In Shari Lapena’s Everyone Here Is Lying, the safe, tree-lined streets of Stanhope turn into a stage where performance collapses under pressure. Avery Wooler’s disappearance doesn’t just spark a mystery; it exposes how fragile truth is when families, neighbors, and an entire suburb depend on appearances to hold themselves together. As secrets collide, the novel maps how even “small” lies metastasize into community-wide catastrophe.
Major Themes
Deceit and Lies
The novel’s engine is the theme of Deceit and Lies, where nearly everyone hides something to protect love, status, or self-image. Affairs, false alibis, and strategic misinformation create a chain reaction: William Wooler conceals his violence and infidelity, Nora Blanchard disguises her dissatisfaction, Marion Cooke engineers a devastating false tip, and Avery Wooler weaponizes a fake kidnapping. Burner phones and a hidden key become emblems of premeditated secrecy, showing how one lie necessitates the next until the truth is nearly unrecoverable.
Appearance vs. Reality
Beneath the polish of suburbia lies rot, and Appearance vs. Reality animates that critique. Stanhope sells safety and civility, yet its pristine homes conceal abuse, obsession, and moral failure: the Woolers’ glossy success hides a marriage frayed by rage and fear, while the Blanchards’ churchgoing warmth masks infidelity and simmering resentments. Even William’s public identity as a doctor—a figure of trust—sits in stark contrast to his private brutality, indicting an entire culture of performed normalcy.
Family Dysfunction
As the psychological engine of the plot, Family Dysfunction shows how secrecy corrodes the home from within. The Woolers fracture over how to parent Avery, as Erin’s patience clashes with William’s volatility, culminating in violence that triggers Avery’s “disappearance.” In parallel, the Blanchards’ emotional vacancy drives Nora to seek intimacy elsewhere and Al Blanchard into obsessive surveillance—two different versions of a family collapsing under silence.
Supporting Themes
Manipulation and Control
Power in Stanhope is exercised through soft pressure and calculated narratives, making Manipulation and Control a constant undertow. Avery plays her parents and the town to punish her father and recast herself as survivor; Marion manipulates an entire investigation with a single, plausible lie; William tries to steer suspicion with half-truths. Even the journalist Casey Wong’s empathy becomes a tool to coax reality from performance.
Revenge and Obsession
In Revenge and Obsession, fixation curdles into harm. Spurned and envious, Marion’s obsession with William escalates from fantasy to a plot to kidnap—and potentially murder—a child, wielding control as punishment. Al’s quiet, relentless tracking of Nora is its domestic echo: a psychological revenge that festers behind a placid exterior.
Guilt and Blame
The novel orchestrates a relentless reshuffling of culpability, making Guilt and Blame both motive and trap. William’s shame for hitting Avery drives his lies; Erin’s fear of failing as a mother breeds anger and denial; Michael blames himself for confiding the hidden key; and suspicion migrates from William to Ryan Blanchard to Marion—only to land back on Avery’s original ruse.
Theme Interactions
- Deceit and Lies ↔ Appearance vs. Reality: The suburb’s flawless image demands concealment, and the need to “look good” fuels the lies that make truth unknowable. The houses of Connaught Street symbolize this pact: beautiful façades that contain the very crimes their curb appeal denies.
- Family Dysfunction ↔ Guilt and Blame: Dysfunction breeds guilt (over temper, parenting, neglect), which then breeds more deception to ease or reroute that guilt—tightening the spiral at home and in the investigation.
- Revenge and Obsession → Manipulation and Control: Obsession seeks mastery; revenge supplies the purpose. Marion’s fixation turns into strategic manipulation of the police and the community, demonstrating how private fantasy becomes public harm.
- Appearance vs. Reality ↔ Family Dysfunction: The performance of the “good family” requires suppressing conflict, which ensures conflict will erupt elsewhere—through affairs, violence, or covert surveillance.
- Deceit and Lies → Community Panic: Each individual lie aggregates into a fog of misinformation, allowing rumor to outrun evidence and making the town complicit in its own misdirection.
Development across the plot:
- An intimate deception (William and Nora’s affair) seems containable. 2) Avery’s disappearance escalates panic, prompting bigger lies to cover smaller ones. 3) Parallel secrets surface—surveillance, infidelity, parental rage—thickening the fog. 4) Marion’s grand deception exploits that fog, redirecting blame. 5) The final turn reveals Avery as the first mover, proving the cycle of deceit self-perpetuates.
Character Embodiment
William Wooler embodies the collision of respectability and brutality: a healer in public, a liar and abuser in private. His panic-driven deceit illustrates how guilt feeds both self-preservation and the community’s misjudgment.
Erin Wooler personifies the cost of keeping up appearances. Her determination to maintain a “normal” family makes her complicit in silence, tying Appearance vs. Reality to Family Dysfunction and deepening her own guilt.
Avery Wooler is the novel’s most precocious strategist, mastering Manipulation and Control to punish her father and recraft the narrative. Her performance as victim-hero blurs the line between innocence and culpability.
Nora Blanchard channels the tension between desire and duty, using deception to escape a passionless home. She underscores how the performance of “good mother/wife” collides with private need.
Al Blanchard is obsession cloaked in meekness: his passive exterior hides surveillance and fantasies of retaliation. He mirrors Marion’s vengeful intensity on a smaller, domestic scale.
Marion Cooke is revenge weaponized. Her obsessive fixation fuses with strategic lying to commandeer the investigation, proving how personal grievance can endanger an entire community.
Ryan Blanchard becomes a receptacle for communal suspicion, illustrating how Blame migrates toward convenient targets when truth is obscured by performance.
Michael Wooler, overlooked and anxious, embodies the collateral damage of Family Dysfunction; his misplaced guilt shows how children internalize adult failures.
Casey Wong’s interviewing style demonstrates a paradox: manipulation in the service of truth. She exposes how method and motive can conflict, even when the goal is clarity.
The novel’s ultimate warning is stark: when communities prize image over honesty, secrets become both currency and contagion. Love tips into control, protection into harm, and the line between victim and perpetrator narrows until almost anyone can cross it.