What I Saw and How I Lied
This winner of the National Book Award gets catalogued under such terms as coming of age, secrets, Florida, and 20th-century history. It is set in 1947 just after World War II, when Evie’s stepfather, Joe, comes home to reunite with Evie and her mother, along with Joe’s mother. While Joe was fighting the Germans in Europe, the three women had been fighting each other as they lived together in a house in Queens that belongs to Joe’s mother. The story starts after the family has Omega Replica been back together long enough for Joe to buy and open a couple of appliance stores. Evie and her mother are happily dreaming about moving out of Joe’s family home and into a house of their own, but mostly 15-year-old Evie is thinking about the opening of school and how soon she can start smoking and wearing lipstick. Just before the school years starts, Joe suddenly decides that he will take Evie and her mother on a family trip to Florida.
The book opens with a scene that fits into the story much later, but is reprinted on page one because it’s crucial that readers understand both the mother in the story and the relationship between Evie and her mother. Evie is the narrator and begins with the following: “The match snapped, then sizzled, and I woke up fast. I heard my mother inhale as she took a long pull on a cigarette. Her lips stuck on the filter, so I knew she was still wearing lipstick. She’d been up all night”. As the air around Evie is filled with cigarette smoke and My Sin perfume (her mother’s “smell”), Evie pretends to be asleep, while Evie’s mother pretends not to know that Evie is awake.
Money—how people get it and what they do with it—is a big part of the story, and so is the postwar prejudice that many people felt against Jews, but the part that is probably going to resonate the most forcefully with girl readers is Evie’s developing sexuality and the niggling feeling of competition that she has with her mother, while also feeling a fierce loyalty that goes back to the time before Joe entered their family. All of this comes out when tragedy strikes the day before the family is scheduled to return from Florida to New York.
What I Saw in the title has two meanings. It includes what Evie literally saw, but more importantly it alludes to what she figures out because of knowing her parents so well and from her keen observations of what is happening all around her. The Florida visit is complicated by the unexpected appearance of Peter, a young soldier who had served under Sergeant Joe in Germany. It turns out that Joe had suddenly decided on the trip to Florida as a way of avoiding contact with Peter, but not to be thwarted, Peter stole a car and followed the family to Florida.
Another clue to the meaning of the story is that the second part of the title is not Why I Lied, but How I Lied. Evie’s court testimony is way too sophisticated to have been plotted either by her parents or their lawyer, or certainly not by a 15-year-old girl. However, it is a testament to Blundell’s writing that the Tag Heuer Carrera Replica Watches court accepts Evie’s testimony as the truth. It is also a testament to Blundell’s writing that readers accept it for what it is: a concoction so sophisticated that we as teachers, along with our students, will have a hard time explaining just which parts are “true” and which parts are “lies.” We’ll also have to put on some heavy-duty thinking caps as we discuss the motivation and the likely results of Evie’s decision to punish herself and her family.
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