Manipulation and Control
What This Theme Explores
Manipulation and control in Sometimes I Lie probe how power hides in plain sight—disguised as care, love, or professional mentorship—and how it bends truth until victims doubt their own perceptions. The novel asks where responsibility lies when the person being controlled also lies and manipulates to survive. It explores how coercion moves along a spectrum, from subtle emotional leverage to overt physical domination, and how “help” can become a mask for harm. Ultimately, it questions what agency means when one’s body, narrative, and choices are managed by others.
How It Develops
The theme surfaces first through a reversal: in Chapter 31‑35 Summary, Amber Reynolds seeks to protect her career by drugging Madeline Frost. This act reframes Amber not only as victim-in-waiting but as a capable manipulator who uses ordinary objects to reorder reality. Power is not yet brute force; it’s opportunistic, quiet, and plausibly deniable.
In Chapter 36‑40 Summary, Madeline escalates control in public and professional spaces, wielding status and the threat of dismissal to coerce obedience. Her “mentorship” is revealed as domination in the guise of industry norms—she scripts not just the show but Amber’s behavior, blurring consent with compliance. Here, language becomes the weapon: what sounds like guidance functions as intimidation.
Domestic space then turns carceral in Chapter 41‑45 Summary, where Claire locks doors, tracks movements, and controls access to information about the twins and the diaries. Control shifts from career leverage to surveillance and isolation; the home, which should signify safety, becomes a maze with hidden keys and curated truths. The manipulation is intimate and maternal-adjacent, making it harder to name and resist.
In Chapter 46‑50 Summary, Edward Clarke strips away any ambiguity, using drugs, restraints, and threats of sexual violence. The power dynamics turn literal and bodily: hands at the throat, machines hissing, and the terror of being unable to move or speak. What began as social coercion culminates in total physical domination, showing the endpoint of unchecked control.
Finally, Chapter 51‑55 Summary reveals how soft power sustains harm over time: Paul Reynolds pressures Amber through appeals to family, finances, and reputation. His manipulation is domesticated and “reasonable,” weaponizing shared responsibilities—pregnancy, money, the future—to keep her silent. The arc of the theme thus traces a continuum from subtle, everyday coercion to overt captivity, implicating nearly every relationship in the novel.
Key Examples
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Amber drugging Madeline shows manipulation as a survival tactic that corrodes the self. By lacing a simple cup of coffee, Amber turns care into a vector for harm, revealing how easily ethics bend under career fear. The act seeds doubt about Amber’s reliability and foreshadows a world where truth is always adulterated.
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Madeline’s threats to end Amber’s job demonstrate hierarchical control masked as professionalism. She uses public spaces and official scripts to humiliate and direct, proving that institutions can launder personal power plays. The threat isn’t just losing income—it’s losing identity and voice.
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Claire’s locked doors and withheld diary pages relocate power to the keeper of secrets. By rationing access to information and the twins, she controls what Amber believes about herself and her relationships. The result is a psychological prison: Amber moves, but only along paths Claire permits.
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Edward’s drugging and restraints transform manipulation into immobilization. He insists on permanent possession—keeping Amber “forever”—which makes control a spatial and temporal sentence. Terror becomes a tool: fear ensures submission even when the body can’t resist.
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Paul’s pleas about the diary and pregnancy model coercion that hides in compromise. He frames silence as sacrifice for the family, making dissent feel selfish. This moral framing is potent precisely because it sounds like love.
Character Connections
Amber embodies the theme’s moral ambiguity. As a manipulator, she justifies harmful choices as defensive maneuvers; as a victim, she’s forced to confront how easily care turns coercive. Her arc suggests that agency under coercion is compromised, but not erased—choices still carry weight, and survival strategies can entangle a person in the very systems they fear.
Madeline personifies institutionalized manipulation. Her threats, public rebukes, and career gatekeeping show how an industry can legitimize abuse as “standards” or “tough love.” She doesn’t need to touch Amber to control her; she just needs to control the spotlight.
Claire converts relational intimacy into surveillance. By managing doors, diaries, and the twins, she curates reality, ensuring Amber’s experience is partial and dependent. Her methods underscore how domestic authority—especially when framed as protection—can quietly become imprisonment.
Edward is the naked face of domination. He collapses the pretense of care and lays claim to Amber’s body, time, and breath. In his scenes, the theme stops asking whether this is manipulation and becomes a study of captivity.
Paul represents the everyday face of coercion: appeals to love, money, and family that make acquiescence feel like virtue. He rarely threatens; he reasons. That’s precisely why his control is hard to confront—its vocabulary is intimacy.
Symbolic Elements
Coffee becomes a vessel of power: the daily ritual of comfort turns lethal once adulterated. The ordinary object reminds us that control often rides in on routine, not threat.
The red bracelet, offered as a gift, reads as bondage disguised as adornment. Its color—echoing blood and warning lights—marks affection’s capacity to signal danger while pretending to protect.
Hospital ventilators and tubes symbolize the outsourcing of autonomy. Machines “care” for the body while advertising how easily a person’s basic functions can be commandeered by others.
The diary stands for narrative sovereignty. Whoever writes, edits, or withholds it decides what counts as truth, proving that control over the story is control over the self.
Locked doors literalize psychological confinement. They teach Amber—and the reader—that freedom can be removed with a quiet click long before anyone notices.
Contemporary Relevance
The novel mirrors documented patterns of coercive control: financial pressure, isolation, gaslighting, and “benevolent” surveillance that erode autonomy. It resonates in workplaces where power hides behind mentorship, families where love justifies silence, and medical settings where consent can be overshadowed by authority. By dramatizing how manipulation travels through language, logistics, and bodies, the story equips readers to name subtle abuses before they escalate—and to question the “nice-person” façade that often shields them.
Essential Quote
“I put the poison in her coffee… I wanted her to be out of the way so I could keep my job.”
Amber’s confession collapses the binary of victim and perpetrator, showing how fear and ambition can rationalize harm. It crystallizes the theme’s core insight: control rarely arrives as pure malice; it often enters through necessity, dressed as care for one’s future, until the line between protection and domination disappears.