None of This Is True: A Novel
None of This Is True: A Novel
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Lisa Jewell on None of This Is True: A Novel
In her own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why she wrote it
A stranger at a window, a question about controlThe book began not at a desk but on a January dog walk, when a man glimpsed through a lit window refused to leave her mind. That image, ordinary on its surface, triggered the habit of thought she has described as central to her whole project as a novelist.
I saw a man sitting at the window, working on his laptop, minding his own business, and couldn’t get rid of this feeling that there was something dark going on, that there was some dysfunctional atmosphere there. I wanted to focus on this stranger and find out what could be happening behind him. The front door is a huge thing for a writer. To breach that door and see how people behave when nobody’s watching, that’s fundamental to writing.
Once she had the image, she needed a coercive controller at its center, and she already knew one from the inside. Her first marriage, which she left after five years, had given her material she has returned to repeatedly across her career, but this novel required her to put its mechanics on the page most directly.
He love-bombed me and proposed after three months, and the minute I agreed to spend my life with him the abuse started. He threw out my photos and diaries. He told me I was bad at sex. I wasn’t allowed a front door key. He chose what we were going to eat and watch. There’s no sunshine when you’re living like that. I’m still confused by how I let it happen.
That confusion, still unresolved decades later, is precisely what she built into Josie Fair, the novel’s coercive controller, whose victims cannot entirely explain how they were taken in.
The podcast format gave the personal material a structural twist she had not used before. Her addiction to true crime podcasts raised a question about power: what if the subject of a podcast was actually the one directing the story, using the host’s own format against her? That inversion became the engine of the book, with Josie seeking out Alix rather than the other way around.
The title, ‘None of This Is True,’ came to me quite early on... It immediately tells the reader, ‘Don’t believe everything you read. Question everything.’ It sets the stage for that sense of unreliability and ambiguity that runs through the story. [paraphrased from audio]
How she wrote it
Five months, two failed epilogues, and a child she had set up all alongShe finished the manuscript in five months, the fastest she had ever completed a novel. The pace was forced: she had taken on a contract to write in a second, undisclosed genre, which compressed her schedule to three novels in two years instead of two. Speed produced a feeling she did not entirely welcome.
There’s something terrifying about working that quickly. I felt slightly out of control.
The ending eluded her even after she had handed the manuscript to her editor, Selina. She delivered it without an epilogue, wrote one version she called a damp squib, wrote a second that also failed, and then, days later, the answer arrived not as invention but as recognition. She had been building toward it the whole time without seeing it.
Of course Josie didn’t kill Brooke, it was Roxy! Roxy has been red flagged the whole way through the book why didn’t I see it? I set this child up with all these antisocial behaviours and violent tendencies why did it not occur to me that it must have been her to kill Brooke?
What resolved her satisfaction was not just finding the right answer but confirming she had not retrofitted it. The clues for Roxy, the child whose antisocial behaviors are seeded across the novel, had been placed before the ending existed as a conscious plan.
I’m not going back and retroactively changing Roxy to fit that epilogue. It had been there the whole time. I just hadn’t seen it until the very last moment. It was very satisfying.
For a writer who does not outline, this is the recurring gamble: plant the material through instinct, then trust that the instinct was load-bearing.
The novel frames its events through a fictional Netflix documentary. After publication, Netflix acquired the actual film rights, a coincidence that she was quick to deflate when it came up on the Lorraine show.
It sounds like I did that on purpose. No, nothing ever works like that. [paraphrased from audio]
The personal thread
A first marriage that keeps finding its way backShe has described her first marriage, a coercively controlled relationship she entered in her early twenties and left after five years, as the biographical fact that most persistently shapes her fiction. The draw back to that material is not nostalgic; it is more like an unfinished argument with a past self she still cannot entirely account for.
I’m constantly drawn back to writing about coercive controllers. My first marriage was probably the most interesting thing that’s happened to me — in the bleakest, most gothic way imaginable. It’s character building for a writer.
The confusion she still carries about how she allowed the abuse to begin is the same confusion she builds into the victims her readers follow. In each novel, the mechanism of entrapment is rendered from close enough inside that the reader cannot dismiss it as something that would never happen to them. That is the effect she is after, and it comes from lived experience she has not resolved into a tidy narrative.
I love to write thrillers about creeps and coercive controllers, and about letting the wrong person in. You can literally wake up one morning, meet someone, and let them into your life, and that can be enough to destroy everything. With thrillers, there’s so much to play with. So many emotions to investigate, so many secrets to uncover.
What she wants us to sit with
Who owns the story, and who decides what’s trueThe novel’s setup looks, at first, like a story about a podcaster who discovers her subject is dangerous. But the book’s deeper concern is about who controls the terms of any story being told, and Alix, the podcast host Alix Summer, believes she holds that control until Josie demonstrates otherwise. Jewell described the surface dynamic before the book published, in language that keeps the trap intact.
Struck by her utter ordinariness, Alix decides to see if she might make an interesting podcast out of what looks like a very small and uninteresting life. But as the recording sessions go deeper and deeper into the truth of Josie’s life, Alix soon realizes that Josie is not as ordinary as she appears. She is hiding some very, very dark secrets, and soon Alix is sucked so deeply into the darkness of Josie’s life that she fears she may never see the light again.
The ending does not close the question of what actually happened. It places the reader in the position of a true crime podcast listener handed partial evidence and expected to reach a verdict alone. That open edge is a deliberate instruction about how much certainty any single account can carry, and it extends the title’s provocation past the last page.
The title, ‘None of This Is True,’ came to me quite early on... It immediately tells the reader, ‘Don’t believe everything you read. Question everything.’ It sets the stage for that sense of unreliability and ambiguity that runs through the story. [paraphrased from audio]
The vulnerability she is pointing to, how little it takes to let the wrong person rewrite your story, is what she wants readers to carry into their own lives, not just apply to Alix.