Justine Larbalestier: Liar

***SPOILERS***

           Liar is a first person narrative told by Micah, an avowed liar. She repeatedly tells us that she’s done lying and she’s telling the truth now, but then at various points reveals that something she said earlier was in fact not true at all. As readers, we naturally believe what a first person narrator tells us. What else do we have, really? This isn’t the classic Huck Finn unreliable narrator situation, where Huck simply doesn’t have the larger context to understand the ramifications of his situation and what he says. Micah understands everything and lies to avoid incriminating herself.

            That’s probably the best place to start separating truth from lie. Micah’s secret boyfriend, Zach, is murdered. That’s the inciting incident, the point that starts this entire narrative going. Whether Zach was or was not her boyfriend is another question entirely. Whether Micah had anything to do with his death is also in dispute. All of these things are overlaid by one great big lie, or possibly a delusion that Micah has: that she is in fact a werewolf who doesn’t experience her monthly transformation as long as she takes her birth control pills.

            I could perfectly well accept the werewolf story in the context of fiction. We can accept any type of world building when it’s built into the story and we know where we stand. But Micah only gives hints about “the family disease” until halfway through the novel, when suddenly she comes out with the statement that she’s a werewolf. It’s so jarring, so out of place in this otherwise real-world story, that Micah sounds seriously delusional. She makes all the pieces fit. She had hair all over her body as a baby. If she doesn’t take birth control pills, she has catastrophic bleeding at her period and grows hair all over again. She’s an astonishingly fast and easy runner. She has an incredible sense of smell. It’s easy to see how someone with psychological problems could take all of that and put it together to conclude that she is a werewolf.

            Micah’s boyfriend was killed by dogs, according to the police. This piece of information changes things. Her parents are completely aware of her werewolf nature to the point of keeping a cage in her bedroom in case she forgets her pills. But they reveal to us, through interrogating Micah, that she forgot her pills the weekend Zach died. That she was gone for four days and returned home covered in blood, wearing stolen clothes. Micah’s parents decide that Micah killed Zach herself and send her off to live on the off-grid family farm, where she can run wild in wolf form every month with all her cousins.

            The reading contract means that I felt a peculiar constant desire to believe Micah. The narrator is all we have in terms of access to this world, so second guessing our narrator feels entirely wrong. But Micah drops little bits of information into the narrative that make it impossible to stay with her. Near the end of the novel she mentions something about how awful “the trial” was and how her family had to get rid of their landline because the media wouldn’t stop calling. What trial? We never hear any more about it. Was Micah on trial for killing Zach? She never mentioned it except in that tiny passing moment. We can’t trust her at all, either to tell the truth or to give us all the information we need.

            I keep trying to back up and figure out what are actual facts in this book. Micah lives in New York. A boy named Zach from her school died. Her extended family lives on a remote farm upstate. Beyond that, it’s hard to say. She tells us about her brother at one point, then tells us she made him up, then tells us she almost killed him one day, then tells us that “it was an accident” and her brother died, implying that she killed him herself when she was in wolf form.

            Micah is a bit of a Rashomon unto herself, giving us so many pieces and facets of the truth that we can’t tell which perspective is real. She’s protecting herself from the truth, whether hiding in this imaginary werewolf identity, or finding ways to see the world that help her make sense of it. It’s not even clear where she is when telling this narrative. At one point she says it’s cold and dark and there are no windows where she is, but another time it sounds like a dorm room and she says she’s at college. Her family throws her out and she stays with her favorite teacher, but then the teacher takes her off the birth control pills. Micah turns into a wolf and attacks the teacher’s elderly mother—or does she?

            Larbalestier does an incredible job of keeping us off balance the entire length of the novel. Just when we think we know something, it gets yanked away. It’s impossible to settle on any one interpretation of the evidence. I would love to teach this novel, just to see who thinks what and why, and to see how the arguments would go. Nobody doubts that Remus Lupin is a werewolf, because J. K. Rowling told us so in no uncertain terms. Why then would we doubt that Micah could be one, except that she tells us herself that she’s a liar?

            This book highlights our interpretations more than anything else. There’s a brief mention of being held down, bars on the windows, being given pills. Does that short passage mean that everything else is being recounted while Micah is in a psychatric facility? That’s the most prosaic and depressing way to read the book, but does that mean it’s the most accurate? Again, Remus Lupin is plenty real to me, so there’s no reason fictional Micah can’t be a werewolf.

            One thing I found particularly fascinating happened because of the cover of the book, of all things. Micah is half white, half black, but the original cover showed a white girl with long straight blonde hair. Larbalestier herself says that this disconnect caused readers to disbelieve anything Micah said right off the bat, because clearly she was lying about being half black. The publisher replaced the photo with a black girl with curly hair, matching Micah’s description. Does that make Micah more believable?

            I’m reading for “what we know and when we know it,” so really this is the hardest book in my entire list to study. I’ve read it at least a dozen times over the years but that doesn’t help at all. What we know: nothing, really. When we know it: for a short time, until a new truth eclipses it. This post-structuralist dream novel is all about the reading of it, locating interpretation in the reader, instead of in some independent written truth out there somewhere.

            How can I use this? Most of all I want to learn how to manage distrust in the reading experience. I’m actually studying this (in a manner of speaking) with a therapist right now, since most of the major techniques of narcissistic emotional abusers work exactly in this area. They try to destabilize their victims by gaslighting, undermining, minimizing, denying, and so on. They actually focus on this precisely, forcing victims to stop trusting their own understanding and interpretation of reality. I suspect I’ll have to dig into this much deeper in future writing, since it doesn’t seem to apply much to my current project. But it’s such a fundamentally aggressive way to interact with someone. The emotional abuser says: What you think is real isn’t real. What you think happened didn’t happen. What you say about yourself isn’t true. What I say about you is true because I say so. The emotional abuser says: You are an unreliable narrator.

            Micah writes (or narrates) like someone who has never been believed her whole life long. She lies all the time because when the truth is uncertain, contested ground, we might as well try to make it into what we’d like it to be. If she is a mentally ill teenager with violent tendencies, who may have killed her brother, her boyfriend, and possibly three other people (she tells us the number may be as high as five) then of course a better reality would be that she’s a werewolf, which means her violent side is hidden deep within her and only comes out when she transforms. Who could blame a wild animal for doing what comes naturally? And if she is a werewolf, how wonderful to have such a gift, even if it means most people will misunderstand and think she’s mentally ill. So much better to be a werewolf!