Listen for the Lie

by Amy Tintera

A podcaster has decided to ruin my life, so I’m buying a chicken.

So here’s a fun fact about this line, and the whole first chapter — it was the last thing I wrote before sending the book off to agents! The book originally started in the grocery store, when Lucy is imagining bashing squash into people’s heads and gets a call from her grandmother. But I felt like we needed to see her in her normal life first, at work and then with her boyfriend. Also, I can’t believe it’s been over a year since LISTEN FOR THE LIE was first released! The paperback is out now, with some fun bonus content and book club questions in the back!

“It’s two hundred and fifty square feet. Who in the world wants to live in two hundred and fifty square feet?”

The idea to have Grandma live in a tiny house came about because I needed Lucy to stay with her parents, in order to make her visit back to Plumpton as painful as possible! So the tiny pink house was born because I’m an evil writer who torments her characters.

I recognize him right away. Ben Owens. Smug podcaster.

This is one of the few scenes that stayed pretty much the same from first draft to final draft. It’s also a scene I was really looking forward to writing! The dynamic between Lucy and Ben was so much fun to write.

I fully expect Mom to cancel the party.

I knew from the very beginning that I wanted to do a wild, chaotic dinner or party around the middle of the book, but I didn’t actually write it in the first draft. In fact, this scene was just a “do this later” note for about the first year I worked on the book. Managing a bunch of characters and making them funny while spiraling into chaos is really difficult and I kept putting it off!

And then Savvy’s standing next to Nina, grinning with her smudged eyeliner, dark blond hair piled on top of her head in a messy bun.

It was SO fun writing Savvy the way Lucy remembered her. Revealing this character slowly, with the podcast and then with Lucy’s memories was a real highlight for me!

“Is that a cosmo?”

Fun fact! They drink cosmos during this scene because I learned how to make them during the pandemic, thanks for Ina Garten. She did a hilarious video of her making an enormous cosmo early in the pandemic, and I felt inspired to try them myself and ended up loving them. Thanks for the idea, Ina!