By Lisa Jewell
A podcaster's subject turns predator
Subject
Themes
Two women share a birthday and almost nothing else. Josie Fair is forty-five, plain, invisible in the gastropub where she is eating with her indifferent husband. Alix Summer is also forty-five, surrounded by friends, confident and successful, a podcaster whose career is built on drawing out the stories of women who feel overlooked. What happens when these two women meet is not a friendship but a slow-motion predation, dressed for much of its duration in the clothes of one.
Two women share a birthday and almost nothing else. Josie Fair is forty-five, plain, invisible in the gastropub where she is eating with her indifferent husband. Alix Summer is also forty-five, surrounded by friends, confident and successful, a podcaster whose career is built on drawing out the…
None of This Is True was published in 2023 and arrived at a moment of intense cultural interest in the figure of the female predator, a character type that true crime podcasts, documentaries, and literary fiction had been circling for several years. Lisa Jewell's novel enters this conversation with…
The manipulation at the heart of the novel is not crude or violent in its early stages. It is intimate, patient, and built on an unusually precise understanding of the person being targeted. Josie Fair does not manipulate Alix Summer in spite of Alix's strengths. She manipulates her through them,…
Josie Fair does not simply want to know Alix Summer. She wants to be her. This desire, which the novel traces from their first encounter at the gastropub through to its violent conclusion, is not about envy in any simple sense. It is about the conviction that identity is something that can be…
The Fair family is a study in the varieties of betrayal that can exist within a household, operating so slowly and so thoroughly that its members may not recognise what has been done to them until long after it has become irreversible. The betrayals here are not dramatic ruptures. They are the…
The crimes in the novel are not committed by someone operating in dramatic isolation. They emerge from a set of conditions that made Josie Fair largely invisible to the social systems around her, and the novel's treatment of crime is inseparable from its treatment of the particular kind of…
The podcast at the centre of the novel is not simply a narrative device. It is an argument about the ethics of listening and the ways in which storytelling can be corrupted when one participant is not participating in good faith. Alix Summer's professional practice is built on the belief that giving…
Josie Fair is the novel's central enigma: a woman whose unremarkable exterior conceals an obsessive, predatory inner life that has been building long before Alix Summer encounters her. She arrives in Alix's world presenting herself as ordinary to the point of invisibility, a woman who has been…
Alix Summer is the novel's moral centre and its most devastated figure. A successful podcaster in her late thirties with a warm marriage, two children, and a career built on listening to women tell their stories, she enters the narrative at the height of her professional confidence. Her podcast, in…
Walter Fair occupies a complicated position in the novel's moral landscape. He is, in some readings, as much a victim of Josie as anyone else in her orbit. In others, he is a man whose own appetites and cruelties made him a fitting partner for the worst of what Josie eventually becomes. The novel…
Roxy Fair is Josie's elder daughter, a young woman in her early twenties whose relationship with her mother is defined by ambivalence. She is present in the novel in a way that her sister Erin is not, physically closer to the family home and therefore more directly caught up in the events as they…
Erin Fair is Josie's younger daughter, and her response to growing up in the Fair household has been the opposite of her sister Roxy's. Where Roxy has stayed close and learned to manage Josie's moods, Erin has achieved distance. She has built a life that keeps the family home at the edge of her…
Nathan Summer is Alix's husband: a sound engineer by profession and a man defined by the kind of uncomplicated decency that the novel contrasts sharply with almost everything else in its moral landscape. He is not an exciting figure in narrative terms. He does not carry secrets or operate according…
It is Saturday in June, Josie Fair's forty-fifth birthday, and she has insisted on celebrating at the Lansdowne gastropub in Queen's Park, a place she associates with a kind of life she has never managed to enter. She sits with her much older husband Walter, who is visibly uncomfortable and quietly…
Josie dresses carefully, puts on makeup for the first time in years, and meets Alix at a coffee shop on Salusbury Road. Alix has already developed the concept and given it a title: Hi! I'm Your Birthday Twin! She promises a single test episode, no obligation to continue, just the two of them in the…
Alix travels to the council estate where Josie grew up and meets her mother, Pat O'Neill, a community activist who is glamorous, expansive, and barely conceals her contempt for her own daughter. Pat makes the visit about herself from the start: her sacrificed degree, her work on the estate, her…
The podcast sessions continue and more of Walter's history emerges. He had two sons from a previous marriage, now living in Canada with their mother, who emigrated when the boys were still children. He has not seen them since. Asked why, Josie explains with a shrug that his ex-wife was simply…
The recording sessions deepen. Alix asks Josie about the denim and learns that Walter once told her the jacket held her essence; she has worn something denim every day since to preserve the way he felt about her at the beginning. Josie produces photographs from those early years: a young Josie in…
The dinner at Alix's house does not go to plan. Nathan does not arrive, texting twice with excuses before missing the evening entirely. Josie and Walter sit with Alix through a stilted meal. Walter drinks quietly and barely speaks, asking only about the electrics. Josie criticises Nathan openly and…
Nathan tells Alix quietly that Josie needs to be gone before Saturday. Alix promises. After school drop-off, she catches the neighbour's son Harry and asks about Brooke. He remembers her well: mature for her age, and involved in a really toxic fight with Roxy at the end of school. He gives Alix her…
With Josie gone, the house exhales. Alix retrieves the blood-streaked key from under the guest-room mattress and pockets it. That evening her sisters arrive and the summer holiday they had been promised unfolds: paddling pools, pizza, wine in ice buckets, margaritas. Nathan drinks a single beer…
The Ambleside investigation reaches its terrible conclusion. On Sunday 28 July, Pat O'Neill calls Alix and arrives to record her own counter-narrative, revealing that Walter was originally her boyfriend before Josie deliberately seduced him when she was sixteen. Pat portrays Josie as pathologically…
In July 2020, Alix meets Katelyn Rand in a park, six feet apart in the early days of restrictions easing. Katelyn is immediately apologetic and disarmingly likeable. She explains how Josie approached her at the alterations shop, framing Nathan as a serial cheat whose wife deserved to know the truth.…
Josie Fair is the novel's central enigma: a woman whose unremarkable exterior conceals an obsessive, predatory inner life that has been building long before Alix Summer encounters her. She arrives in Alix's world presenting herself as ordinary to the point of invisibility, a woman who has been…
Alix Summer is the novel's moral centre and its most devastated figure. A successful podcaster in her late thirties with a warm marriage, two children, and a career built on listening to women tell their stories, she enters the narrative at the height of her professional confidence. Her podcast, in…
Walter Fair occupies a complicated position in the novel's moral landscape. He is, in some readings, as much a victim of Josie as anyone else in her orbit. In others, he is a man whose own appetites and cruelties made him a fitting partner for the worst of what Josie eventually becomes. The novel…
Roxy Fair is Josie's elder daughter, a young woman in her early twenties whose relationship with her mother is defined by ambivalence. She is present in the novel in a way that her sister Erin is not, physically closer to the family home and therefore more directly caught up in the events as they…
Erin Fair is Josie's younger daughter, and her response to growing up in the Fair household has been the opposite of her sister Roxy's. Where Roxy has stayed close and learned to manage Josie's moods, Erin has achieved distance. She has built a life that keeps the family home at the edge of her…
Nathan Summer is Alix's husband: a sound engineer by profession and a man defined by the kind of uncomplicated decency that the novel contrasts sharply with almost everything else in its moral landscape. He is not an exciting figure in narrative terms. He does not carry secrets or operate according…
By Lisa Jewell
Subject
Themes
Two women share a birthday and almost nothing else. Josie Fair is forty-five, plain, invisible in the gastropub where she is eating with her indifferent husband. Alix Summer is also forty-five, surrounded by friends, confident and successful, a podcaster whose career is built on drawing out the stories of women who feel overlooked. What happens when these two women meet is not a friendship but a slow-motion predation, dressed for much of its duration in the clothes of one.