Sometimes I Lie

Three statements. That's all it takes to plunge you into uncertainty.

"1. I'm in a coma. 2. My husband doesn't love me anymore. 3. Sometimes I lie."

This is how Alice Feeney's novel *Sometimes I Lie* begins. The narrator, Amber Reynolds, offers these three confessions before the first chapter even starts. And already, the reader faces a problem. How do you trust someone who admits she lies?

Amber is a thirty-something woman lying in a hospital bed on Boxing Day, the day after Christmas. She cannot move. She cannot speak. She can hear, though—fragments of conversations between nurses, her husband Paul, and her sister Claire. Through the antiseptic smells and the steady rhythm of machines, she pieces together the bare facts: she survived a car accident. She's in a coma. And she's terrified.

But Amber's terror isn't just about her physical helplessness. It's about what she suspects. The police think Paul had something to do with the accident. Her husband and sister visit together, and their conversations fuel her paranoia. She remembers finding white wine in the fridge—Claire's drink, not hers. She remembers the sexy lingerie in the closet, three sizes too small for her. She remembers Paul's car parked in Claire's driveway. The pieces seem to fit: her husband doesn't love her anymore. Maybe he never did. Maybe he and Claire are having an affair. Maybe they wanted her gone.

But here's the thing about Amber Reynolds: she tells us all of this. She invites us into her suspicions, her fears, her memories. And then she reminds us, on page one, that she sometimes lies.

This is the central puzzle of the novel. Amber is an unreliable narrator—and not in the subtle, I-might-be-misremembering way. She's upfront about it. She tells us she lies. But if she's telling us she lies, is that itself a lie? Can we believe anything she says? Every confession becomes suspect. Every revelation carries a shadow. The reader becomes a detective, sifting through Amber's words for something solid to hold onto.

The novel's structure mirrors this uncertainty. Chapters jump between three timelines: the weeks after the accident, the days leading up to it, and diary entries from 1991, when Amber was ten and went by her middle name, Taylor. The diary entries feel raw and honest—the unfiltered voice of a child. But whose child? The narrative teases us, letting us assume the diary belongs to Amber before revealing otherwise. Even the past refuses to stay put.

Amber's coma becomes a prison, but also a vantage point. Trapped in her own body, she can only gather clues from what others say around her bed. She learns she was driving Paul's car—a car she never drives. She learns she wasn't wearing her seatbelt—a habit she never breaks. She learns there are marks on her neck that don't match the accident. Each piece of information raises more questions than it answers.

And then there's the little girl in the pink dressing gown. Amber keeps seeing her—a vision, a memory, a ghost. The girl appears in Amber's dreams, standing in the rain, singing a nursery rhyme. She wears a thin gold bracelet. Amber doesn't know who she is, but the girl feels important, like a key she can't quite reach.

The book's title, *Sometimes I Lie*, is both a confession and a warning. It tells us the ground beneath our feet is unstable. It tells us the narrator may be spinning a story, not reporting the truth. And it challenges us to figure out where the lies end and the reality begins.

But here's the question that lingers: if Amber is lying, what is she hiding? And if she's telling the truth, what does that mean about the people around her—the husband who may have tried to kill her, the sister who may have betrayed her, and the ex-boyfriend who just showed up again after ten years?

Because as Amber lies in that hospital bed, unable to move or speak, someone is whispering in her ear. Someone who knows exactly how to keep her in this coma. Someone who has been waiting a long time for this moment.

And that someone is just getting started.