After watching the Netflix miniseries, His & Hers, and being pleasantly surprised by all of the twists at the end, I was curious to check out the works by Alice Feeney, whose novel of the same name was adapted to the series. Sadly, that novel was not immediately available, so I snagged the only one that was, her 2018 debut novel, Sometimes I Lie.
The book itself alternates between a few different timelines. In the present, our narrator Amber is talking to us through her mind, as she is currently in a coma. Then we are treated to a short period of time directly before the accident that’s put her in the coma, along with diary entries from when she was about 10 years old in 1992. I’m going to be honest, I found a lot of the lead up to be a bit boring and repetative. Amber also came across both unwell, but also rather annoying. She seemed to jump to a lot of paranoid conclusions. In hindsight, they make more sense, but in a weaker way.
We learn that prior to the coma Amber had been working at a popular radio program for a mean woman named Madeline. As the book progresses, we learn that Amber is trying to sabatoge Madeline’s career, which after some calculated craftiness, does end up working out. But all while this is going on, we learn that things between Amber and her husband Paul seem a little resentful. He’s not having any luck with writing a new successful novel, and she’s not been able to get pregnant. This lack of attention has her convinced he’s having an affair with her sister, Claire. Claire is “better” than Amber in a multitude of ways, so of course Amber is wary.
This is where the diary entries start adding a bit of confusion to the story. Amber is a mean and angry little girl who claims to hate her parents because they don’t love her. Although she gets along with no one at school, she eventually, and a bit begrudgingly befriends Taylor, a slight girl who’s the subject of several bullies. Once they finall connec, they learn that they have a lot in common, and then something switches in Amber’s brain to be fiercely protective of Taylor. Even as her family threatens to move away, Amber still vows to be by Taylor’s side.
I honestly feel like that’s all I’m going to say, because once things finally start rolling in the last 80 pages or so, they really start going. Feeney has a sick and twisted brain in some regards, but with both this book and the TV series starting in the same slow, kind of uninteresting manner, I’ve learned that she does make up for it in the end. Do some things seem far fetched? Totally. But this is a work of fiction, so who really cares. All you need to keep in mind is that just like the book title suggests, sometimes Amber lies.