Sometimes I Lie
Sometimes I Lie
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Alice Feeney on Sometimes I Lie
In her own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why she wrote it
A hospital bed and a 3 a.m. notepadThe premise of Sometimes I Lie, a novel narrated by a woman who is conscious but paralyzed in a hospital bed, did not arrive from imagination alone. In her early twenties, Feeney was in an accident that left her with a serious head injury and no memory of the event itself. That experience of being present but voiceless became the book’s engine.
I was in an accident in my early 20s. I woke up in hospital with a serious head injury, unable to remember what had happened. I could hear people and feel them touching me, but I couldn’t move or speak. It was terrifying. That memory played a big part.
The central character arrived through a separate channel entirely. The accident gave Feeney the situation; a specific night gave her the person who would inhabit it. She woke at 3 a.m. and reached for a notepad, catching the character before she could disappear.
I woke up in the middle of the night with a character called Amber in my head, and wrote down the three things I knew about her on a notepad by my bed. Those three things have never changed.
Those three original notes remain undisclosed. Whatever they were, they held through every subsequent draft.
A decade at the BBC’s main news desk, deciding which footage of terror attacks a lunchtime audience could bear, left Feeney with a view of human behavior that no invented plot could match. When readers question the darkness in her fiction, she reaches back to that newsroom experience as her answer.
When people ask me why I write about such dark things, I always think, I could never write anything that is more horrific than the things people do to each other in real life. The writing of these stories is my way of trying to make sense of a world that increasingly doesn’t make any sense to me.
How she wrote it
Corkboards, commutes, and a credit cardFeeney drafted Sometimes I Lie in secret on her commute between London and home, with no one at the BBC aware she was working on a novel. The planning came first. She mapped every chapter on a giant corkboard before writing a word, using a different colored card for each one, because for her the alternative was worse than a blank page.
I’m a planner. I think about a story for a long time before I commit to writing it, and I plot everything out on a giant board before I write a word.
The manuscript was already underway when she enrolled in the Faber Academy’s Writing a Novel course, funding the fees on a 0% credit card. She framed the course not as professional development but as a last viable attempt. The gamble paid off faster than she had prepared for.
In many ways, it felt like my last chance, so I worked even harder than before and it meant everything to me. I applied for a place on the course and got myself a 0% credit card to pay for it. I completed Sometimes I Lie just before I graduated and was approached by 15 literary agents.
The ending that readers now argue about most was not in the original manuscript. After finishing what she thought was a complete draft, Feeney felt an absence she couldn’t name until she filled it. The chapter she added, titled “Later,” became the one she is asked about more than any other, and she has declined to explain it.
It felt like something was missing and so I wrote the chapter called Later.
The questions that chapter generates have followed her through every subsequent book tour. She has answered none of them.
The unreliable narrator is a familiar thriller device, but Feeney’s specific interest in Amber, the book’s protagonist who lies in a coma throughout the present-day timeline, was in a more unsettling version of that unreliability: one the narrator cannot control or even detect in herself.
Amber isn’t just unreliable for the readers, she’s unreliable for herself, and that’s what fascinated me most about her.
The deal came through while she was sitting at the BBC news desk next to one of the network’s main anchors. She had kept the project secret from her colleagues for a decade. The moment her agent reached her on the newsroom phone, she had to hold the news inside.
I’ll always remember hiding under my desk and whispering to him on the phone, ‘Is it real?’ I had wanted this for so long. I struggled to believe it was actually happening.
The personal thread
What her husband saw on holidayThe darkness Feeney put into Sometimes I Lie was sufficiently surprising to the people closest to her that its publication functioned as a kind of revelation. Her husband read the novel while they were on holiday together, and his reaction captured exactly how far the book departed from what he thought he knew about her.
[paraphrased from audio] She recalled her husband looking up from the book repeatedly in their holiday cottage, asking her: “Who are you? What is this?”
It is a reasonable question about a book whose premise came from a memory she had carried privately for years, written on commutes nobody at work knew she was taking for that purpose.
The adaptation interest arrived quickly after publication. When her agent called to tell her that Sarah Michelle Gellar wanted to bring Sometimes I Lie to the screen, Feeney was caught between professional composure and the scale of what she was hearing. The surrealism of the moment stayed with her.
[paraphrased from audio] She described the call from her agent as “quite a surreal thing,” and said that when she spoke with Gellar directly, the conversation felt stranger still because Gellar “sounded like Buffy and Buffy was on the phone.” With Warner Bros. involved and scripts in progress, she called the whole development “dream come true stuff.”
What she wants us to sit with
The lies nobody else can seeFeeney has consistently located the book’s core argument not in its plot mechanics but in a more ordinary kind of deception. The twists and the unreliable narrator are the delivery system; the subject they deliver is something readers are less likely to recognize as fiction.
Sometimes I Lie isn’t just a story about the lies we routinely tell each other, it’s about the lies we tell ourselves.
Asked about the ending she added in a late draft, the chapter that generates the most questions and the most disagreement among readers, Feeney has stopped short of explanation. Her position is that the ambiguity was always the point, and that the chapter earned its place in the book on those terms.
I really love the ending, despite all the questions I get about it. That was always what happened next in my head, and I’m really glad that bit of the story made it into this book.