Count My Lies

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of death, emotional abuse, violence, and bullying.

Sophie Stava makes allusions to several novels in Count My Lies, especially F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925). When Sloane learns Jay’s name, she compares Jay to Jay Gatsby—the wealthy, mysterious protagonist of Fitzgerald’s novel. In The Great Gatsby, Gatsby has risen from poverty to wealth by engaging in shady business practices, intent on winning the love of Daisy, who has already married the rich, “old money” Tom Buchanan instead. The Great Gatsby’s themes of how wealth and class influence personal relationships also appear in Count My Lies, with Sloane, like Gatsby, attempting to improve her socioeconomic position through lies and social-climbing. Violet, like Daisy, appears to have an idyllic life but is actually trapped in an unhappy marriage, with her husband Jay’s infidelity mirroring the chronic infidelity of Tom Buchanan in Gatsby.

Before Sloane meets Harper and Violet for the first time, she reads Daphne du Maurier’s gothic novel Rebecca (1938), which also contains important themes of class and attempted social-climbing. The novel is narrated by a nameless, impoverished young woman who initially works as a companion to a rich lady.