None of This Is True

by Lisa Jewell

Josie nods. Today is her forty-fifth birthday. She finds it hard to believe. Once she’d been young and she’d thought forty-five would come slow and impossible. She’d thought forty-five would be another world. But it came fast and it’s not what she thought it would be. She glances at Walter, at the fading glory of him, and she wonders how different things would be if she hadn’t met him.

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 is fourteen again, sixteen, eighteen, a young mum spending her husband’s money frugally in Sainsbury’s, a middle-aged woman in a quiet flat, and in every incarnation she is the same person: a girl in stasis.