Opening Context
Alice Feeney’s Sometimes I Lie is a knotty psychological thriller that turns its own storytelling into evidence. Through the coma-bound perspective of Amber Reynolds, the novel probes how truth splinters under pressure—by trauma, by desire, and by the lies we tell to live with ourselves.
Major Themes
Deception and Unreliable Narration
The novel is a study in unreliable narration, beginning with a confession—“Sometimes I lie”—and escalating into a narrative that withholds, refracts, and invents. Deception operates outwardly (misleading others), inwardly (self-protective denial), and structurally (the diary voice masquerading as Amber’s but belonging to Claire). The final identity reveal doesn’t just shock; it shows deception as the very architecture of the book’s reality.
Identity and Self-Perception
Who we are—name, history, role, or inner self—becomes a contested space. The narrator’s performance of “Amber the friend/wife” exposes identity as a series of roles, while the stolen life raises the question of whether identity can be performed so fully that it replaces the self. Mirrors and doubling underscore this instability, reflecting a self that cannot recognize itself.
Memory and Reality
Built on the “Now/Then/Before” braid, the novel blurs recollection, dream, and present sensation until the reader shares the narrator’s disorientation. The coma makes perception porous, allowing manipulated memories—especially the misattributed childhood diaries—to pass as truth. Memory emerges not as record but as narrative, revised to protect the teller from the unlivable parts of the past.
Trauma and its Lasting Effects
The childhood fire radiates outward, shaping behaviors, relationships, and the story’s deepest lies around its heat. The scars appear as compulsions, rage, and repression, with the mind recasting responsibility to survive the guilt that cannot be voiced. Hints of parental addiction and dysfunction suggest a cycle of damage that culminates in catastrophe—and repeats in new forms.
Supporting Themes
Sisterhood and Toxic Relationships
The sisters’ bond is the novel’s dark gravity: intimate, possessive, and indistinguishable at times from control. Built on shared trauma and secrecy, their closeness amplifies the major themes of identity performance and the ethics of love that seeks to own.
Manipulation and Control
Power in the book is exerted by managing stories, bodies, and environments, from stalking and coercion by Edward Clarke to the narrator’s micro-control of routines and outcomes. As a theme, manipulation and control feeds the distortion of memory and the performance of identity, while petty office revenge and schemes against Madeline Frost show how manipulation scales from the domestic to the professional.
Justice and Revenge
Pursuits of justice and revenge masquerade as moral clarity but often cloak obsession and projection. The narrator’s elaborate paybacks—including career sabotage and the climactic “corrections” to the past—blur redress with retribution.
Guilt and Blame
At the story’s core lies a churning engine of guilt and blame: guilt too heavy to bear, blame shifted to make living possible. This redistribution of culpability fuels the unreliable narration and the rebuilding of the past into something survivable.
Confinement and Powerlessness
Amber’s coma literalizes confinement and powerlessness, mirroring the psychological prisons of secrets, dependence, and coercive relationships. Physical immobility aligns with emotional entrapment, making the body a stage for the book’s questions about agency.
Theme Interactions
- Deception and Unreliable Narration → Identity and Self-Perception: Lies don’t just hide the self; they fabricate one, until performance becomes personhood.
- Trauma and its Lasting Effects → Sisterhood and Toxic Relationships: Shared catastrophe binds the sisters into a codependent loop where love and harm are inseparable.
- Manipulation and Control → Memory and Reality: Coercion and narrative spin distort what counts as “true,” making memory a tool rather than a record.
- Guilt and Blame → Justice and Revenge: Unbearable guilt seeks relief in punishment—of others, or of a chosen scapegoat—rebranding vengeance as fairness.
- Confinement and Powerlessness ↔ Manipulation and Control: The less power one has, the more one crafts control through story; the more one controls, the more others are confined.
- Memory and Reality ↔ Deception and Unreliable Narration: Fabricated memories fortify lies, while lies retrofit the past to fit the desired present.
Character Embodiment
Amber Reynolds
As a consciousness trapped in a body, Amber embodies confinement and powerlessness while becoming the canvas onto which others project control. Her liminal state forces the novel’s questions about perception, truth, and who gets to author a life.
Claire
Claire personifies deception, manipulation, and the corrosive alchemy of trauma into identity. By inhabiting her sister’s life, she turns guilt into narrative strategy, proving how far self-deception can go when survival depends on it.
Paul Reynolds
Paul Reynolds illustrates everyday deception and masculine insecurity—white lies about success that metastasize into mistrust. His failures of honesty widen the novel’s atmosphere of suspicion and misreading.
Edward Clarke
Edward channels manipulation and control through stalking, coercion, and narrative intrusion, showing how violence can masquerade as devotion. His presence sharpens the novel’s focus on fear as a tool for rewriting another person’s reality.
Madeline Frost
Madeline functions as the spark for revenge plots, turning professional rivalry into a theater for “justice.” Through her, the novel shows how old wounds find new arenas—and new victims—when grievance seeks an outlet.