W
e all lie. I lie out of laziness and habit, to
make stories interesting or more amusing.
I lie because I’d rather stay at home and
read a book than venture across town on
a damp evening to make conversation
with people I don’t know. I lie because, yes, your
haircut does look awful, but there’s nothing to be done
until it grows back. These are the small lies; the kind lies.
Some of us tell bigger lies because we’ve lost our jobs,
or we’re in debt, we no longer love you, or we’re having
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to tell the truth. Crime novels are built on these lies. The
biggest lie of all is at the core (I didn’t kill her), but this
is concealed among the other lies (I came straight home;
I was asleep; we never argued). The job of the crime
writer is to mete out the truth in spoonfuls, sprinkled
among the untruths and red herrings, and make the
reader work to understand who is lying, and why.
I write stories about murder, and so I write about
lies and the people who tell them, and the people who
are hurt by them. My novelĴ began with
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protagonist] when I was 16, and the details stayed withM
y childhood memories tend to blur, largely
because of my propensity for fudging the
truth as a child. It’s hard to remember
what was what sometimes – even what
I noted in diaries was part fact, primarily
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Ȃ Ĵǰ
some kind of alternate reality where my strict Nigerian
parents were far more laid-back. I’d spend Sundays
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come Monday morning, spin the answer to the
question, “How did you spend your weekend?” into
a fabulous funday. Prayer in church pews became a trip
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ę Ȭ ǯ
I didn’t just stick to white lies by any means: mine were
a whole rainbow of untruths.EMMA FLINT, AUTHOR OFLITTLE DEATHS“HE LIED ABOUT HIS JOB AS A DOCTOR, UNTIL
ONE DAY IN 1993 WHEN,BELIEVING HE WAS
ABOUT TO BE EXPOSED, HE MURDERED HIS WIFE”“IT’S HARD TO REMEMBER WHAT WAS
WHAT SOMETIMES –EVEN WHAT I NOTED IN
DIARIES WAS PART FACT, PRIMARILY FIBS”
YOMI ADEGOKE, JOURNALIST, PRODUCER AND CO-AUTHOR OF
THE UPCOMINGSLAY IN YOUR LANE: THE BLACK GIRL BIBLEwas comforting and no-one looked at me as though
I had a third eye.
It wasn’t long before I began to wonder: what if?
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if the lies I told by omission and prevarication were
true, and what I had believed to be reality – that my
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lie? What if he had been alive all along?
I stopped talking about my father altogether. When
a discussion turned to fathers among my classmates,
I would tune out or excuse myself. But in my mind,
he came alive. I spent hours thinking about where he
was and what he was doing, how in that moment
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ǯ Ĝ
him, piecing together all I knew about the event
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emerged from the wreckage alive.
I realised during this phase that in order to build
a plot that is compelling enough to compete with
reality, the details are crucial. That’s where the delusion
lies. In my favourite scene, set in a future time when
my father came home again, it wasn’t convincing if
I imagined he was wearing a suit. If he was wearing
a dark-blue suit, a white shirt and a red tie, things
came into focus. If all the clothes were frayed because
they were second-hand, then it could all be true. After
all, his documents were still at home, so he couldn’t
have been able to get a job and would have had to
depend on charity until he found his way back home.
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those words to was a friend whose father lived
abroad. We’d known each other for four years, and she
thought that my father, who had now been dead for
nearly a decade, was still alive. We were in secondary
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going on holidays. She was talking about how excited
she was to see her father during the holidays when
I blurted out, “My father is dead.” She stared at me
for a while, then reached out and held my hand.
There was no going back to thinking my father might
still be alive after that day.
Something strange happened during the holidays:
I opened a blank notebook and, before the break was
ǰ ę ǯ ¢ ¢
ę Ȃ Ĵ
poetry? Perhaps it was just time, or I was bored. It
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painful as it was, it had set me free from the single story
that had consumed my imagination until then.72 ELLE AUSTRALIA