What This Theme Explores
Trauma in Sometimes I Lie is not a single rupture but a series of shocks that echo through memory, identity, and choice. The novel asks how a mind survives when the body and narrative are taken over—by machines, by other people, and by the past itself. It probes the costs of vigilance and the mistrust that follows harm: how fear recalibrates love, work, and self-perception. Above all, it questions whether healing means remembering fully or learning to live with what can never be fully known.
How It Develops
The novel roots trauma early, in childhood incidents of bullying and a lost bracelet that tether Amber to shame and secrecy. Her private diary becomes a fragile refuge that also teaches concealment; trust curdles into self-surveillance as she learns that vulnerability invites violation, a pattern first traced in the memories gathered in the Chapter 1‑5 Summary. These formative wounds don’t vanish—they harden into a stance toward the world: anticipate harm, preempt disappointment, stay small.
The car crash and ensuing coma radicalize that stance. Immobilized and voiceless, Amber’s consciousness is forced into pure witness while machines regulate her body. The result is a trauma of disembodiment: the mind remains alert while agency disappears, fusing terror with hyper-attentiveness. Hospital confinement compounds this, as routine procedures—scrubbing, tubing, monitoring—become assaults on dignity. The sterile care that keeps her alive also engraves a new fear: that safety can feel like violation.
Outside the ward, relational traumas rhyme with medical ones. In the Chapter 6‑10 Summary, Paul’s lies and gaslighting blur cause and effect, teaching Amber to doubt her own perceptions. The push-pull of occasional tenderness followed by withdrawal rehearses the hospital’s logic in human form: comfort that controls, attention that erases autonomy. The Chapter 11‑15 Summary furthers this pattern through Claire, whose protective vigilance slides into ownership; love becomes a project, and Amber a problem to be managed.
Professional humiliation then exports private ruptures into public space. In the Chapter 16‑17 Summary, Madeline’s on-air shaming weaponizes visibility, transforming Amber’s competence into exposure. The result is perfectionism as armor: compulsive checking, ritualized control, and a self-worth that lives on the brink. Finally, in the Chapter 21‑25 Summary, nightmares stitch past and present together; sleep offers no mercy, and the boundary between memory and hallucination thins. Across these stages, the novel shows trauma accruing, layering, and looping, until survival looks like constant interpretation—of others’ motives, of one’s own mind. For a broader arc of these events, see the Full Book Summary.
Key Examples
The coma as living entombment
“I hear the beeping, the machine… I cannot move, I cannot speak, but I can hear the world slipping past me.”
Amber’s body is captive while her mind remains lucid, a split that becomes the template for later dissociation. The scene literalizes trauma’s core injury: awareness without agency.
The dead robin and first intimacy with loss
“I pick up the robin’s tiny body, its feathers still warm, and I feel a surge of guilt that I could not save it.”
This childhood encounter fuses empathy with self-blame, establishing guilt as Amber’s reflex in the face of harm. The warmth of the body—life almost, but not—prefigures the hospital’s liminal state.
The neck scar as a quiet archive of violence
“A faint line of bruising on my throat… the memory of a hand tightening around my throat.”
The body remembers what the mind tries to reorder; the scar is a marginal note the skin refuses to erase. It turns the invisible—coercion, fear—into a visible signature.
Claire’s intimacy as erasure
“‘You’re not a person, you’re a project,’ she whispered, and I felt my own voice dissolve.”
Care becomes control here, revealing how familial love can replicate the domination Amber fears. The language of “project” reduces her to a task, echoing the hospital’s procedural gaze.
Public shaming as professional terror
“She barked at me on live TV, ‘You’re a liar,’ and the studio lights burned into my skin.”
Madeline’s humiliation fuses exposure with pain; the lights feel like touch, turning attention into a bodily assault. Work itself becomes a site of threat, sustaining hyper-vigilance even outside intimate relationships.
Character Connections
Amber Reynolds is both subject and analyst of trauma; her fractured narration mirrors its effects. She assembles reality like a detective of her own life, but every discovery risks retraumatization, so her storytelling is a survival strategy—reframing events to momentarily reclaim agency. The oscillation between certainty and doubt captures the mind’s adaptive, if destabilizing, response to injury.
Paul Reynolds reenacts the coma’s power dynamic in emotional terms. His selective warmth keeps Amber attached while gaslighting destabilizes her judgment, binding love to insecurity. In this way, he personifies the cycle of harm followed by intermittent relief that can trap survivors in abusive patterns.
Claire offers a more ambiguous threat: she means to protect, but her control narrows Amber’s choices until autonomy feels dangerous. By conflating safety with supervision, Claire complicates the notion of caretaking, showing how trauma can make both parties complicit in a bond that soothes while it diminishes.
Madeline Frost shifts harm into the public and professional sphere, proving that trauma does not stay in private rooms. By attaching shame to performance, she forces Amber into rituals of perfection that echo medical monitoring—metrics replace trust, and worth is constantly measured.
Edward Clarke represents the return of the repressed: a physical reminder that what seemed escaped can reappear with force. His presence triggers flashbacks that collapse time, demonstrating trauma’s refusal to proceed neatly along a healing timeline.
Symbolic Elements
The dead robin embodies innocence interrupted and the first internalization of guilt. Its smallness reflects Amber’s own perceived fragility, while its warmth—life lingering after harm—anticipates her liminal existence in the hospital, alive but untouchable.
Hospital machines symbolize the mechanization of care and the confiscation of autonomy. Their reliability is chilling: they keep Amber alive while reminding her she is not in charge of her own breath, turning safety into dependence.
The red bracelet condenses childhood promises and their betrayal. Lost and later rediscovered, it returns as a relic that both comforts and indicts—proof that something once protected her, and that protection failed.
The mirror stages the fragmentation of identity. Each glance is an audit: Can she trust this face, this memory, this version of events? Reflection becomes interrogation, and the self is always slightly misaligned.
Contemporary Relevance
The novel’s depiction of medical trauma resonates with ICU survivors who describe intact consciousness alongside bodily helplessness, and the lingering anxiety that follows. Its portrayal of coercive control and gaslighting mirrors current conversations about the subtle mechanics of intimate-partner violence that erode agency without leaving obvious marks. Sibling codependency and “protective” domination complicate our assumptions about family care, while workplace harassment shows how public humiliation can entrench private symptoms like OCD and insomnia. In mapping how trauma migrates across settings—home, hospital, studio—the book captures the modern challenge of healing in a world that never stops watching.
Essential Quote
“I’m in a hospital. The ventilator huffs and puffs, the machines breathing for me, while I am forced to listen to the sound of my own heart beating like a drum of warning.” – Chapter 1‑5 Summary
This passage crystallizes the theme: life sustained at the cost of control, awareness sharpened into dread. The heart’s “drum of warning” turns the body into its own alarm system, signaling how survival can feel indistinguishable from threat when trauma rewires perception.