Sometimes I Lie

“We’ll start rumors on social media. We’ll take control of the situation. You know what you have to do.”

This plan, hatched by Amber and her only friend at work, Jo, betokens Amber’s decision to strategize against being terminated after the New Year at the radio station because of the friction between her and the radio show’s iconic star. It is Jo who spearheads the Facebook campaign to spread rumors of Madeline’s imminent departure and Jo who advises Amber to dress up for work to show Madeline that she is there to stay. What is odd is that Amber is in fact plotting with an imaginary friend.

“The harder I try to hold us together, the faster we fall apart.”

Early on, Amber reveals her deep concern over the condition of her marriage and specifically her hopes that a baby might help resolve her estrangement from Paul. She expresses her fears, uncomplicated by any evidence, that he and Claire are having an affair. In her mind, their marriage is doomed even though what evidence we can gather from the hospital bedside would indicate Paul is a conventionally loving husband doting over Amber during her medical crisis. The statement, on second reading, underscores Amber’s unwillingness to deal with reality.

“If you were to strip us all down to our purest intentions, the lowest common denominator would always be wanting to be listened to, needing to be heard above the noise of modern life.”

At the emotional core of the novel’s layers of uncertainty is a single certainty: Amber is a psychologically bruised and emotionally damaged young woman who harbors secrets that have eroded her sense of self-worth and her peace of mind. If, as evidence indicates, her parents were killed by Claire at her tacit request, that reality is the confession from which her conscience needs to be unburdened. The emotional terrorism exacted on her since by Claire is a kind of metaphoric coma—Amber helpless to say what is wrong with her.

“Life is more terrifying than death in my experience.”

Amber, in her coma, assesses the slow-motion wreck of her life while she is suspended between wakefulness and a dream. Although she fears her husband, at the encouragement of Claire, might remove her from the respirator, Amber understands life itself, defined in her experience by violence, betrayals, and anxiety, does not seem to offer all that strong a counterargument to embracing death.

“I despised you.”

Amber’s emotional baggage begins with her childhood and her understanding early on that her parents were indifferent to her. Her father was a workaholic, her mother a person with alcoholism. In this exchange, Amber’s mother refuses to sugarcoat the reality of Amber’s birth, how neither parent wanted a child, that she was an accident caused by a romantic evening that got out of hand because of too many bottles of wine. Amber tests her mother in the hopes of hearing some emotional support, but her mother only hisses that from the moment she knew she was pregnant, she loathed Amber.

“The girl in the pink dressing gown emerges from the covers at the foot of my bed and sits herself up so that we mirror each other.”

In a novel in which characters regularly use alcohol to distort reality and in which the main character is in a coma and free-floats between dreams and fantasies, the girl in the pink dressing gown first appears to Amber when she is on the way to the hospital, soon to lose her unborn baby. The girl, presumably, embodies the baby that Amber is carrying and the child she hopes will help reconnect her with her husband. That the girl ultimately departs the hospital room in the company of Amber’s other imaginary friend, Jo, indicates the deep emotional need Amber had for the child she will never bear and, in turn, her movement toward reality rather than fantasy.

“I knew the fish was dead and I couldn’t decide how I felt about that.”

Although there is some question over who kept the diary, the more likely writer is Claire herself. Here she reveals her disquieting fascination with dead things—here a fish in the school’s biology room tank—and her curiously sociopathic tendency to enjoy the experience of it. Her ambivalence reveals how she has already begun to shut down the more typical responses of compassion and empathy. This is a stone-cold reaction uncomplicated by simple decency, a forecast of a dark future for someone who is apparently a bad seed.

“Lies form the mortar, holding the walls together. If there weren’t so many lies, the walls would have collapsed by now. Instead we’ve built ourselves a prison.”

This is Amber’s assessment of the relationship between her husband, her adopted sister, and her. Keeping in mind that the reader is also being led (and misled) by Amber’s lies/revelations, this idea of a prison constructed must also include the reader, uncertain over whom to trust and what really happened. As it turns out, the viability of the lies alone maintains the bonds between characters and between reader and characters.

“I’m so sorry. I just wanted to clear the air and reassure you that I’m not a psycho.”

This is Edward, who maintains a grudge for 10 years against Amber, all the while keeping a creepy shrine to her in his apartment. He sets up their meetings deliberately as a way to get her back, drug her, and take compromising photos of her. As a hospital orderly, he pumps Amber full of drugs to maintain her coma, and in her helplessness, he rapes her. Thus, this statement introduces the element of irony: The more characters profess, the more they lie.

“I still don’t know where I am but I soon realize I am naked […] I look down on my bare legs and see a tattoo of blue-green bruises on my knees. Something very bad has happened.” 

One reading of the novel suggests that Amber is emotionally and psychologically a victim first of her parents, then of her friend Claire, then her boyfriend, Edward. Here she stumbles awake after being drugged by Edward and raped repeatedly. The scene suggests Amber’s vulnerability, the way she is used, and makes all the more heroic her decision in the end to fight back and destroy Claire, who is after all responsible for Edward’s rage.

“Her name screams itself over and over inside my head. I need Claire. I need her so badly right now and I hate her at the same time.”

Herein lies the twisted dependency of Amber on Claire. She reaches out to Claire as an unhappy and lonely child, and Claire exploits that dependency and refuses to allow Amber any room to grow emotionally or psychologically. That need is a deep source of Amber’s unhappiness and her argument at different moments while in a coma that surely death could not be as bad as life.

“But the little girl in the pink dressing gown stands up and takes Jo by the hand before I can reach it. She pulls her toward the door. The room starts to fall apart, huge jigsaw pieces falling down into the darkness below.”

Jo, Amber’s imaginary friend, and the little girl, her unborn baby, represent the consolations Amber has long taken in the refuge of her private world. That Jo and Amber depart Amber’s hospital room at the same time indicates that Amber herself, at some level, understands that her pregnancy loss and the threats to her husband cannot be ignored. The world will not be a simple jigsaw puzzle she can assemble. It is time Amber understands, time for things to get messy.

“Some people are ghosts before they are dead.”

This is Amber as bereaved mother dealing with pregnancy loss in a car accident caused by her own adopted sister. Inevitably, however, given Amber’s own painful childhood and her own indifferent parents, she was emotionally dead, a kind of ghost, more an absence than a presence, even before she grew up.

“I asked Jo what she thought and she said I’d done something very clever because so long as they have mirrors in Wales, I can take Taylor with me.”

Jo is not real, presumably, so this is Claire reassuring herself that by cutting her hair to mimic Amber/Taylor’s hair, she will be forever one with Taylor. This sort of psychological doubt-talk suggests that perhaps Amber or Claire is entirely made-up, an imaginary friend constructed and sustained to protect the other from confronting the reality of what they have done to family and friends. Is Claire a figment of Amber’s diseased imagination?

“I close my eyes so that I can’t see the flames, but I can still hear their screams.” 

Amber has never moved on emotionally from the night her parents were killed in a housefire that, presumably, her friend Claire started as a way to keep Amber close to her. It is, in that logic, a kind of twisted act of love—after all, Amber’s parents were unsavory and unloving. Amber did not set the fire, and yet now, close to 20 years later, the simple gesture of her husband making their home a bit more festive—he lights a romantic fire in the fireplace—triggers Amber’s emotional reaction.

“I think I might be dying but I am so tired of living that maybe it’s okay; I allow my mind to power down. Far above me, beyond the cold, black waves, I hear voices, but the words won’t unravel themselves. ‘She’s crashing.’”

Amber has just been raped by Edward and realizes that, with him controlling her medication, he can prolong her coma and this torture indefinitely. Here she wills herself to die, to crash, and submits herself, her life too much of a burden for her, to the dark waters of unconsciousness and death.

“I used to write a diary […] Always found it very therapeutic. I’ve read it’s good for anxiety.”

Claire’s admission is unsettling—after all, readers have assumed the diary was Amber’s, not Claire’s. The idea of the diary being a healthy outlet, of course, is ironic given the nature of Claire’s psychoses and her own unsettling anxieties over being left alone.

“I’m not stupid. I knew what I had to do. I started crying in my room that night […] the next day, I saw the fostering paperwork on the dining room table.”

“I’m not stupid. I knew what I had to do. I started crying in my room that night […] the next day, I saw the fostering paperwork on the dining room table.”

“I’m back now and I remember everything.”

This is the heroic moment of recovery for Amber: She begins to surface from her coma, triggered at least in part by her husband’s simple and sincere declaration of love. The reality of the so-called accident and the duplicity of her adopted sister now set Amber on a course in which she will refuse at last to play victim.

“‘She’ll kill you.’ He laughs. He doesn’t understand that I’m not joking. ‘She won’t let anyone take me away from her, she never has.’”

Amber understands that Paul unearthing the diaries and making such a fuss about them in front of Claire with Amber’s gift puts Paul in danger. The diary entries confirm that Claire killed Amber’s parents in the fire but imply that Amber told her to do it—at least that is one reading of the events in the novel. This confession reveals the twisted bond between the two women. Claire cannot share Amber even if it means killing first her parents and then her unborn child.

“This is Claire’s fault. Everything that is wrong with my life is Claire’s fault.”

Unless, of course, Amber has lied about everything back to the first page, here is a moment of honest assessment of her anxieties. Is blaming Claire convenient? Is blaming Claire even honest? Is blaming Claire a strategy of self-preservation? The reality of Claire’s evil manipulations sets the course for Amber’s calculated, cold-blooded execution of Claire and her husband on Valentine’s Day.

“‘I love you,’ she says before turning back to the road with both hands on the steering wheel. I hear the brakes screech.”

This recollection by Amber of the last seconds before the accident reveals the depth of Claire’s evil. Making sure that Amber is not fastened in while clicking her own seat belt, speeding up saying she wants to get Amber to the hospital, and then bracing herself against the wheel before slamming on the brakes, certain Amber will be sent through the windshield, and then leaving Amber on the road define Claire’s villainy and, in turn, justify Amber’s own revenge.

“She looks at the [petrol can], then back to me. I study my sister’s face one last time, then take her hand in mine, squeezing it three times before letting her go.”

This is the cold, but necessary, execution of Claire by Amber. The gas can tells Claire she is to be burned alive, a kind of fitting symmetry given what she did 20 years earlier to Amber’s parents. The two sisters squeeze each other’s hand in a curious gesture that speaks of the love/hate, good/evil relationship that they have maintained. I love you, Amber says in all but words, but I must kill you—a sentiment that recalls Claire’s own actions in the car on the way to the hospital that Christmas afternoon.