57 pages • 1 hour read
Never Lie
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Symbols & Motifs
The Portrait of Adrienne
Adrienne’s portrait is a symbol of the need to keep up appearances that many people feel. Adrienne’s portrait presents a picture-perfect (literally) image of her. It is the reverse of The Picture of Dorian Gray. In Oscar Wilde’s book, the portrait of Dorian ages and gets distorted and ugly, while Dorian remains young and beautiful. In this case, the portrait remains forever beautiful, while Adrienne becomes, in spirit, uglier and uglier before her death. The portrait is also a symbolic representation of Tricia’s lies. Tricia blatantly pretends to be unfamiliar with the portrait when, in fact, she is the person who gifted it to Adrienne.
The portrait’s significance is reiterated in the book’s Epilogue, when Tricia reveals that she could not bring herself to destroy the artwork. Instead, it is stashed in the attic of the house, much like Dorian’s own painting in Wilde’s novel. The fact that Tricia can kill Adrienne in cold blood but is unable to destroy the portrait speaks to some kind of sentimentality rarely seen in Tricia’s character. Despite Tricia killing Adrienne, the two women share a bond—both are killers, both manipulate the men in their lives, and both do whatever they have to for self-preservation. The portrait symbolizes both this bond and Tricia’s own desire to keep up appearances, as she literally hides the portrait away.
The Tape Recordings
The tape recordings in the book are a pivotal plot device, helping to unveil the truth about EJ, PL, and GW (Ethan’s mother). Tricia pinpoints their importance: “Will the contents of these tapes reveal the secret of what really happened to Dr. Adrienne Hale?” (142). In this way, they serve as a symbolic representation of the book’s thematic discussions of truth versus lies. Adrienne herself proclaims of people, “Everybody lies” (5). Meanwhile, when it comes to tape recordings, she is adamant that “[t]ape recordings don’t lie” (54).
However, the tape recordings speak to the humanity of lying in another way—they are only audio, without visual representation. This is significant because Adrienne uses visual cues to tell when people are lying. For example, she notes that EJ’s right eye twitches when he lies, while Tricia crosses her legs when she lies. A tape recording may not “lie,” but it also does not present the full truth, since it omits these visual elements. You might say they lie by omission—something many of the book’s characters do. The symbol of the tape recording thus reiterates the book’s argument that everybody lies.
The House
Adrienne’s house is the common thread throughout the book, the motif that binds the past and present narrative voices of Adrienne and Tricia together. Consistently, the house represents secrets, a symbolic reference to thematic discussions of truth and lies. The house itself holds many secrets. First, there is Luke, hiding in the house from Ethan and Tricia. Then there is the literal secret room, full of tape recordings that Adrienne hid from the world. Finally, there is the grotesque corpse hidden under the floorboards. In the book’s epilogue, yet another secret is revealed to be held on the property—Luke’s body, now buried in the garden. The house can be seen as a physical representation of the various characters’ secrets and lies.
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