None Of This Is True Lisa Jewell Quotes

When she doesn’t like the reality of things, she finds a reality she prefers.

Do not claim that you are anything other than what you are. An evil motherfucking basic bitch. ‘My name is Alix Summer.

But I suppose the problem is that people often don’t realize that their lives are changing for the better until after the event, when they stop to look back.

And there it is, the point which it all boils down to eventually. The point where there are no words, no theories, no explanations for behaviors that baffle and infuriate and hurt. Just that. Men.

And as awful as it sounds, death is a clean break. There are no gray areas. No ambiguity. It’s like a blank canvas in a way.

The energy they give off is effervescent, a swirling, intoxicating aurora borealis of grating, glorious entitlement.

I just wanted—and I know how bad this sounds—but I wanted her to be somewhere else. Not at home. I hated it when she was at home; she cast this mood, this atmosphere. I didn’t want to talk to her. I didn’t… God save my soul, I didn’t like her.

Jojo’s got what you might call an elastic relationship with the truth.” “Elastic?” she repeats. “Yeah. She, er… how can I put it? When she doesn’t like the reality of things, she finds a reality she prefers.

But what I’ve found, Nathan, is that life shows you the way when you forget to make one. So, you know, let’s wait and see.

Acting as if there is something wrong with me, when there isn't. It's the world that's wrong, you and I both know that.

You know, like when you’re driving down windy roads and you deliberately close your eyes for a second, just to see what happens. So that’s what I did.

But I guess maybe everyone has a purpose. Though some are harder to fathom than others.

Absolutely spine-chilling stuff, with some shocking glimpses into the darkest corners of humanity: we guarantee you’ll be bingeing the whole thing in a day.

Where Josie is stiff and unanimated, her mother is all expansive hand gestures and chatter. She’s glamorous, too, clearly takes care of her appearance, sees herself as a woman worthy of attention and respect.

her and Walter on to the internet for people to gawp at and to judge makes her feel queasy. But she’s happy for others to do so. She’s a consummate lurker. She never posts, she never comments, she never likes. She just looks.

Once again, she is struck by the sheer blandness of him, the impenetrable wall of nothingness between his physical being and the rest of the world. Yet he is clearly a master gaslighter. Behind the dead eyes lies the soul of a groomer and a liar and an abuser. She feels a bolt of ice shoot through her core and shivers slightly.

Hi! I’m Your Birthday Twin! A NETFLIX ORIGINAL SERIES

I listened to your podcast this summer. Basic bitch? Really? I’ve been under attack all my life, Alix. All my life. And now from you too.

A WEAK MAN CAN’T LOVE A STRONG WOMAN. HE WON’T KNOW WHAT TO DO WITH HER.

But it is clear to Alix that Pat is actually a raging narcissist, and that no child of a narcissist ever makes it out into the world unscathed

And it was Dad who helped monetise it all, got me on Glitch, managed my subscriptions, opened my bank accounts. He did all of that for me. He was the one who made me famous.

it doesn’t feel as if there ever was a peak, rather an abyss formed of trauma that she keeps circling and circling with a knot of dread in the pit of her stomach.

Is it any wonder that Alix is so torn about her marriage, when her husband is capable of such acts of generosity and affection, whilst also capable of making her want to die?

You have to be free in order to be in control, Alix. You have to be free. No baggage. A clean break.

She was so jealous of him, of the fact that we loved him. She was sick with it. You know. Sick in the head.

And actually, all things considered, I’d probably tell thirteen-year-old me to run for the hills and not look back.

what sort of feminist rewards men for not behaving badly with offers of penetration?

All the while resisting the temptation to say, Fuck, Josie, you married a pedophile.

Been with my husband since I was fifteen years old.

Because if she is right and he is wrong, this podcast could be the making of Alix’s professional career.

Thirty-one.’ ‘Not young.’ ‘No. Not young. She was building a career.’ Alix sees a sour look pass across Pat’s face. ‘Well,’ she says. ‘Nice if you can plan it that way, I guess.

We’re very lucky. Most people work hard, don’t they? But not everyone gets to live in a house like this.

a sort of blundering, thoughtless, aimless approach to life. A “do the thing and worry about it later” approach.

And he just looked at me and his eyes were this color, I don’t even know if there’s a word for it. Just the most incredible shade of nothing.

She was making a true crime podcast, out of the events of her own life.

She does not have to leave on Saturday. She smiles and heads up the next flight of stairs to her room next to Eliza’s on the top floor.

Amy: “Yes. All this. All the killings. All the deaths.

strange wire of connection, that sense that there is something bringing her and Alix Summer together, something in the universe.

She’s starting to feel that Erin is part of the problem here. She’s starting to feel like Erin is no longer on her side.

Remember you have choices.

Being a good dancer, for example. Great on a second date, but not so important fifteen years down the road with two children, two careers and a future to worry about. At eight fifteen Nathan

Yes. It’s terrible. Only slightly more terrible than a husband who doesn’t come home for a dinner that his wife has cooked for him and spends the whole night out somewhere in his work clothes.

It was a loud household. A lot of shouting. A lot of slammed doors. And then one day, I guess about five or six years ago, it suddenly went really quiet. And we never really knew why. Until all this happened.

This is it. I’m jumping. I’m going. I’m leaving this world. I’m entering another. It was almost as if I knew, even then, that there was no way back. That once I’d befriended the monster, that was it. For life.

My life had actually begun. Or at least that’s what I told myself. That’s what I believed. It’s only now that I can see how wrong I was. That I was just handing myself from the hands of one controlling person to another.

What a strange people we are, she thinks of her countrymen: where other people take to the shade, to the aircon, stay indoors and close their curtains in the heat, the English hurl themselves at it, like pigs into a furnace.

She wants to ask Pat why she didn’t plan it that way. She was clever and had ambitions. Why did she get pregnant at twenty? Why didn’t she go back to university afterwards? But she doesn’t. Instead, she slides the photo back

Then she pulls on her favorite dress; it’s made of denim and buttons up the front to a shirt collar and ties up at the waist with a matching belt. She wears it with her denim Vans and appraises herself in the full-length mirror.

And the interview itself: reliving the early days of her relationship with Walter; telling her about her terrible mother; the look on Alix’s face of rapt fascination, as though Josie were the most interesting woman she’d ever met in her life.

This year she thought of the honeyed glow of the Lansdowne, the buzz of chatter, the champagne in ice buckets on outdoor tables on warm summer days, and she thought of the little bit of money her grandmother had left her last month in her will,

So, in your opinion, Walter didn’t groom Josie?” “Groom her? You mean manipulate her into a relationship with him? No. I don’t think so. I think she saw him, she wanted him, she got him. She didn’t care who she hurt. She’s never cared who she hurt.

and you know my alarm goes off at six thirty yet you couldn’t even wait for half an hour because you’re too fucking selfish. So yes, thanks a lot, Nathan. I’ve had four hours’ sleep and now I have to get our kids up and get them ready for school and

But, Josie, think about it. Erin has been abused under your roof for years. You’ve done nothing to protect her. She waits until you’re out of the house before she uses the bathroom. What on earth makes you think she’s going to get in touch with you?

if you’re out there somewhere listening, know this. Your fight is yours and yours alone. Do not claim to be fighting on anyone’s behalf. Do not claim that you are a victim. Do not claim that you are anything other than what you are. An evil motherfucking basic bitch.

sometimes I make myself imagine what it would be like if Walter died, to see if maybe that will make me know if I love him or not, and I really do think, if he died, everything would be better. And surely, if that’s the way I feel, then I don’t really love him? Do I?

Yes. I do. And I am. You can be happily married and a feminist.’ ‘I don’t think so. I think that you can only be a feminist if you’re single.’ ‘Oh. That’s an interesting counterpoint. Can you elaborate?’ ‘I shouldn’t need to, Alix. You should understand what I’m saying.

But then she looks again at the blurred version of herself in the big window and suddenly she sees that the half-finished portrait is that of a queenly woman, not a gauche girl, and she knows that finally, after all these years, it is time to hold her life up to the light.

when she went from being the sort of girl who drank warm cider with rough boys to the sort of girl who had the love of a real man, who had beautiful babies and a two-bedroom flat. But that girl … that girl is starting to feel like a shapeshifter, a fraud, a one-dimensional paper doll.

She tries to imagine what he must have looked like reeling into a hotel at four in the morning, his bright red hair awry, breathing the putrid breath of a long night of alcohol and rich foods into the receptionist’s face, before collapsing into a hotel bed and snoring violently in an empty room.

A life lived in fast-forward and now, apparently, she should peak and crest and then come slowly, contentedly down the other side, but it doesn’t feel as if there ever was a peak, rather an abyss formed of trauma that she keeps circling and circling with a knot of dread in the pit of her stomach.

had been attracted by Josie’s slight weirdness: the denim, the old husband, the clipped, detached way in which she spoke. It would be easy to assume that all her weirdness was a result of having spent her childhood with a narcissistic mother and her adult life with a man like Walter. But what if the weirdness was innate?

Honestly? I think I was bored, Roxy. I think I was bored and I was having problems with my husband, I was filled with anger and resentment, with this low-level rage, and your mum came along with her stories that made my problems pale in comparison and I think it just stopped me focusing on the shit in my own life. That’s all it was. A distraction.

It’s happening, Walter. Whether you like it or not. I’m going to tell Alix everything. I can’t live like this anymore. We’re moving on.” “I can’t talk to you. You’re insane. You’re literally insane. I’m married to a fucking nutter.” “And I’m married to a fucking pedophile!” The air in the room freezes. For a second, neither Josie nor Walter breathes or moves.

She pictures her leaning down in the dressing area and finding the pieces of evidence she’d left in her shoe rack this morning before she left, the key-card holder, the little bag, the illegible phone number with a girl’s name she’d added to it. Daisy. She’d been pleased with that. The sort of ultra-feminine, young-sounding name that would set alarm bells ringing.

She casts around desperately for something to take, some shred of Alix to fill her up until they meet again. She lifts the lid of Alix’s recycling box and sifts through it until she comes upon a glossy magazine called Livingetc. She flicks through it and sees that it is full of beautiful photographs of houses. She slides it into her shoulder bag, and she heads home.

she knows why she agreed to work with Josie: because, subconsciously, she wanted something to hurt her, and here she is now, staring at the last four walls her husband ever saw, and she is hurting, she is hurting so badly it feels as if fingers are inside her gut shredding it into pieces and she grabs hold of the doorframe with both hands and curls into herself and howls.

So I got chatting with her and she asked me what I did and I told her about the acting. Told her I was struggling. You know. As actors do. Made light of it. And she said—and these were her exact words—‘I might have a gig for you. Give me your number.’ So I gave her my number and then, yeah, a few days later she called me. And that was that. Up to my neck in it. Up to my fucking neck.

she doesn’t want to be that wife, the purse-lipped, stick-up-the-butt wife, the wife who can’t relax and can’t have fun and spoils it for everyone else. She wants to down tequila shots and sing and dance and laugh like a drain. But she can’t take on that role because Nathan has already staked his claim on it and one of them has to remain sentient and together; one of them has to be the grown-up.

Alix knows that she deserves better than being abandoned by her husband twice a week while he gallivants around spending money on tequila shots and hotel rooms, that she deserves her messages to be replied to, her calls answered, a proper explanation for the absence of her husband for twelve straight hours. She knows it, but somehow the pendulum of pros versus cons keeps swinging back to the pros.

She said that your father left the marital bed every night and went into Erin’s bedroom, then didn’t come back.” “Yes. He was gaming with her.” “Gaming?” “Yes. He was part of the thing, part of the act, you know. The subscribers loved my dad being there. He would just sit behind her and make wisecracks. He had a nickname. Pops. Erased and Pops. That was part of why her stream was so popular, because of him.

Because Josie didn’t tell you lots of things and Josie’s run off letting the whole world think that her husband was a monster, that he groomed her, that he abused his children, and the world needs to know that’s rubbish. You need to know that’s rubbish. Walter Fair was far from perfect. He was quite controlling. Liked things done his way. He was quite full of himself, yes. And obviously I knew it was wrong that we were having an affair behind his wife’s back. Of course I knew that.

You are telling me that in the aftermath of what happened with Walter and Brooke, your youngest daughter ran away from home and you withdrew conjugal favors from your husband, and that as a result of that, your husband started to visit your older teenage daughter in her bedroom every night, to, you assume, sexually abuse her. Your daughter began to regress to the point of wanting to eat only baby food and stopped leaving her room entirely. And this has been going on for the past five years?” “Around about. Yes.

Both women fall silent. Then Josie sighs and says, “Men.” And there it is, the point which it all boils down to eventually. The point where there are no words, no theories, no explanations for behaviors that baffle and infuriate and hurt. Just that. Men.

Stumbling from the cool of the air-conditioned hotel foyer into the steamy white heat of the night does nothing to sober him up.

Worked fine for my other two.

Men.’ And there it is, the point which it all boils down to eventually. The point where there are no words, no theories, no explanations for behaviours that baffle and infuriate and hurt. Just that. Men.

No child of a narcissist ever makes it out into the world unscathed.

It means she’s wrong, that everything, literally everything, about her is wrong and that she’s running out of time to make herself right.

She told us all these lies about her, that she used to be a prostitute, brought tricks into the house, that she used to beat her and starve her and of course we were small so we believed her. But then our dad told us it wasn’t true, that Mum was just jealous of Grandma because she’d been with Dad before her.

She says this with a strange certainty, as if the world were not full of dangerous people who prey on the vulnerable, as if nothing bad could possibly have happened to her daughter between three o’clock on Saturday morning and now.

She loves that Nathan thinks she’s pretty, but she also wishes that Nathan could see the beauty in less conventionally attractive women, too. It makes him sound shallow and misogynistic when he denigrates women’s appearances.

Walter didn’t really have much to do with the girls’ schooling, especially after all that business with the social services when Erin was in year six.

She tries to claw back the stolen half-hour, but her adrenaline is pumping again; her husband went somewhere last night and has woken up in his friend’s flat and doesn’t know what happened in between. Her husband, who has a career and a mortgage and two children to think about. Her husband, who is forty-five.

Other people have been out here all day, enjoying themselves, enjoying the weather, enjoying their friends and their children. Other people have been living.

But it is clear to Alix that Pat is actually a raging narcissist, and that no child of a narcissist ever makes it out into the world unscathed.

Josie tucks the hand wash into the back of her underwear drawer with the Nespresso pod. It came in such a pretty bottle: dark gray with a cherry-blossom print on it, like Japanese art. And it smells like Alix.

Yeah. She, er… how can I put it? When she doesn’t like the reality of things, she finds a reality she prefers.

are you just going to sit around feeling sad about everything or are you going to fire up your engines and make something out of all this fucking awfulness? Because

The name on the card”—she turns to Alix and nods, just once, as if she already knows something—“was Miss Erin Jade Fair.

She is not a feminist, she is not anything; she is a trinket, a flibbertigibbet;

I’d been in denial throughout my whole pregnancy—drinking, smoking.

She thinks of her underwear drawer, at home, of the trophies and trinkets tucked away behind her socks and bras. Not just Alix’s. The others too.

are you just going to sit around feeling sad about everything or are you going to fire up your engines and make something out of all this fucking awfulness?

I say words before I hear them in my head, you know?

It’s terrible. Only slightly more terrible than a husband who doesn’t come home for a dinner that his wife has cooked for him and spends the whole night out somewhere in his work clothes.

But it is clear to Alix that Pat is actually a raging narcissist, and that no child of a narcissist ever makes it out into the world unscathed. This knowledge adds nuance to her view of Josie, helps make more sense of her.

Yes. I was a bit. My mum always makes me feel like that. I mean, I know she looks very together. I know she gives off this vibe of being a decent person, all her talk of saving the estate and everything. But believe you me, she’s not what she seems at all. She was a terrible mother, Alix. A terrible, terrible mother to me.

Interjected with neutral questions. All the while resisting the temptation to say, Fuck, Josie, you married a paedophile.

Yes. I’ll need a plan. But what I’ve found, Nathan, is that life shows you the way when you forget to make one. So, you know, let’s wait and see.

shallow puddle of a dream,