrageous than the last, so when I finally told him, the simplicity of it would be irresistible.”

Meg’s understanding of human psychology allows her to be successful, and in narrating her experiences, she doesn’t withhold her intentions. She is completely transparent about what she is doing and why it’ll work.

“I’m going to have to tell Scott. I can’t conceal a $30,000 debt from him. A small voice floats up from deep inside of me. What if Meg is right? What if it’s Scott after all? Not for the first time, I wonder what my life would be like if Scott weren’t an addict. Or if I’d left him instead of staying and working through the steps with him. Things would be so much clearer now, not having to navigate around the constant doubt, the voices that invade my sleep, always questioning what he says. Always wondering if it’ll happen again. Pushing me to look for the cracks, trying to figure out what’s real inside my own relationship.”

Kat’s panic over the debt shows how much self-blame she has internalized because of her experiences. This moment also shows how immediately her intuition suggests that Scott is behind it, but she pushes that thought away and blames herself for doubting him when he has shown her exactly who he is.

“‘Don’t.’ I was numb, miles away from the initial stab of shock and pain. Instead, I felt an icy calm envelop me, and I welcomed it. I wanted to live inside that pain-free bubble for as long as possible, because I knew the alternative was to relive every betrayal, over and over again, long after this moment had passed.”

Kat, like Meg earlier, is desensitized from her emotions because they are too intense. She is dissociating and in a state of trauma because she has once again misplaced her trust in Scott. The idea of a “pain-free bubble” shows how Kat hasn’t been willing to deal with reality, but now her world is so rocked from truth that she is further away than ever and at a kind of turning point in her life.

“I was unable to speak for a moment, Meg’s generosity was unexpected, and yet, not surprising. Sure, she’d kept Phillip’s cash. But she balanced the scales. Gave back to Celia a little bit of the power Phillip had stolen, and exposed him in the process. The same thing she’d done for Kristen. What she was trying to do now for her mother and for herself.”

Kat is beginning to see Meg for who she is and who she knew Meg was all along but lied to herself to fit her narrative that Meg ruined her life. She says Meg giving the lake house to Celia is “unexpected” because giving up that much money seems absurd for anyone, especially a con artist who has every reason to try and take advantage of the world that walked all over her. But Kat also says it’s not “surprising” because Meg is a good person who lives by Girl Code. She has a history of helping women in need, and Kat is finally seeing the pattern of Meg’s behavior and the constellation of her work as a kind of justice, rather than pure manipulation or scheming.

“As we approach the front door, I layer my comments carefully, like a house of cards, one alluring fact on top of another.”

Meg’s final phases of her plan with Ron require the utmost precision and care, demonstrated by the simile used here. Too strong of a breeze or a faulty hand gesture can bring down a house of cards, just like any little wrong detail could completely unravel her plan with Ron. She has to piecemeal her success, card by card, carefully, so that Ron ends up in the frame of mind he needs to be in for her plan to work.

“‘I’m so glad someone finally reported him. Thankfully, not all men are like that.’ My allusion is clear—Steve is one of the good guys. And like most people, he will do everything he can to live up to that impression.”

Meg manipulates Ron’s business manager, Steve, by using a compliment to win his favor. However, this isn’t an ill-intentioned maneuver; rather, it’s almost a two-fold approach: Make Steve think she appreciates him, so he’ll be distracted as he moves through the next steps of her plan with Ron without realizing it, and remind Steve gently that it’s important to be kind and respectful of others and their boundaries.

“Everything I thought I wanted had been based on the assumptions of a traumatized young woman who needed to assign responsibility for what happened to her. To look at the chain of events leading up to her rape, find the link connecting before to after, and then cut it. I’m ten years older now, and I understand that life isn’t linear; cause and effect are often unclear. I still want the story, but at some point over the last several weeks, my motivation has shifted. What I want now is to see Meg succeed.”

Kat’s worldview shatters open with this revelation. She has many similar thoughts leading up to this point, but this is the moment she finally says it clearly in her interior narrative: Meg isn’t the one who caused her trauma. Meg isn’t responsible for Kat’s suffering. Kat misplaced the blame on Meg because her experiences were so horrible she needed to blame someone. Kat even distances herself from this younger version of herself by using third-person pronouns. She isn’t a traumatized young girl anymore. She is a woman with 10 more years of experience, and she supports other women fighting the good fight.

“But each one of them has left an indelible mark on me. I love the movie Casablanca because of Diane in Phoenix. I prefer my sandwich bread toasted thanks to Natasha in Monterey.”

Meg’s letter reveals another aspect of her character: how deeply others impact her as she travels and pursues her life as a con artist. Even though her characters are fake, her memories and the impact of the people she meets along the way are real. She holds onto those authentic moments within the lies as core parts of herself, even if she isn’t being herself at the time and even if she can never go back to be with the people who influence her.

“Slips the needles out, the square piece complete, and she tucks it all away. I think about the last ten years—row after row, city after city, mark after mark. Ron was the knot, and now it’s time to put that part of my life away. I have a rental house waiting for me—a small bungalow on a hill overlooking the beach. I imagine warm sun, soft sand, and sea salt drying on my skin. Maybe I’ll learn to surf, or work in a bar selling drinks to tourists. Or maybe I’ll spend my time reading on my porch. Perhaps one day, I’ll read a novel about a female con artist traveling the country, dreaming of the day when she will finally mend her mother’s greatest heartache.”

This imagery of a woman at the airport completing a crochet project serves as a metaphor for Meg’s journey as a con artist. That part of her life has been neatly stitched and tied up; it’s complete. She is ready to move on to another life where she can just be herself, a regular person doing a regular job somewhere she can stay for good. She also alludes to Kat’s novel, and this shows how much she values Kat’s friendship and wants to see her succeed.