Lying Is Its Own Form of Storytelling
In literature, nothing is as fascinating or destabilizing as deception: Your weekly guide to the best in books
No one can make a story sing quite like a liar. Spinning falsehoods is its own kind of storytelling, and when it happens within a book’s plot, it can be fascinating, destabilizing, or both. That’s true regardless of whether a character or a narrator means to be malicious. After all, lying is ubiquitous: “We all have a tendency to fictionalize, whether we realize it or not,” . Drawing on the work of Jonathan Gottschall, Kelly says that we tweak our memories and anecdotespull meaning out of chaos.
