Sometimes I Lie

Claire is Amber’s friend from elementary school. She is something of a kindred spirit—they share the same birthday and communicate on levels that often defy language, a connection that has led to some speculation that Claire is some kind of imaginary friend that Amber conjures to blame all the bad things that happen around her. Claire, however, appears to maintain a separate integrity. She is married, she has a home, she has twins, she visits the hospital and has real-time conversations with doctors. She appears to be real.

Claire’s character emerges through and against Amber’s perceptions. It is tempting to reduce Claire to what Amber avers at one point she might be: a “nutjob.” She is responsible for most of the villainy in the novel, but she acts out of love. Claire, we assume, keeps the diary that Amber shares in her narration. Claire has a problematic relationship with her parents, both distant in their affection for her and both more supportive and loving of Amber/Taylor, whom they adopt after Amber’s parents die in a Christmas fire in 1992.

What drives Claire is her fanatic need to be loved and to protect those she loves. She loved her grandmother, who died too young from cancer and in whose house her family moved until they were displaced by her grandmother’s sister, Madeline Frost (Amber’s boss), earning Claire’s deep animosity and her elaborate nearly 20-year vengeance plan. When Amber/Taylor’s parents make plans to move, Claire engineers the house fire that kills them, acting, she believes, under Amber/Taylor’s orders. Claire slams on the brakes of the car on the way to the hospital to cripple Amber and cause her, presumably, to lose a baby that would take Amber away from her, thus making sure Amber remains under her loving control.

It is Claire, presumably, who exact a brutal and messy vengeance on Edward, Amber’s stalker/rapist, apparently using his own tanning bed to torture and kill him. Claire, then, is a control freak whose actions are uncomplicated by sensitivity or empathy. Only Amber’s decision, once she realizes the depth of Claire’s twisted obsession, to eliminate Claire again out of love (it is Valentine’s Day) and poison Claire and her husband, ends, at least we think, the sick dependency that has so twisted Amber’s own psychological well-being.

Early on, it is easy to dislike Amber’s husband. Indeed, it is difficult to come to terms with Paul, Amber’s long-suffering husband, because his wife—and the police for that matter—suspect he had something to do with the accident. In addition, Amber, in her coma, mulls over her misplaced fears that Paul is actually sleeping with Claire.

Paul is a novelist, and in a narrative in which characters freely dispense with the integrity of their real character to play a part, a narrative in which characters freely distort and even reinvent reality into a convenient and manageable plot, Paul is a refreshing change of pace because as a novelist he draws a clear line between reality and fiction. In his shed, literally occupying a special zone designed for enchantment, he creates fictions, writing characters with consistent motivation moving through a carefully designed sequence of events that link into a plot. However, he can leave that world, literally. In the shed he pretends; Amber and Claire go at it in reality.

Paul is a promising writer who loves his wife, is devoted to her, and wants only to make her world quiet, stable, and comfortable. He dotes on her in the hospital, stays for hours, even installs the camera in the hospital room on the slim chance he might catch his comatose wife move and thus delay what he cannot bring himself to even think about: disconnecting his wife’s life-support apparatus. That Amber suspects him of cheating with Claire, that his character must come through that jaundiced perception, makes his emergence as something of a moral hero all that more challenging. He does nothing to merit Amber’s suspicion; every action he takes he readily explains. He cannot conceive of the curious wonderland perspective of his OCD wife and his psychologically troubled faux-sister-in-law because, as a novelist, he can do what neither of them seems particularly interested in doing: He can maintain fact and fiction as complementary energies rather than fusing them into a single entity.