When First Person Starts Lying to You

Every first-person narrator is lying to you. Not in the big Gone Girl way. In the small, human way that real people lie — to themselves, mostly, and by selection rather than invention.

The first-person narrator has only the version she decided to tell. She was there when the thing happened. She's choosing, right now, which details make the cut. She's choosing which she remembered wrong. She's choosing what she'll call the scene in three chapters when she has to refer back to it.

The craft question isn't whether she's reliable. She isn't. The craft question is: which of her lies do you know about, and which are lying to you too?

Three unreliabilities worth knowing by name

The catalogue runs wider, but three show up in almost every novel worth re-reading.

Unreliability of omission. The narrator leaves out the thing that would put everything in a different light. Often she leaves it out because she's telling the story to a person she doesn't want to know that part. (She's telling it to you. You are a person now.)

Unreliability of self-portrait. The narrator describes herself as more reasonable, more hurt, more patient, or more foolish than she actually was in the scene. The scene shows a different person than the narrator insists she was. The gap is the drama.

Unreliability of interpretation. The narrator renders events accurately and then tells you what they meant. Her read is wrong. The reader, given the same details, gets a different verdict. The reader is meant to.

Notice that none of these require the narrator to be wicked or disturbed. Everyone you know does all three weekly. First-person fiction is built from the same material.

How to make the dial visible

The problem with a narrator who lies to herself is that, by definition, she isn't going to announce it. You can't write “of course she was lying to herself, dear reader” without collapsing the whole device.

Instead, you stage the gap. Four reliable ways:

1. Let another character react. The narrator describes a thing she said “gently.” The other character winces. The reader sees the winced-at version.
2. Let the physical scene contradict the claim. She says she was calm. Her hand shakes when she reaches for the glass. The narrator doesn't notice she noticed. The reader does.
3. Let time contradict her. Chapter 3: “I don't think about him anymore.” Chapter 7: a ten-paragraph flashback to him, unprompted by anything in the scene.
4. Let dialogue she reports trap her. She tells you what he said. What he said implies what she said. What she said was nastier than she's admitting.

Every one of these is cheap in the best sense — zero word cost, huge interpretive payoff. You can add one to a draft-four paragraph with a single added sentence.

A distance you have to decide on

There's a bigger strategic call underneath all of this. How far in time is the narrator from the events?

A narrator telling you what happened an hour ago is drunk on it, still bleeding from it, unable to draw the lesson. Her sentences should feel close to the event. She shouldn't have the phrase for it yet.

A narrator telling you what happened ten years ago has the phrase. She's told this story before, probably to herself, in the shower, for ten years. Her sentences should feel rehearsed. She should be wrong about the lesson, though — rehearsed wrongness is its own tell.

Most novice first-person fails because the narrator sounds like a present-tense liveblog and a finished memoir at the same time. She's inside the car crash and she's already written the essay about the car crash. Pick one. Or pick a controlled, visible slide between them.

The moment you notice you're lying to yourself

One more technique worth the price of the whole essay: the self-interrupt.

It's when the narrator is telling you her version and then, mid-sentence, flinches — notices, for a half-second, that this isn't quite the truth. And then she keeps going with the polished version anyway.

“It wasn't that I missed him. It was — well, I suppose I did, in a very specific way, which I won't get into.”

Three moves in that sentence: initial lie; crack in the lie; polite refusal to examine the crack. The reader has watched all three and now knows more about the narrator than she'd ever voluntarily tell.

Those moments should happen maybe three times in a novel. Each one is a small earthquake. You can't manufacture them on every page or they become a tic. You look for them — you feel for them — at the seams of the material where you, the writer, know she's fudging.

The working rule

First person is not a camera strapped to a person's head. It's a story a person is telling. Which means everything true of told stories is true of it.

You want to know if your first-person narrator is working? Ask this, cleanly: what is she trying to convince the reader of, and why does she need the reader to believe it?

If you don't have an answer, she's not narrating. She's just describing. The difference is whether the novel breathes.