My Lies, Your Lies by Susan Lewis
Genre: Suspense, Family drama, Contemporary fiction, chick lit
Read: 13th August 2020
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Amazon
Published: 16th April 2020
★★★ 3 stars
DESCRIPTION:
His life was destroyed by a lie.
Her life will be ruined by the truth.
Joely tells other people’s secrets for a living. As a ghost writer, she’s used to scandal – but this just might be her strangest assignment yet.
Freda has never told her story to anyone before. But now she’s ready to set the record straight and to right a wrong that’s haunted her for forty years.
Freda’s memoir begins with a 15-year-old girl falling madly in love with her teacher. It ends in a way Joely could never possibly have imagined.
As the story unravels, Joely is spun deeper into a world of secrets and lies. Delving further into Freda’s past, Joely’s sure she can uncover the truth… But does she want to?
MY REVIEW:
A Susan Lewis book is always going to be a great read, generally highly emotive with a river of suspense flowing through it. And usually with a twist thrown in when we least expect it. MY LIES, YOUR LIES had all this and yet it didn't quite live up to the expectations one would have of a Susan Lewis book. It was still enjoyable...but there were parts that were also bordering on the ridiculous as well.
The story begins with Joely, a former journalist who is dealing with the fact that her husband has moved in with her best friend, Martha the meat-eating man stealer. Reeling from her grief and her husband's betrayal, Joely accepts a job as ghostwriter to reclusive author, F.M. Donohoe, to undertake the task of ghostwriting a memoir. She travels from London to a remote area in North Devon to Dimmett House, riddled with secret rooms, towers and turrets and darkened halls. Freda is the reclusive writer and she is as eccentric as they come. Her manner is aloof and even arrogant. One minute she is full of memories she regales Joely with, the next she takes to her room and doesn't speak to her for a day. Joely doesn't know what to make of her or her behaviour, other than to undertake the task at hand.
Upon arriving, Joely discovers that Freda has already begin the memoir, having written the first two chapters already, and it is her firm wish that Joely continue in the vein with which she began. Their conversations about the memoir lead Joely to pondering many things but none of them would prepare her for where it would lead. Freda had her own agenda with this memoir. She wanted to right the wrongs that had taken place previously as a result of the outcome to the story Joely now transcribes.
It is 1968 and the story of a 15 year old schoolgirl who embarks on an affair with her music teacher. It is explicit in all its naked glory. Their secret assignations, their trip to Paris, their plans and promises for the future...as they parade around naked in the confines of a secluded cottage, soaking up their love for one another. She was 15, he was 25. Not a huge age gap by any means, but still unacceptable by society's standard...even in the age of free love. But where was this love to go, given their age difference? And the fact he was a teacher and she was a student? Surely this could not end well.
Freda drip-feeds information while Joely begins to make assumptions. Is the girl in the story a young Freda? And is the music teacher the husband she lost three years ago? And why does she feel that Freda s watching her and listening in on her phone conversations? It is obvious that Freda is manipulating Joely to tell the story as she wants it perceived. So what was it Freda truly wants out of this?
Joely could not foresee what was to come. The twist that came that threw her whole world into disarray, and left her questioning everything she had ever known? What did it all mean? And where did Freda, and Joely, fit into it all?
MY LIES, YOUR LIES is an eccentric tale to say the least. It was mysterious, duplicitous and intriguing in a strange way. It did promise to be so much more but it really dissolved into a ridiculous caricature. Freda was meant to be a formidable woman but was more eccentric and aloof. Joely should have scarpered when she had the chance but she too went on to prove how idiotic she could be. Her big secret that she wallowed over the entire book, when she wasn't presuming what was to come in the memoir, wasn't that great after all...more a run of the mill kind of secret. Everyone else played so little part you couldn't really connect with them. Holly is a precocious 15 year old that should be taught a little more respect than the way she spoke to her parents, grandmother and even Freda. I think she was given a little too much free reign that would never have been allowed when I was her age. Times may change, but boys and hormones don't. And considering what the basis of this story is about, I would have thought she would have been reigned in a little more.
The story is told primarily through Joely's eyes in the third person, as as occasionally Freda and Joely's mum, Marianne. Peppered throughout are the memoir entries written in the first person narrative, leaving the reader pondering who she may well be.
I do love how the author approached and introduced an illicit affair between a 15 year old schoolgirl and her music teacher. It broke all the rules and crossed many boundaries. But it gave us as readers, food for thought that there is more to the story than one might at first think. Firstly the difference between paedophilia and haebophilia, when all interest in anyone underage is simply considered to be the former. The case here is obviously haebophilia and while it is still a disturbing thought to most, it is quite often an accepted practice in many cultures. Including our own many centuries ago. But that is not the case here. It is a little disturbing and uncomfortable read in parts but does that make it wholly excusable?
So is the relationship supposed to be acceptable or not? It's not so much the age thing, as there were only 10 years between them, it was the fact he was in a position of authority and trust. He has to take responsibility because he was the adult in the scenario. But we all know what 14 and 15 year olds are like. They can turn it on with the best of them. That doesn't make it right but it doesn't make her innocent or blameless either. She set out to seduce him. She wanted him. While in the eyes of the law she is still a child, there is so much about her that isn't. Both are equally to blame because it takes two. She knew what she was doing as did he. They were both complicit. They were both to blame. And there are always two sides to every story.
In my opinion, MY LIES, YOUR LIES took a little too long for interest to take hold - at nearly 30% in, which is a bit too long in my opinion - but then it did admittedly get rather interesting. And then it didn't. The climatic twist came 20% too soon or rather the ending was dragged out a little too long. As a result, it did become slightly ridiculous. I'm not sure how the past and the present were supposed to entwine but didn't seem entirely real. I'm not entirely sure what the author was trying to say in bringing such a story to light.Society certainly wouldn't accept it, so what is she saying? Did I miss something? Is she romanticising it? Or is it a warning?
Overall, not a bad read but not the Author's best. Still, I give it 3 stars for being middle of the road. It's not a book I can decide whether I like it or not.
But one this is for sure...there are two sides to every story. Not just the one you think you know.
I would like to thank #SusanLewis, #NetGalley and #HarperCollinsUK for an ARC of #MyLiesYourLies in exchange for an honest review.
MEET THE AUTHOR:
Susan Lewis was born in Bristol in 1956. She lives in the west of England and has written 26 novels as well as an autobiographical memoir – Just One More Day (2006) with a follow up memoir One Day at a Time to be published November 2011. Her novels were nominated for the Romantic Novelists' Association's Romantic Novel of the Year award in 2002 and 2005.
Lewis was educated at The Red Maids' School in Bristol, England. After several temporary secretarial jobs she worked at the television network HTV in Bristol, then moved to London to join Thames Television to work in news, current affairs, light entertainment and drama. She knocked on the Controller's door to ask what it takes to be a success. He told her: "Oh, go away and write something". Her first novel, A Class Apart was published in 1988. She has since published a further 27 novels.
Three years after her first book was published Lewis moved to France, followed by a move to California in 1996, then to the French Riviera in 2004. During this time she met her partner, James. She returned to Gloucestershire in the UK in 2010.
Her mother died of cancer when she was a child, and she is a supporter of Breast Cancer Care, and the Bristol-based charity Breast-cancer Unit Support Trust (B.U.S.T.), which raises money to help provide treatment and support for the local community and medical technology for the Breast Care Unit at Southmead Hospital, Bristol. She is also a supporter of Winston's Wish, the charity for bereaved children.
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