Count My Lies

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

One of the central themes in Count My Lies is the complexities of lying. The three characters at the heart of the novel—Sloane, Violet, and Jay—are all deceptive and secretive in various ways. Through their schemes and motivations, the novel explores the nature of deception and its impact on relationships.

Sloane’s lies are a reflection of her low self-esteem and her chronic desire to improve her own socioeconomic status. She tends to regard her lies as a compulsive habit, claiming, “[T]he lie had dropped out. Clunk, onto the sidewalk, startling them both. I meant well, really, I did” (8, emphasis added). Sloane’s framing of herself as passive in the perpetuation of her lies, and her insistence that she “meant well,” reflects her general sense of herself as helpless and vulnerable. Her dishonesty creates problems for her at work, where she fakes her qualifications, and she spends much of the novel worrying that Violet might discover her real identity and past. Her lies and insecurity leave her vulnerable to Violet’s manipulations.

Violet’s lies are more dangerous than Sloane’s. Violet says, “This whole time, [Sloane] thought she lied her way into our lives, but the truth is, I lied my way into hers” (292).