Perfect Strangers

Olivia is the main character and protagonist. The story belongs to her, as it centers on her experiences with James and in the psychiatric center. More so, the narrative is literally hers since she’s the author. Olivia describes the dueling worlds as “a book within a book within a book” (556), and she is the creator of all three books, which exist in her novel, Perfect Strangers.

For Olivia, the boundaries between fiction and reality are blurred, illustrating the theme of Shaping Reality Through Storytelling. Olivia uses her reality in her fiction, in which her husband, James, is an artist, and her ex-husband, Chris, is the United States Ambassador to the UN. She also has a daughter, Emerson. However, the blurry relationship between Olivia’s true world and the fictional universe also makes her an unreliable narrator. Her narrative is intentionally misleading. First, she tricks the reader into thinking that her relationship with James in Paris is real. She then leads the reader to believe that Olivia’s life in the psychiatric hospital is true. Finally, the Epilogue reveals the authentic reality. Yet Olivia doesn’t narrate the Epilogue. The only way for the book to reveal the final truth is to use a third-person narrator, indicating that Olivia remains untrustworthy.