Lies, damned lies and autobiographies

nor is the odd white lie. “She went to stay on your uncle’s farm,” Miranda and her siblings were told about a favourite cat that they half knew to be dead.

But for Miranda, there were also more serious omissions. Her eldest brother’s mother died when he was a small child and it was only years later that she understood that the cause of death was an abortion, and not the stomach ulcer her father claimed. Miranda’s father began courting her mother, Maureen, only a few months after his first wife’s death, but for some years, Maureen went along with the lie that a more decent length of time had elapsed.

Doyle has had the clever idea of structuring her story through a series of 70 of the lies told in her childhood and early adulthood. In the process, she explores the nature of lying and asks why lies should beget lies within marriages and families. Although this is her first book, Doyle is a natural and spirited writer, and her story is confidently and stylishly told. She’s insightful in her observations on marriage, where she finds that there are more secrets than in any other kind of relationship. “The honesty and openness that a husband and wife expect can force us to sometimes bury who we are.”

And she’s unearthed some interesting scientific facts. Did you know that the bigger the brain, the more frequent the deceit (lemurs are less sneaky than chimpanzees)? Or that pathological liars have more “white matter” than “grey matter” in their frontal lobe?

All this seems to have particular relevance now, in our era of fake news, and Doyle is aware of this. We all lie, she says, and politicians are among the worst. She cites (a bit woollily) PolitiFact’s finding last year that 70 per cent of the statements Donald Trump had made in his campaign were questionable (with 17 per cent “pants on fire” falsehoods), and concludes that the electorate must have heard that he was deceiving them – but no longer cared.

Trump, in the taxonomy established by Doyle, would count as a pathological liar, whose lies are rendered more convincing by his self-deceit. “When we are blind to ourselves, we are more convincing. Holding self-belief, despite evidence to the contrary, bewitches others.”

Of Miranda’s own cast, the person with the most self-belief of this kind is her father. While beating his children, he could consider himself a good person. He liked rescuing people: a couple refused respite care for their autistic adult son; a female Pakistani colleague bullied at work.

What does Doyle make of the potential parallels between Trump and her father? I’d have been interested to hear her explore her personal sense of the connections between public and private lying a little more. Instead, she has rather an anxious tendency to turn to psychologists every time she wants to make a point, which leads to moments of banality: “According to Dorothy Rowe, the psychologist, we tell lies as a way to defend the sense of who we are. Lies give us back the control we believe we have lost.” Really? Or: “Psychologists from Columbia and Stanford have found a correlation between the language we use and the way secrets make people physically feel.”

It’s much more interesting when Doyle stops generalising and turns to the particularity of her own case: the liar turned memoirist. If, as she admits, growing up in a climate of lies turns you into a liar yourself, then where does this leave you as a writer? Authentic-sounding memoir is not necessarily truthful. Her father, we learn, was a compulsive and relatively convincing memoirist himself.

“I have lied just as much as I need to,” she writes, saying that she has invented some dialogue and “neatened up a fractured and disjointed life”. But at the same time she knows that “memoir will always be a work of self-deception”.

And she understands that merely telling the truth cannot provide the liar with the redemption she hopes for. “Do I kid myself that by betraying my parents, I am telling the truth?” The answer, as so often in this elegantly ambivalent book, is yes and no.

Lara Feigel on a curious memoir made up of fibs told to the author as a child ‘Do I kid myself that by betraying my parents, I am telling the truth?’