I Love You More: A Novel by Jennifer Murphy

Author:Jennifer Murphy [Murphy, Jennifer]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780385538565
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2014-06-17T00:00:00+00:00

Picasso

Lie: (noun) an intentionally false statement, or a situation involving deception or founded on a mistaken impression.

Lie: (verb) to get oneself into or out of a situation by providing an intentionally false statement, presenting a false impression, or being deceptive.

Lie: (ninth commandment) Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor.

Lie: (Pablo Picasso, my namesake and therefore my destiny) Art is a lie that makes us realize truth.

Lie: A lie told often enough becomes the truth.

Vladimir Lenin said that last thing. He was a mean and unpopular leader, who in 1917 led a revolution in Russia that started the form of government called Communism. We learned a little about him in fourth grade, but not what he said about lying. That came from Daddy, and whenever Daddy made a point of teaching me something I didn’t already know, it meant there was a good reason I should know it. We were sitting at my desk up in my bedroom; he was helping me with my history lesson. He’d pushed all the stuff on the chair to one side and pulled it up next to me.

“What do you think he meant by that, Pinion (the wing of a bird)?” he asked.

I took my time before I answered like he’d taught me to—You can always tell a stupid person by how fast they answer a question they don’t know the answer to—and then I said, “Sometimes it’s easier for people to pretend what they said is true, because then they don’t have to feel bad about themselves?”

“That’s one way to look at it,” Daddy said. “But another might be that when you tell a lie, you have to make sure you stick to it.”

I remember being confused about that, because lying is supposed to be a sin and all, and I wanted to ask Daddy more about it, but I could tell that he was done with the subject, and when Daddy was done talking about something or doing something, he just got irritable if you kept on asking about it or doing it.

When I first started telling lies, I thought a lot about them. That’s not too surprising, I guess. It’s probably similar to when you buy something new, like shoes or a backpack, and you start seeing the exact same ones everywhere, on other kids, in magazine pictures, on mannequins at the mall, whereas before you bought them, you never even knew they existed. Well that’s kind of how it was with me and lies. I saw and heard them everywhere. All kinds of them: intentional, unintentional, big, small, mammoth. It seemed like lies were such a part of our society that they were practically acceptable. Daddy used to say that lawyers lied all the time. Mama, Jewels, and Bert not only lied to everyone else, including the police, they obviously lied to themselves. My teacher lies about everything, not only about minor stuff like what’s going to be on a math test but about his past accomplishments (like I’m betting he didn’t play football for Alabama and wasn’t a DEA agent).

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