68 pages • 2 hours read
The Last Time I Lied: A Novel
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Themes
The Blurred Lines Between Truth, Lies, and Deception
Emma is on a quest to uncover the truth about what happened to her friends, but first, she has to wade through a web of lies and deception, some of which are of her own making. Characters lie on purpose, by omission, and by accident (e.g., when their beliefs prove misguided). Sometimes characters lie to hide things they are ashamed of, and sometimes they do so to disguise more sinister intentions. As Emma comes closer to the truth of the girls’ disappearance, the sheer multitude of lies and the ambiguity of characters’ reasons for promulgating them render the line between truth and falsehood increasingly hazy.
The motif of Two Truths and a Lie establishes the blurriness of the boundaries between what is real and what isn’t. As a girl at Camp Nightingale, Emma plays the game with her cabinmates. The game is Vivian’s favorite, and she teaches Emma that you “could learn more about a person from their lies than their truths” (92-93)—a counterintuitive claim that frames lies as more “real” than truth. She also insists that “the point of the game isn’t to fool others with a lie” but rather to “trick them by telling the truth” (94), further undercutting the idea that truth is simple and easy to discern.
In both the game and the novel, the truth is often presented in such a way as to make it seem unbelievable. For example, a legend about Lake Midnight suggests Franny’s grandfather flooded a village of “ostracized” people who refused to leave the valley and whose ghosts went on to haunt the surrounding land. The story seems fantastical, but there is “a ring of truth” to it (317): Peaceful Valley Asylum was flooded, but no one was harmed. Similarly, characters fool one another by telling partial truths that leave out crucial information or truths that disguise real intentions. Chet, for example, is honest with Emma about his idea to invite her back to Camp Nightingale and his hope for “closure.” However, he fails to mention that this closure involves exacting revenge on Emma. Vivian likewise doesn’t tell any outright lies in her diary, but she suggests that her thirst for revenge relates to the hospital patients’ presumed drowning instead of her sister’s. Similarly, she lets Emma believe that she had sex with Theo, saying nothing to contradict the younger girl’s accusation.
This last example is a lie that changes the course of both Emma’s and Theo’s lives, creating a chain reaction of untruths that continues to resonate in Emma’s feelings of guilt and her tendency to hide from her past. It illustrates how lies have the power to shape an individual’s life, influencing how they see themselves and others. In this sense, a lie can become truth, at least so far as a given person is concerned.
The Impact of Trauma and the Reliability of Memory
The Last Time I Lied is a story about coming to terms with childhood trauma and facing long-repressed memories of the past. The trauma Emma experienced as a girl still influences many aspects of her adult life. However, although she dwells on what happened at Camp Nightingale, she discovers that even her own memory is not to be trusted.
Emma’s time at Camp Nightingale defines her adult life even as she tries to evade it. She wears a charm bracelet with three pewter birds to ward off the hallucinations she began experiencing after the trauma, and its continued presence on her wrist suggests the girls’ continued influence on her. She is a rising star in the New York City art world—a career she has built by painting her three vanished cabinmates over and over. However, this career also reveals the way in which Emma hides her past and the guilt she feels surrounding it; the girls feature in all her work, but she always paints dark leaves and twisted branches over them. She shares the truth of her past with no one, keeping details like her parting words to Vivian and her time in a mental health institution closely held secrets.
Emma’s return to camp suggests she has also kept some details from herself, as many aspects of the place are different than she remembered. Small details, like the length of the drive and the size of Lake Midnight, do not correspond to Emma’s memories, implying that she could have also misremembered larger details. As she unravels the past, she in fact discovers that some of her most important memories, like seeing Vivian with Theo in the shower, are false. Furthermore, details that have important consequences for her adult life, like Chet’s childhood distress, are “hazy” in her memory. These discrepancies hint that Emma has repressed elements of her time at Camp Nightingale because they are too traumatic to confront directly.
Healing from that trauma therefore requires that Emma speak her truths and solve the mysteries that have plagued her. She confesses her “sins,” finds forgiveness, and lets go of her guilt. Through this process, she discovers that “[h]aving the truth revealed means you can finally start to unburden yourself of it” (361). Although Emma continues to paint Vivian, Natalie, and Allison, she moves from hiding the girls to covering them in a way that feels more like “a funeral” in their honor. However, Emma still has one unreliable memory that she must let go of: Her childhood idolization of Vivian prevents her from seeing the truth of the other woman’s cruel nature. When she hears Vivian’s confession, Emma enters the final stage of her healing. She paints Vivian’s portrait, renouncing the tendency to hide the truth once and for all.
Hiding Dark Reality Behind Idyllic Appearances
The proliferation of lies in The Last Time I Lied speaks partly to the characters’ concern with keeping up appearances; time and again, they cover up or pretend away a reality that is less than appealing. On the surface, life seems beautiful and idyllic, but this often hides a darker truth that bubbles to the surface no matter how intently it is suppressed.
Much of the novel’s symbolism, including that which surrounds Camp Nightingale and Lake Midnight, reflects this theme. The property the camp stands on was bought and preserved by Franny’s grandfather, Buchanan Harris, who made his fortune in the timber business; its beauty and wildness belie Harris’s “lifetime spent deforesting” (22). The lake is not even naturally occurring. Rather, Harris flooded the area, and a “graveyard of trees” lies just below its surface (143), symbolizing the environmental destruction that the pristine lake disguises. Likewise, Emma’s paintings are both a literal and figurative form of covering up; she paints her vanished friends and then obscures them to hide her grief and guilt.
The narrative’s inciting incident—Emma’s invitation to return to Camp Nightingale—also hinges on a cover-up. When the camp reopens, there is no mention of the terrible incident that forced its closure. Franny gives the same welcome speech as always, offering only a “brief silence” that contains “years of omitted history” (75). She doesn’t speak about “the camp’s shame [or] its subsequent closure” (75). Mindy, who is herself concerned with “pretending” away her humble roots as a farm girl, is on “high alert” to make sure everything goes perfectly. Emma’s presence is required to complete the image of a healed camp; however, she receives multiple “warnings” that she must “tread lightly and not make any messes” (123). In other words, whether Emma has recovered fully is not important; she should not openly express the reality of her trauma.
The motive for reopening the camp is also rooted in Franny’s hidden cancer diagnosis. She wants “one last glorious summer” so that she can forget about the girls’ disappearance (217), which she calls the “one thing in [her] life that wasn’t fortunate” (217). However, nothing can be hidden forever. The tragedy that occurred at Camp Nightingale deeply affected everyone involved, including Emma and Chet, and that trauma, like the drowned trees in Lake Midnight, eventually comes to the surface. Only by facing the truth can the characters find real healing.
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