The Lies I Tell

Kat’s partially written novel is a symbol of her unfulfilled ambitions, references to which occur throughout the novel. Her mother’s constant hounding of her about her failed career as a journalist reminds Kat how she was living her mother’s dreams by working for the LA Times, and she was so willing to do anything to get her big break and make her mom happy that she pursued a lead without backup that ultimately harmed her for a long time. Others constantly ask Kat about her novel, but she’s so wrapped up in her pursuit of revenge against Meg and trying to support Scott’s gambling habits that she fails to make much progress on it. When Scott steals her novel and replaces it with blank printer pages, Kat is gutted because he has effectively stolen her dreams. Instead of giving in to his demands to get it back, she puts her foot down and moves forward by inserting herself into Meg’s story again until she is finally able to make sense of it. Kat ends in a place where she has the ability to move forward with her dreams, even as those evolve, and this is reflected by the positive feedback she receives on the early pages and the openness of her future to writing the rest of the novel.