Sometimes I Lie

Narrator Amber Reynolds opens the book by introducing herself and revealing three points before Chapter 1 that will inform the rest of the book: “1. I’m in a coma. 2. My husband doesn’t love me anymore. 3. Sometimes I lie” (1).

It is Boxing Day, the day after Christmas, 2016. Amber Reynolds struggles to figure out where she is. She feels suspended between “sleep and wakefulness” (1). She panics when she determines she cannot move her body, nor can she talk. She can hear but cannot speak, and she begins to understand, through the antiseptic smells and the steady throb of a machine, that she must be in a hospital and, more alarming, she is “voiceless and still” (23). She understands she is in a coma.

The pain is steady rather than intense. She is aware of nurses coming into her room and attending to her, brushing her hair, and turning her over. She gathers from their conversations that she was brought in the night before after she survived a nasty one-car accident. She is relieved at last when she hears her husband, Paul, arrive in the room. However, something in his voice disturbs her, and somehow she is certain that he had something to do with the accident. In his conversation with the attending doctor, Paul reveals his hand is badly injured and that there are marks on Amber’s neck not consistent with the car accident. Paul offers no explanation. Amber learns that she was not wearing her seatbelt, which she always does, and that she was driving Paul’s car, which she never does.

The following morning, her sister, Claire, visits. Claire is her younger sister and, to Amber, their parents’ favorite. They always doted on her, and Amber has always been jealous of that attention. Amber suddenly sees a disturbing vision of the car accident that includes an image of young girl in a pink dress walking down the middle of the street, causing the car in which Amber is riding to veer sharply and collide with a tree. In the vision—or perhaps it is a fragment of a memory—Amber has a sensation of being thrown through the car’s windshield. Paul and Claire then depart together. Although following time is difficult for Amber, she is aware that sometime later Paul returns, and she feels two strong hands momentarily grip her neck. Paul is joined by two detectives who question him about where his wife was going, why she took his car, and why neighbors reported the two of them arguing quite loudly. Again, Paul offers no answers.

As Amber lies in the hospital bed, she struggles to recall the days leading up to the Christmas Day accident. For the last six months, she has worked as an assistant host to a popular BBC morning radio show called Morning Coffee. She is not entirely happy but plays the part of an engaged team player, finding comfort with her only friend at the studio, Jo. It is the Monday before Christmas, and the topic for today’s show is a roundtable on the psychological importance of imaginary friends. After the show, Amber heads to a restaurant to meet Jo for lunch. Amber runs into an ex-boyfriend named Edward Clarke. Feeling increasingly distant from her husband since the publication of his successful first novel some months earlier, Amber cannot help but notice how good Edward looks. Amber has begun to be a bit concerned about the possibility her sister and her husband are having some sort of affair. Amber came home from work unexpectedly just days earlier and found the two of them sharing a bottle of wine, her sister doused with exotic perfume and dressed in tight clothes. Amber wants to keep her marriage together, but she cannot bring herself to ask Paul about Claire. She states, “The harder I try to hold us together, the faster we fall apart” (32).

For some time now, tensions have grown between her and the morning show’s iconic host, Madeline Frost, to the point that the show’s producer quietly tells Amber that she is most likely going to be let go after the first of the year. Desperate to keep a job, even one she does not enjoy, Amber, with Jo’s help, plots an elaborate campaign, which she grandly dubs Project Madeline, designed to get Madeline fired. That night she sets up a bogus Twitter account and starts the rumor that Madeline Frost will soon be leaving Morning Coffee.

The next day, Tuesday, December 20, Claire comes to visit Amber at her home just down the street from Claire’s. Amber tells her about running into Edward, although she is not sure why she shares that confidence with her sister. Amber is taking a stroll in the garden when a robin crashes into the patio window. Amber is fascinated watching the bird die, broken and alone. Even as she tosses the dead bird into the garbage can, she thinks how easy it is to die.

In diary entries dating to 1991, Claire (presumably, although at this point the impression is that Amber is their author) shares her expectations starting at a new school. She is 10, and keeping a diary is the assignment her teacher has given during a unit on Anne Frank. In her diary, Claire recounts how often her parents argue and how heated the arguments can be. She is certain they do not love her anymore. Although Claire records that the family has moved a lot, they are now living in her grandmother’s house following Nana’s death from cancer. At school, Claire meets Taylor (who readers will later learn is Amber, going by her middle name), but Claire is uncertain over whether she wants a friend this soon at a new school. At home Claire spends much of her time alone. She is fascinated by her grandmother’s keepsakes, most notably an iron doorstop shaped like a robin. She is sad the bird cannot fly.