Lies I Told My Sister is Louise Ells’ second novel and is a sensitive, poignant work of fiction. Taking place over just 17 hours and alternating between past and present, the novel takes us into the strained relationship of estranged sisters Rose and Lily, who are meeting at the hospital after Rose’s husband has been injured. Very quickly, issues of their childhood, the death of their older sister, and the inevitable truth of past lies and secrets surface. But while centering around a serious injury, the novel focuses on the cost of secrets, the depth of the bond between sisters, and just how far we will go to protect the ones we love—and ourselves.
Louise joins us for a Power Q & A to talk about her fascinating protagonist, Lily, and her unreliability as a narrator.
Lies I Told My Sister by Louise Ells (Latitude 46 Publishing)
Q: When recounting the traumatic incident from her childhood which changed the direction of her life, Lily is “. . . aware that it is the memory of a memory of a memory, and that over the years I have added details and embellished in some places, let other facts fall away.” Can any of Lily’s versions of her life be trusted, or is she an unreliable narrator?
A: That’s an interesting question! I didn’t deliberately set out to make Lily an unreliable narrator as a literary device, (such as Amy Dunne in Flynn’s Gone Girl), and she doesn’t lie to the reader about, or withhold, vital information. Lily is sometimes aware when she’s lying to herself, but she also believes stories she’s been telling herself for years, and many of those are less than accurate. She is convinced, for example, that had she not terminated her first pregnancy, she would have carried to term and delivered a healthy baby. In reality, she has no evidence to support that belief, and holding on to it is more harmful than beneficial for her. Although she places great importance on shared memories, Lily’s inability to face her painful memories results in her isolation.
“We do not see things as they are, we see things as we are.” (-attributed to Anaïs Nin)
I wonder if any of us is truly trustworthy a narrator of our life? My maternal family founded and ran a legal firm, and I’ve had many conversations with solicitors, barristers, and judges, all of whom suggest that eyewitnesses provide, at best, inaccurate evidence, because human memory is so fallible. Lily believes that her remembered lived experience must be true until she is presented with alternate versions, which she then has to decide between. I watched a production of the play Rashomon at the Shaw Festival in the mid-1990s, and thirty years later I still remember my amazement as I slowly came to the realisation that a single “true” version of events was never going to be revealed. I hope my readers question what really happened on that spring day in 1976, and what actually transpired the day that Peter fixed the broken kitchen door. I suspect readers will blame Lily far less than she blames herself.
Lily and her mum are both inadvertently responsible of having created family myths to share with Rose. Rose is an intelligent woman, and knows that Tansy can’t have been a perfect child and life on the Old Homestead can’t have been as romantic as Lily portrays it to have been. Because Rose loved and misses Bobby, however, she is more inclined to accept all the positive stories she’s told about him.
In many ways Lies I Told My Sister is a continuation of the conversation I started with my short story collection, Notes Towards Recovery, when I asked how the stories (and lies) we tell ourselves, and others, shape our lives. Like so many people, Lily creates her identity in part through the telling, and re-telling of her stories. She is fully aware that there is a clear line between exaggerating the truth and telling an outright falsehood, but when the truth is too distressing to face, she rewrites rather than reframing. Although she places great importance on shared memories, Lily’s inability to face her painful memories for years resulted in her isolation.
One of the wonderful things about fictional characters, of course, is that they can always learn and change. By the end of my novel, Lily has become much more aware of her mistakes and misinterpretations, and is determined to move forward with a greater understanding of, and focus on, honesty.
Author Louise Ells.
About Louise Ells:
Louise Ells was born and raised in Northeastern Ontario. After years of travel, she moved to Cambridge and earned her PhD in Creative Writing. She was a Hawthornden Fellow in 2017, and published her short story collection, Notes Towards Recovery (Latitude 46) in 2019. Louise teaches at universities and colleges in England and Canada and currently lives just north of Toronto, where she can often be found in her library surrounded by books and snuggled up with her cats.