Don't Mess With Me (Sydney Salter)
I'm not big on lying or unreliable narrators. I do remember being walloped by the revelations about the narrator in Gillian Flynn's Gone Girl, I did not see that coming , but more often I feel manipulated by stories with twists like that. I hated one of this season's Big Books because of its unreliable narrator. Ugh! Don't mess with me. I think it's too easy to make a reader feel tricked by a plot device and much harder to make an unreliable narrator necessary to the story. I don't even like lies of omission and I'm still angry that I gave the author of the memoir Strangers my money--when it turns out she really misrepresented her circumstances. And doesn't need anyone's money. That said, I am not perfect, of course, and while I rarely outright lie, I do omit key information sometimes. As a teenager I did stand in front of a traffic court judge for expired tabs, and when he asked me, "are you currently driving the car?" I answered, ...
