Book review, full book summary and synopsis for None of This Is True by Lisa Jewell, a psychological thriller about a true crime podcaster and a woman who comes into her life and leaves destruction in her wake.
Synopsis
In None of This is True by Lisa Jewell, Alix is a well-known true crime podcaster who meets a woman with her same birthday who has an interesting story to tell and who claims she's on the verge of making great changes in her life.
Josie seems unremarkable, but as Alix digs into her past, it soon becomes clear that her life is stranger and darker than her appearance would suggest.
When Josie disappears, Alix realizes she's become the topic of her own podcast and that she and her family may be the next victims in the trail of destruction Josie seems to leave behind.
(The Full Plot Summary is also available, below)
Full Plot Summary
Ending & ExplanationsSee the Questions, Ending and ExplanationsChapter-by-Chapter SummarySee the Chapter-by-Chapter Summary of None of This Is TrueQuick Plot SummaryThe two-paragraph version is that Josie is downtrodden woman who meets a beautiful and successful podcaster, Alix, who she happens to share a birthday with. Josie convinces Alix to tell her story on her podcast where she describes being groomed by a man 20+ years older than her, Walter, who she married and had kids with, Roxy and Erin. Josie also says that he abused Roxy's friend Brooke and now has turned his sights on Erin. Josie learns that Alix's husband Nathan is an alcoholic. Josie wants to transform her life and finally leaves Walter. Soon after, Nathan goes missing, and so does Josie.
It's eventually revealed that Josie became convinced that getting rid of their "disappointing husbands" was the only way they could transform themselves and flourish. Alix figures out that Josie kidnapped Nathan. Walter's body is found, then Nathan's body is found, as well as Brooke's body. Roxy and Erin talk about how unstable and jealous Josie was. They also explain that Josie blamed Brooke for Roxy running away from home. A Netflix show about the whole ordeal gets made. Josie continues to be on the run, but she clarifies in a letter that Nathan's death was an accident. And privately she thinks about how Roxy was the one who killed Brooke (which is why she subsequently ran away from home), and Josie helped cover it up and lied about it during the podcast to protect Roxy.
The book opens by introducing a new Netflix show called Hi! I’m Your Birthday Twin! from podcaster Alix Summer, and the book is interspersed with descriptions of various clips from this show.
Part I opens with Josie and Alix's 45th birthdays. Josie is a downtrodden and unremarkable woman who married a much older man, Walter, when she was young. She meets Alix, who is an attractive and successful true crime podcaster. They discover their shared birthdays and that they were even born in the same hospital. Josie develops an interest in Alix's podcast which tells stories about women who have overcome obstacles in their lives to succeed and flourish. She tracks Alix down and tells her that she's about to make big changes in her life and asks Alix if she'd be interested in her story for her podcast.
As they start their recording sessions, Josie talks about her much-older husband, Walter, who she met when she was 13 and he was 41. They married when she was 19. They have two kids, Roxy, now 23, and Erin, 21. Alix also learns that Josie's kids were troubled, with Roxy being a troublemaker and potentially violent. Erin still lives at home and is a hardcore video-gamer. A neighbor mentions there were rumors of abuse in their household. Alex also meets Josie's narcissistic mother Pat who resents Josie for being the reason she had to drop out of college.
Josie also talks about how Walter kissed her for the first time when she was 15. He proposed and took her virginity the day she turned 16. At 18, she moved in with him. She describes Walter as controlling and explains how she built her whole life around being with him, but now she doesn't know what it was all for. They meet at Alix's home studio to record their sessions, and Josie steals small mementos from Alix's home -- starting with minor items, but soon moving up to more substantial items like a diamond bracelet -- wanting to have small pieces of it with her.
Meanwhile, Alix has her own complications at home with her husband, Nathan. While Nathan is generous and successful, he often goes on drinking benders and doesn't come home. Alix tries to make her peace with it, but when Josie finds out about it she feels enraged with Nathan.
One night, Alix has Walter and Josie over for dinner, and she finally meets Walter. When Walter speaks to Alix, he warns her that Josie has a tenuous connection with the truth and that she can be very "tricky" and says that she needs to control situations. At home, Josie fights with Walter and hurls increasingly pointed insults at him. In response, he calls her weird and stupid. Josie is furious.
In Part II, Josie shows up -- battered and bruised -- at Alix's doorstep the morning after the dinner on Friday. She says that Walter was in a bad mood after the dinner and took it out on her. She asks Alix for a place to stay, which soon morphs into pressuring Alix to let her stay for the week. Alix is reluctant and feels she is being controlled by Josie, but she also senses that saying no will jeopardize the podcast which is just starting to get interesting. While at the house, Josie continues collecting trinkets -- like a child's drawing, Nathan's business card, a photo and other items.
As they record that week, Josie talks about how Roxy had a good schoolmate, Brooke, but they had a falling out. It was discovered that Walter had been grooming Brooke the way that he'd been grooming Josie before, and he slept with Brooke when she turned 16. After that happened, Josie refused to let Walter touch her. Instead, his sights turned toward Erin, and he's been abusing her ever since, slipping out of bed most nights. Erin has been avoiding Josie for the last six months or so, refusing to see her, and her tastes have gotten stranger with her now only being willing to eat baby food. Finally on Friday, Josie had enough and stood up to Walter and left him, taking Erin and her dog with her. Erin chose to stay elsewhere.
Alix is stunned at these revelations and looks into the story about Brooke, which shows that Brooke is now missing. A clip from the show shows Brooke's aunt talking about how she was last seen at a bus stop. Alix soon discovers that the bus stop Brooke went missing at is a 2-minute walk from Josie's house.
When they talk about what happened after the Friday dinner, Josie describes how Walter beat her with a remote control after she accused him of abusing her, Brooke and Erin. Alix follows-up with questions that reveal holes in her story, but Josie brushes it off. Alix suggests trying to reach out to Brooke or Erin for the podcast, but Josie bristles at either suggestion.
When Nathan tells Josie she has to leave at the end of the week, Josie is angry. She snoops in the master bedroom when no one else is home. She finds a clear baggie with white powder residue and a hotel keycard in Nathan's pant pockets. On another clip from the show, a woman named Katelyn describes how she used to know Josie as a child and then ran into her again many many years later, with her now working as a (struggling) actress. Josie told her she had a job for her.
In Part III, Josie leaves Alix's house, but follows Nathan to a bar. As instructed by Josie, Katelyn approaches Nathan and his friends. Meanwhile, at home Alix finds the items from in Nathan's pockets (which Josie planted for her to find), along with a napkin with a woman's name and phone number (which Josie added). Alix also finds a bloody key that Josie left behind. That night, Nathan doesn't come home and a day later he's still not back.
Alix is convinced he is cheating on her until she gets a call from a hotel nearby regarding damages to a hotel room. She goes to the hotel and starts to ask questions. They show her the CCTV footage, which shows Nathan being picked up by a car, and she finds out that the hotel room was paid for on a card belonging to "Erin Fair". Alix calls in a favor to trace the car's plates. It's a rental currently rented by "Erin Fair".
Alix calls the police to report that Nathan has been kidnapped. Meanwhile, someone else calls in a welfare check for Erin and Walter Fair. The next day, the news reports that Walter Fair has been found dead, and Erin was beaten severely and is in a coma. The police learn that Erin had a large sum of money saved up as a video-game streamer on the Glitch platform, and Josie has been siphoning money from Erin's account.
Soon, Roxy Fair surfaces. She talks to the police and says that most of what her mother claimed was a lie. Walter Fair was not sleeping with Brooke (who was Roxy's first girlfriend) -- Roxy ran away because she wanted to. He was also not abusing Erin. He would go into Erin's room late at night, but only to join her Glitch streams and make wisecracks which her followers loved. Pat also reaches out to Alix and tells her about how she was actually the one who started having an affair with Walter when Josie was 13. As Josie got older, she became fixated on him and the two eventually told Pat they were together when Josie turned 18.
Soon, police find Nathan's body in the water near a cabin where they think he was being held. Brooke's body is found in the trunk of a car (the key Alix found) in Josie's garage. Erin comes out of her coma. She explains how Josie is someone who couldn't stand anyone loving someone else more than her. She was jealous of Walter loving the kids more than her, or his own kids more than her and of the fact that he was with Pat before her. Erin also says that because of her Glitch savings she was ready to break free from Josie, and she thinks her mother was threatened by that which is why Josie felt the need to have something drastic happen.
Erin also admits to seeing Josie attack Brooke the night of the prom, since she blamed Brooke for Roxy running away from home. She says it's why she started distancing herself from her mother.
In Part IV, Josie is still on the run and Nathan's funeral happens. The podcast airs and is turned into a Netflix show. Josie reaches out to Alix via a letter to tell her that Nathan's death really was an accident -- she was drugging him and didn't think he'd die from it.
The book ends with Josie, now blond and living elsewhere, thinking about what really happened to Brooke. Roxy was the one who killed Brooke and then Brooke ran away as a result of it. The rest of the family helped to cover it up. Josie lied about it to protect Roxy, and in that way she tells herself she was a good mother.
For more detail, see the full Chapter-by-Chapter Summary.
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