I Know Who You Are: A Novel

I Know Who You Are explores identity as a fragile performance, suggesting that the self can shatter when trauma and manipulation blur the boundaries between one’s authentic history and a constructed role. The novel critiques the notion of a stable identity by presenting its protagonist, Aimee Sinclair, as a collection of fragmented personas. Her struggle to locate a true self reveals that identity isn’t an innate truth but a precarious construct and is easily broken by both internal wounds and external pressures.

Aimee’s profession as an actress is a metaphor for her fractured identity. She finds it easier to perform as someone else than to be herself: “Acting is easy; it’s being me that I find difficult” (3). This difficulty stems from a past that others have redefined. As a child, her captors stripped her of her birth name, Ciara, and renamed her Aimee, forcing her into a new role and even changing her birthday. This initial loss of self is compounded by the various names she carries, from “Baby Girl,” a name used by her abusers, to Aimee Sinclair, the public figure she has become. The recurring motif of mirrors, in which Aimee often fails to recognize her own reflection, visually represents her disconnect from a stable sense of self.