Lying Liars and Rejecting This Month's Blog Assignment (Mary Strand)

This month at YA Outside the Lines, we're supposed to share the biggest lie we ever told ... and to discuss how, as authors, we write unreliable narrators in our fiction.

(Unreliable narrators are ones you can't trust to tell the true story, usually because they're lying either to themselves or you.)

I find it telling that I keep spelling "unreliable narrators" as "unrelatable narrators." Because I don't write unreliable narrators and don't relate to them. Oh, and I never lie.

Why, why, WHY am I always the blogger in the YA Outside the Lines group who rejects the stated mission? (heh heh.)

Seriously, I don't lie. One of my friends told me she once described me to her sister like this: "She's the only person I know who absolutely doesn't lie. Like, ever. But she also doesn't say everything she thinks."

This is a wonderfully accurate description of me, thank you. :-)

Sometimes you're put in a horrible situation, where someone asks you point blank a question that you KNOW they don't want the answer to. "Do I look fat?" "Does everyone think I'm a jerk?" So you change the subject or use silence or offer a tiny sliver of information that is true without being the entire truth.

Or, at least, I do. But everyone who knows me also knows I won't lie to them, so just the fact that I pause before answering gives them the answer they were hoping not to get.

The closest thing to "the biggest lie I ever told" happened in high school, the night I was arrested. (I covered this in a blog three months ago.) (But it was EXPLUNGED, so, legally speaking, I can also say in all honesty that I was never arrested.) (Man, I love law!)

The biggest terror in my life in that moment wasn't the cops or the upcoming criminal trial or even my dad, who was so pissed that my sister Sheila insisted on driving to the police station with him so he wouldn't kill me (okay, not literally) on the way home.

The terror was my mom, who SHOULD have been a lawyer. Man, she could grill you to death. (Also not literally.) When I was caught drinking beer at age 16 with my much-older-than-me softball team, I was too embarrassed to admit to my mom that I did it only because I didn't want to look like a little kid. I didn't actually like the taste of beer. I rarely had it until college, and even then I preferred liquor over beer. (Still true.) So I said I was just trying a beer, which was essentially true. I MUCH preferred the lemonade I also had that night.

Two or three months later in the courtroom, some tricky timing details of the evening came into play, but for my mom's sake I stuck to my story that I had merely had "a beer." When the prosecutor asked me how much I'd had to drink on The Fateful Night, I looked to the back of the courtroom, where my incredibly grim mom was sitting, arms crossed. I decided that my mom's opinion was all that mattered. So I said, "A beer."

I had actually had part of two different beers. Again, tricky timing details were at play. And when the prosecutor started grilling me on the stand, I finally gave up and said, "Which beer?"

In my mind that was the Perry Mason moment, when I saw "PERJURY" in big bold letters in front of my eyes. Even though, even in high school, I never lied. I was going to prison.

Or, well, not. When the prosecutor jumped all over what I'd already testified, and the judge leaned over the side of the bench to stare at me, I saved the day (and my version of the truth) by calmly explaining that I'd had 3/4 of one beer and less than 1/4 of another beer, and that added up to "a beer." (Math girl.)

The entire packed courtroom (except the prosecutor, who was pissed) exploded in laughter. Even the judge did. And THANK GOD, so did my mom. And in that moment I knew I wanted to go to law school.

But that's as close as I come to a lie. And I have no time for narrators who lie. I avoid all books or movies with unreliable narrators. (I'm still spelling it "unrelatable" when I first type it.) I do not write books with unreliable narrators, period. I just googled a list of books or movies with unreliable narrators. I thought Holden Caulfield of The Catcher in the Rye was pathetic (or phony, to quote Holden), and I was able to watch The Sixth Sense only because I knew about the unreliable narrator before I saw the movie, and even so, I still hated that device. I tried to read the acclaimed We Were Liars, but I couldn't handle the lying and unreliable narrator. Hard pass. If I'm reading a book that turns out to have an unreliable (unrelatable!) narrator, I'll put it down. Or throw it, as the case may be.

Lying liars are scam artists. Not a fan of those, either.

Mary Strand is the author of Pride, Prejudice, and Push-Up Bras and three other novels in the Bennet Sisters YA series. You can find out more about her books and music at marystrand.com.