SEE JANE LIE
Newcomer’s buzzy debut novel explores toxic female friendship
Seven Lies
Elizabeth Kay Penguin Viking
The way fledgling British novelist Elizabeth Kay sees it, her life has gone surreal. So what does she mean by this?
Go back a couple of years, and you find her enjoying a productive job as commissioning editor at a leading British publisher — a job that saw her shepherding a new manuscript from the acquisition process through to its ultimate arrival in the bookshops. It’s work she loves.
Meanwhile, at home she was making renewed efforts to fulfil a yearning to write a book herself. The result was Seven Lies, a seductive novel about a female friendship that turns toxic and ends up in a dark and frightening place. It was snapped up by a leading literary agent, who quickly sold it in 25 territories around the world and then negotiated lucrative TV rights.
Kay is accustomed to be on the inside helping to navigate an author’s destiny. But this time she’s an onlooker, the centrepiece of a massive marketing campaign on both sides of the Atlantic. At 29, she’s struggling to adjust — and not only to the “overwhelming ” shock of her huge advance.
“It’s nerve-racking, I have to say,” she says from her home in London. “In my day job, working to launch an author’s book, I have the weight of their expectations and I so want the book to succeed for them and their career. So when it’s happening to myself, I find it quite daunting. It needs a real adjustment to find myself at all comfortable in this space.”
What makes her success even more surreal is that the book has been published, first in the United Kingdom in April and now in North America, in the midst of a pandemic. She also became the mother of a baby boy in February. So it is from the perspective of both maternity leave and lockdown that she has watched the launching of a novel that has been winning comparisons with Gone Girl and The Girl on the Train.
“This would have been a special year anyway, what with the book and the baby,” she says. “But the pandemic has almost overwritten both of those in some way. At home my baby may feel like the biggest change and adjustment in my life — but there are really much bigger issues because of the pandemic.”
Seven Lies, published in Canada by Penguin Viking, follows the first-person narrative of Jane, whose closest friend since childhood is Marnie. And on the very first page, she’s expressing her hatred for the man who has entered Marnie’s life. Kay knew she wanted to examine female relationships from various perspectives — not just the changing nature of a friendship but also mother-daughter relationships and the bond between siblings.
But the book’s main focus is Jane’s obsessive need for Marnie, a need driven to a new and dangerous urgency when Marnie falls in love with George, a man that Jane loathes.
Anxious to preserve the relationship, Jane smothers her true feelings and tells Marnie that the two are right for each other. It is the first lie she tells and it sets off a chain of further falsehoods that fuel the canker of possessive jealousy and ultimately lead to tragedy.
“I knew I wanted to write dark and quite sinister fiction,” Kay says. “I knew that was the space I wanted to be in because those were the books I really loved reading. And I felt that female friendship was a somewhat under-explored area for tension. A friendship can be intense and wonderfully supportive at times, but it can also be complicated by jealousy and lives lived at different speeds.”
Readers will find Jane a hypnotic but increasingly unsettling presence as she continues along her destructive path. So how unnerving was she to write about?
“I loved being inside her head,” Kay confesses. “I really, really enjoyed it.”
She initially feared she might find Jane difficult to live with “but instead I had a soft spot for her which I suppose is problematic given how dark she really is. I saw something vulnerable in her that I hope other people see, too.”
Even though Jane became a larger-than-life presence at Kay’s writing desk, there’s no comparable figure in the author’s life — although she has her own best friend.
“I met her when we were very young. Went to nursery school, primary school, secondary school together. I finally saw her last week after months of separation because of the pandemic. Probably the longest time in my entire life that I hadn’t seen her.”
This strong friendship helped Kay ground her novel in psychological truth.
“I felt I knew where Jane was coming from in terms of having a friendship that was life-defining,” Kay says.
In the book, she needed that friendship to come across initially as genuine before it turned toxic.
The name “Barbara Kay” is a pseudonym. When she sent the completed novel to agents, she did so anonymously because she wanted it to be judged on its merits, not as the work of someone within the publishing industry.
“I was worried about what would happen if I used the name I was known by and they hated the book. Still, I was kind of expecting when I began sending it out that I wouldn’t hear anything back for a long time.”
Instead, the book was immediately picked up, and Elizabeth Kay is generating excited buzz in the book industry. Even so, she’s been attentive to the way Seven Lies is being handled.
“I feel very confident with my publishers in Canada, the U.S. and the U.K. I really trust these people and feel very comfortable and confident that they are doing exactly what I would hope to be doing myself. But it’s still a whirlwind.”
I knew I wanted to write dark and quite sinister fiction. I knew that was the space I wanted to be in because those were the books I really loved reading.