None of This Is True

by Lisa Jewell

A life lived in fast-forward and now, apparently, she should peak and crest and then come slowly, contentedly down the other side, but it doesn’t feel as if there ever was a peak, rather an abyss formed of trauma that she keeps circling and circling with a knot of dread in the pit of her stomach.

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.

Then Zoe and Alix turn the conversation away from the Huge Coincidence and immediately Josie sees that it has passed, this strange moment of connection, that it was fleeting and weightless for Alix, but that for some reason it carries import and meaning to Josie, and she wants to grab hold of it and breathe life back into it, but she can’t. She has to go back to her husband and her flatbread and let Alix go back to her friends and her party. She issues a quiet “Bye then” as she turns to leave and Alix beams at her and says, “Happy birthday, birthday twin!” “You too!” says Josie. But Alix doesn’t hear her.

She’s a consummate lurker. She never posts, she never comments, she never likes. She just looks.

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.

Is it any wonder that Alix is so torn about her marriage, when her husband is capable of such acts of generosity and affection, whilst also capable of making her want to die?

From somewhere else in the flat she hears the muted sounds of her husband’s voice. She tucks in her earplugs and turns the page of her book.

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.

She has not seen Roxy. The emptiness of this realization scoops out the base of her belly. But then relief quickly takes its place.

And there it is, the point which it all boils down to eventually. The point where there are no words, no theories, no explanations for behaviors that baffle and infuriate and hurt. Just that. Men.

Alix knows that she deserves better than being abandoned by her husband twice a week while he gallivants around spending money on tequila shots and hotel rooms, that she deserves her messages to be replied to, her calls answered, a proper explanation for the absence of her husband for twelve straight hours. She knows it, but somehow the pendulum of pros versus cons keeps swinging back to the pros.

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.

She thinks of her underwear drawer, at home, of the trophies and trinkets tucked away behind her socks and bras. Not just Alix’s. The others too. She feels an itch to go home, just for a moment, to tuck the child’s drawing and the bread tag and the photos of Leon into the drawer.

and so when I wrote that epilogue and saw what had really happened through the lens of Josie’s warped and broken mind, I was as shocked as I expect my readers to be. Of course, I thought to myself, of course! All along I’d been painting Roxy in these tiny splashes of dark back story without ever really exploring what a child like that might end up being capable of, especially with a pedophile for a father, a narcissist for a grandmother, and a sociopath for a mother. It was the perfect ending and made sense of everything. The relief I felt as I put it on the page was immense.

Kinda wish I didn’t read the authors notes at the end. Reading that LJ wanted readers to believe it was Roxy was hard for me… I liked how it ended and thought maybe that part would be ‘Josie’s POV’ where she’s distorting her realities. I don’t love that the author revealed she actually meant for it to be Roxy