She Treads Softly: My Lies, Your Lies

Sunday, August 16, 2020

My Lies, Your Lies

My Lies, Your Lies by Susan Lewis
HarperCollins: 8/11/20
review copy; 416 pages

My Lies, Your Lies by Susan Lewis is a recommended novel of intrigue that morphs into a family drama.

Joely is a ghost writer who assists other people in telling their story, so it is a surprise to her when she is hired by a well-known writer, Freda Donahue, to be a ghost writer for her. Freda apparently has a story she wants to tell to set the record straight and she hand-picked Joely to do the job. It is clear from the start that Freda is an odd, eccentric woman who has an arrogant, condescending attitude. The story she wants to have Joely write is set in 1968 and is about a fifteen-year-old girl who had an affair with her twenty-five-year old teacher. Joely wants to escape her home life right now anyway because it is in turmoil.

My Lies, Your Lies started off strong and once it got going it grabbed my attention. The tension was palpable and I was glued to the pages. Then something switched off in the writing and the novel morphed into a completely different story, one that was neither gripping nor compelling. There was a place in the novel where, if Lewis had changed her direction and came to a conclusion, I would have rated it five stars. Instead, she headed off in an insipid, unbelievable direction and lost my interest in the last 20% of the novel. The impact the novel could have had was lost in a fluffy ending. The writing was mostly good and the characters well-developed so I'm recommending it, with the warning that the ending will work for some readers and not for others.

Disclosure: My review copy was courtesy of HarperCollins.

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John Updike's six rules for reviewing:

1. Try to understand what the author wished to do, and do not blame him for not achieving what he did not attempt.

2. Give him enough direct quotation--at least one extended passage--of the book's prose so the review's reader can form his own impression, can get his own taste.

3. Confirm your description of the book with quotation from the book, if only phrase-long, rather than proceeding by fuzzy precis.

4. Go easy on plot summary, and do not give away the ending.

5. If the book is judged deficient, cite a successful example along the same lines, from the author's oeuvre or elsewhere. Try to understand the failure. Sure it's his and not yours?

To these concrete five might be added a vaguer sixth, having to do with maintaining a chemical purity in the reaction between product and appraiser.....Review the book, not the reputation.... Better to praise and share than blame and ban. The communion between reviewer and his public is based upon the presumption of certain possible joys in reading, and all our discriminations should curve toward that end.