How much of what happened at school could have been completely false? This is beginning to remind me of thinking about Hardboiled Wonderland and the End of the World and trying to piece together an interpretation that fits the text.

Justine, have you been reading Ishiguro? I haven’t felt this chilled since I read A Pale View of Hills. This goes way beyond The Life of Pi. An unreliable narrator is a terrible thing to try to unravel.

So, now I’m wondering what’s at the farm. A hospital? I do believe her parents left her somewhere.

But the wolf interpretation does work. Mostly. I think disassociation works better at the moment, anyway. In a few weeks, I may be back to believing in the wolf.

The main thing I’m still wrestling with is the “punishing inconstant heart” thing. No matter which way I look at it, Micah MUST have been telling the truth about that being in Zach’s book…did she write it?? Did Sarah? Micah mentions later that Zach’s heart was never as constant as her own. This, more than anything, makes me think Micah killed Zach.

But, ARGH! I don’t want to believe that! XD

This book reminds me both of an episode of “Star Trek” in which Kirk and Spock fry the CPUs of a race of androids in “I, Mudd” by using the liar’s paradox and Agatha Christie’s “The Murder of Roger Ackroyd” in which there is the unreliable narrator. I think I may tell my friends that this is a story of a lying narrator who may or may not be a werewolf. That about covers the whole thing.

I read that book in one night. It enthralled me from the first page- the whole idea of an unreliable narrator, one who could LIE, was just such a weird and wonderful idea. The whole thing was the craziest, wildest, most beautiful piece of writing I’ve read. At the end, my interpretation was that Micah was severely insane, that “upstate” was a mental facility, and that her parents were incredibly abusive towards her. I’m not so sure about the werewolf thing (which completely shocked me) but I think she might have made that up to make herself feel more invincible. Honestly, I think she made up even having a relationship with Zach. She probably admired him from afar, but really had no affiliation with him. Or she could have stalked him. I’ve considered that too. And wow, that thing about her brother, I STILL have no idea what that was about! Is he alive? Did she kill him? Did he even exist? The whole thing is, all of my assumptions could be wrong. Which just makes the book even more intriguing.

Micah is complex. I don’t think she’s entirely right in the head. She lies to much, but without reason. She says there are lots of theories from psychiatrists and the like as to why she lies, and she even implies she lies because the world is better her way, but we have no definitive answer.

When I got to the werewolf bit I almost put the book down. Like, “No way, that’s going too far Justine, you can stretch the lying to breaking point but this one is so not believable”. But I persevered! Hurrah! And once I though to myself, “Maybe this book is allowed to have a fantasy element even though part one didn’t have that element”, it was much easier to read and I was engrossed.

The most interesting thing about this book is knowing that the entire story, from beginning to end, could be a lie. Micah could in fact just be a writer, not a liar, and she, like Justine, is just writing a story, not her story exactly, just her story modified to be interesting, or in fact somebody else’s story entirely, and she’s posing it to be her’s, in which case she would be a liar. Confused? You should be.

Love it.

1. Micha really is a warewolf. I tend not to believe this, because- dispite all of the convincing detalis Micha gives- this seems like a stretch.

2. Micha is mentally ill. Her ‘birth control’ pills are really medication, which is why they are so important, and why she didn’t take it any time someone was killed (like she forgot her pill around the time Zach was murdered, and didn’t ake it the day her teacher’s family died). This makes more sense to me, but the book is fantastic any way you interpret it.

At first when I read the ending, I was horror struck. I was so angry at such and ending, leaving me to decide weather this compulsive liar, who I have strangely come to love, was telling me the truth or again fibbing. I was angry, as if I was the only one she was lying to, as if she personally wanted to make me go insane.

Now I’ll admit, I’m a no-it-all wanna be and I felt the need to decipher this book and decode it until I found out the truth. I googled it and read various blogs and reviews, and then I fell upon this one. After reading many of the posts on this thread, I began to further look into the idea the Micha is indeed clinically mental and that she is not really a wolf at all, rather a troubled teen. I began to believe that maybe what the posts were saying is true. Micha may not be lying however, perhaps she is using being a wolf as some sort of analogy in her life. The cage, a symblic prison brought on her by her parents that she will never escape of. The farm as the mental hospital that which she retreats to and is unsure if she belongs there or not, her cousins being fellow juvineile pacients, her great aunt and grandmother doctors, her uncle, a paciet who has completley lost metal capabilities, Yoyeko, possible being a shirk? And maybe, her birth controls being pills she takes in order to keep her mental sanity?

And then I wondered, did Justine Lebarber think all of this up, metophorically? Did she plot and plan out this novel to be symbolically so much more than Micha was telling us? Did she purposfully create such a story, thus, not lying herself but symbolically speaking? Maybe Micha never lies, maybe she simply alsways speaks in metaphor. So I wonder If Justine wrote this in this way, or maybe, she smiply wrote a story involving a lying warewolf and leaves it up to us to decide. I wonder if maybe Justine was testing the faith in humaity- how much will the cynical, untrusting person of today’s society believe a compulsive lier, even after learning to love her?

Maybe Justing is testing us. Maybe she wants us to trust. Maybe I do.

I want to trust Micha, don’t get me wrong. Everything she says I want to whole heartedly believe. I want to think of Micha going to a nice school and living a fuffiling life. And I think that if thats what Justine wanted us to believe, she would have not have written such an ending, estranging our minds in such a complex way.

And i have met Justine myself (pardon me for refering to her in only the first name, I simply can’t spell the last name) and she seems like a pretty trustworthy, stand up kind of women. I have persoanlly shacken her hand and talked to her, one on one, before reading the novel and I wonder, could this person have decived me so?

There are so many unanswered questions in this book, so mnay holes (like how Micha returned to the city with no money or routes of transoptation) that would prove Micha to be fabricating her life. But then i think of Justine and wonder, is she a lier?

In the end, I do not know If i trust Micha or not. But I better figure it out soon seeing as I have to write a paper on it for my high school english exam (it’s my choosen independant novel!)

Comment if you choose

To me, all the lies about gender and being intersexed seemed really important. Her story would really make sense as someone struggling with gender identity or something similar, but maybe unable to deal with it directly. Coming up with a narrative about being a werewolf could be a really good way to cope with feeling like a ‘freak,’ as she so often called herself, and a confusion about ‘what’ she fundamentally is. Then there was Yayeko, who seemed like the last person to try really get through to her, trying to tell her that she should be happy to be a girl.

For example, what if she wasn’t initially lying when she pretended to be a boy? Say that she had been born intersexed, but everyone thought she was a boy. Hence the name ‘Micah.’ What if SHE WAS Jordan until she hit puberty– she got her period, metaphorically killing him? (That could make her feel uncertain about whether her parents loved her). So when she got to high school, she was still acting like a boy out of habit or comfort, until her own body betrayed her when she laughed.

It would be a realistic narrative, accounting for the pills and interventions and attempts to change her, that makes sense without her necessarily being insane. Because I don’t really want her to be insane and a killer–that would be a degree of darkness in her psyche that I almost feel is the most reductive possibility, as fascinating as it still would be.

I’m not sure how this works in to the whole murder story–though her desire to tell Zach the truth in some way might–but I think that it works in well with the werewolf story. And it explains a lot about why she feels she was raised lying. Maybe the murder lies and the identity lies are not inherently intertwined, except by her reactions.

We don’t know who Micah’s audience is, but assuming that it is US (the reader), let’s assume that she’s trying to tell the truth. She details the parts about werewolves, which adds credibility to her story. Also, if we assume that at the beginning she promises to tell no more lies, the whole thing about being born with fur would be true.

The trial could be her parents arrested on charges of child abuse. After all, there’s the cage, never taking her to doctors, giving her birth control pills from her mother’s prescription, and abandoning her at her grandparents’ place without telling her and pulling her out of school.

I have a lot of thoughts about the book that I haven’t quite worked out, so I don’t want to comment on the plot directly. I do want to say why I think it’s important that the book not be spoiled. It’s not a matter of whether the reader should be surprised or not. In the course of spoiling (or reviewing or summarizing), the spoil-er tells the plot as they read it to the spoil-ee. If you were told that Liar was a werewolf story or even just told it was a fantasy story, you might be more inclined to believe Micah’s werewolf story. I could tell a friend who hasn’t read it that it’s the story of a girl I’m convinced is in a mental institution – so she, depending on my greater knowledge of the story, might read it as though it was a story written by a girl in a mental institution (even though that’s in no way been established as fact.) What you know going in shapes how you organize the story in your head as you read – the expected v. the unexpected, the believed v. the unbelieved, what’s happened v. what usually happens in stories of whatever genre you were told Liar was – and ultimately the plot overall changes.

This applies to all stories because the experience of reading is so subjective – a book like Liar, where the subjectivity of the narrative is obvious, highlights the subjectivity of any narrative. All narrators are Micahs and all stories are lies. Knowing the details of what a story is supposed to be can get in the way of seeing what a story is. Of course, summaries etc are so commonly read before a book that I’m not arguing against anything here. But when was the last time any of us read a story knowing nothing about what happened in it or who the writer was? It’s an interesting thing to consider.

Because all of it actually happened. Or none of it did. It’s a flowing, changing narrative, and it has at least dozens of different meanings and interpretations. Most of them are lies, and just as many of them are true. I like that there isn’t an answer. It’s just as powerful if Micah is a werewolf, using prison/institution metaphors to grapple with what is happening to her, as it would be if she were a traumatized, possibly mentally ill girl who has constructed a story of herself as a werewolf to deal with that.

But I do think it’s valuable to spin theories. I don’t think any of them could ever be right (or wrong), but each one adds a new layer to the story.

The first time is on page 232.

My most current theory is that there really is a “family illness”, but that it isn’t being a werewolf, it’s having a serious psychiatric illness, like schizophrenia. If I remember my freshman psych correctly, many people have their first psychotic break around puberty…much like Micah’s first manifestation. The farm upstate could really be a farm upstate where her family has segregated themselves to hide the illness…or convinced themselves that it is really a gift. But who knows?

Oh! This just came to me, but what if Micah and Jordan are somehow the same person? As in, she “killed” him when she started having violent episodes? That would tie in with the having a “boy name”, pretending she was born a boy, all that stuff.

My favorite thing is the way Micah keeps reminding us that fiction is also lying, that politeness can be lying, that a lot of daily living and surviving in the world is lying. It leaves open the possibility that Micah is the most honest person in the story, because her lies aren’t pretending to be something else.

I don’t really have any one theory that I like better. There are two slips, or statements, that Micah makes, and the fact they are glossed over is either in their favor, or means they are the most obvious lies–the statements she makes about the pills and being strapped down, for one, and the trial for two.

But even then, I WANT to believe Micah, that she’s a werewolf, and that she didn’t kill anyone on purpose. (I did see the reveal about Jordan coming, oddly. Maybe because I have a little brother? J/K)

I have to read this book again.