None of This Is True

by Lisa Jewell

I know you said you didn’t want anything, but I didn’t believe you.”

It means she’s wrong, that everything, literally everything, about her is wrong and that she’s running out of time to make herself right.

She loves that Nathan thinks she’s pretty, but she also wishes that Nathan could see the beauty in less conventionally attractive women too. It makes him sound shallow and misogynistic

And as awful as it sounds, death is a clean break.

“Apparently, they made quite a few attempts to get me up. They, erm, they had to let themselves in in the end. Just to check I wasn’t, you know, dead.”

Walter didn’t really have much to do with the girls’ schooling, especially after all that business with the social services when Erin was in year six.

“Yes. That’s what it felt like. His interest in me. It felt like a monster.”

Alix squirms. This woman, she strongly suspects, loathes her daughter.

But it is clear to Alix that Pat is actually a raging narcissist, and that no child of a narcissist ever makes it out into the world unscathed.

helps make more sense of her.

Alix takes a breath and stops herself from asking her next question.

And it smells like Alix.

But after they’ve gone, then what? Will you still want this? Everything you’ve built? Will you still want Nathan?”

“But when you think about Nathan dying, how does it make you feel? Really? Inside? Does it make you feel sad? Or does it make you feel… free?”

“No. It doesn’t make me feel free. It makes me feel sad.”

It’s only now that I can see how wrong I was. That I was just handing myself from the hands of one controlling person to another.”

Walter is always, always there. Walter is never anywhere else. She would like it if Walter could be somewhere else.

“Sure,” he says. “Anything for you, my love.” He says this with sarcasm, but also, Alix knows, with a touch of sincerity, an awareness of how much he currently owes her.

She’s starting to feel that Erin is part of the problem here. She’s starting to feel like Erin is no longer on her side.

“Yeah. She, er… how can I put it? When she doesn’t like the reality of things, she finds a reality she prefers.”

Time has lost its form and its meaning.

and waits to feel normal. But the normal doesn’t come.

Maybe normal is over there, she ponders, on the other side of the park somewhere;

Nathan wants her to have a plan. Well, now she’s got one.

“Well, yes. I suppose. But you’d think that the sort of people who listen to your stuff would have some sympathy, some empathy.

“I’m trying to tell you my story, Alix. My truth. And you seem to be trying to make it into something it isn’t. You either want my story or you don’t. You can’t have it both ways. You just can’t.”

It all just strengthens her resolve.

She is simultaneously shocked and entirely unsurprised that she has been let down by Nathan.

“I don’t think so. I think that you can only be a feminist if you’re single.”

sigh

Who is she? Why is she? What has she done? What should she do? Is she a good mother? Has she been a good wife? Good sister? A good friend? A good woman? Does she deserve what she has? Is she shallow? Is she irrelevant? Does she want to be relevant? Is she a feminist? Or is she just feminine? What more could she have done for Josie? And women like her? What more could she have done for her marriage?

Alix didn’t know what color an artichoke was; she just knew that the dress was the same color as Nathan’s eyes and that was the most important thing.

does lisa jewell not know what an artichoke is or is it a British thing

not one minute of it was true. None of it.

🤨🤌🏼