Spoilers And The Short Answer
Grab a notebook for this one, because this ending needs a timeline.
Spoiler warning. This video gives away all of None of This Is True, by Lisa Jewell, including who dies, and it covers child abuse and murder. If you have not finished the book, pause here and come back later.
A podcaster records a woman for weeks. Then the woman vanishes, and the rest of the book shows how much of that tape was built to mislead her.
The short answer. Josie Fair told the podcaster, Alix Summer, that her husband Walter was a monster. Then Josie lured Alix’s husband Nathan into a trap, and he died. Walter is dead, a teenager called Brooke Ripley is dead, and Josie’s last memory blames her own daughter Roxy.
Here is the route. How the book is built, what Josie said on tape, what everyone else says, how Nathan disappears, three versions of Brooke, three versions of the night Walter died, and the final scene on a bus.
Two Timelines, One Book
The book runs on two layers. The main story is the summer of twenty nineteen, told close up, switching between Alix and Josie. They meet in a pub on the eighth of June, when both turn forty-five.
Layered over it are short inserts from a Netflix series called Hi! I’m Your Birthday Twin! The book’s own blurb calls it a podumentary. The inserts look back from later, with interviews and reenactments, which is how we learn early that two people are dead.
There are more dates. Alix says the podcast went live in May twenty twenty and ended that August. In March twenty twenty two, Josie overhears two women talking about the Netflix show. So the story reaches us as a documentary, built from a podcast, built from tape that Josie steered.
At the back of the edition we read, Lisa Jewell says there is no scripted podcast inside the book. The interviews are ordinary scenes. It was the documentary inserts that shaped the structure.
What Josie Told The Microphone
Here is our chart. On one side, what Josie said on the recordings, by date. On the other, what the book shows later. Start with the tape. The book prints nine dated recordings of Josie, from the twentieth of June to the eighteenth of July.
On the fourth of July, she says that Walter, who was forty-two when he first took her to a pub, proposed to her the year she turned sixteen. On the eleventh, she says Walter was made redundant and then worked away in Scotland and the north east, and that she liked the quiet weekdays.
In mid July, she tells Alix about Brooke, Roxy’s friend. Her claim is that Walter groomed Brooke the way he groomed Josie. On the seventeenth of July, she says Walter goes into Erin’s room most nights. Erin is her older daughter, whom Josie describes as eating only baby food and never leaving the flat. Josie says she stayed in her room with earplugs.
On the eighteenth, she tells the Friday night. She screamed a word at Walter, he beat her with the remote control, and she left with Erin and the dog. But Alix notices a gap. The walk to her house takes sixteen minutes, and Josie arrived at three in the morning.
What Everyone Else Says
Now the other side of the chart. Pat O’Neill, Josie’s mother, says on the twenty-eighth of July that she was Walter’s girlfriend when Josie was about thirteen. Josie never mentioned that. Pat is no neutral witness, but she says Josie wanted Walter and got him.
Roxy, who left home at sixteen, says Brooke was her first girlfriend. She says she hit Brooke at school, then ran away from her mother. When Alix plays her Josie’s tape, she calls it nonsense.
Erin, in a Netflix interview, tells a different household. She says Walter joined her gaming streams as Pops, and helped her earn a living from them. The police say that over forty thousand pounds had come into her account from a streaming company called Glitch.
And over ten thousand of those pounds were taken out in cash in two weeks, from machines in Queen’s Park. Erin’s own account describes a father who sat beside her online, not one who crept in at night. The abuse story came from Josie alone.
How Nathan Disappears
Josie leaves Alix’s house on Saturday the twentieth of July. That night Nathan goes drinking in Soho, which Josie knows because he told her. She follows him, and a blonde woman calling herself Katelyn sits down beside him.
Katelyn Rand is an actress Josie met at the alterations shop where she works. She says Josie offered one thousand pounds to get Nathan into a hotel room, and that she thought she was helping Alix escape a bad husband.
Josie had also planted a bag of powder, a napkin and a hotel key card in Alix’s shoe rack, taken from Nathan’s jacket, to point at an affair. At about three in the morning, Nathan is sent out to a hire car booked on Erin’s card.
All summer, Josie had been taking small things from Alix’s home. A coffee pod, a teaspoon, a magazine, a bracelet. The police later lay them out on a table in front of Alix.
Alix finds the warning on her own tape the night before the body is found. Josie quotes a guest from Alix’s old series, who said death is a clean break. Then Josie asks whether everything would be easier if husbands were dead.
About a week later, Nathan’s body is found in shallow water at Lake Windermere, near a lodge Josie had booked. Minutes before the news, Alix gets a voicemail. Josie says she never meant it to go this far. In a letter that November, she calls it an accident, a dose that stopped working.
Three Versions Of Brooke
Brooke Ripley vanished from her school prom in June twenty fourteen. Her remains are found in the boot of a car in a garage leased by Walter. The police open it with the key tagged six, the one Josie hid under Alix’s mattress.
Version one is Josie’s tape. Brooke is Walter’s victim, and Josie never says how she died. Version two is Erin. She says she was home alone with her mother, heard Brooke at the door in a white dress, saw Josie hit her, and then heard a choking sound. She says Walter was working away and Roxy was in Bristol.
Version three is the last chapter. Josie remembers coming home to find Roxy kneeling over Brooke’s body, saying she did not mean to do it. Erin is in the doorway. Josie rings Walter in Newcastle, and he talks them through the cover up.
That means plastic sheeting, the bathroom window onto the mews, and the key. These three versions cannot all be right.
Three Versions Of The Night Walter Died
Now the night of the dinner, Friday the twelfth of July. On tape, Josie says Walter beat her with the remote and she left with Erin. Erin says they came home around ten, Josie screamed a word at Walter, and Walter fell clutching his chest.
Erin says she then beat her mother with the remote, and Josie kicked out at both of them. She woke later tied to a chair in a cupboard. Walter was found dead in the bath.
Josie’s last memory has her threatening to tell Alix about the car. Walter clutches his chest and falls, and Erin hits her. After that, nothing.
Notice the overlap. Erin’s story and Josie’s final memory agree on the chest and on Erin hitting Josie with something. They disagree on what came before. The only version that has Walter attack Josie is the one on tape.
The Bus In Twenty Twenty Two
The last chapter is March twenty twenty two. Josie sits on an almost empty bus after dark in a Midlands city, wearing a mask, her dyed blond hair pulled over her face. Two young women in front of her talk about the Netflix series.
They call her creepy. One wonders whether Roxy and Erin were in on it. Josie turns her face to the window and touches the gold bumblebee on her chain, like the pendant Alix wore, the one the police never found.
Then she runs through her memories, and admits she cannot tell which are true. She even thinks of something she said she had done, although she did not. But one memory shines through, and it is the one with Roxy and Brooke.
The book ends with Josie telling herself she is a true mother who protected her child. She is so sure that it is the truth. So incredibly sure.
Which Narrator To Trust
This part is my opinion, so treat it as a draft. I would not trust Josie’s tape. Her own voicemail says there was a darker end to the story that she lost her nerve to tell. And her last memory contradicts what she told Alix about Walter.
Alix is not a clean witness either. She admits she was bored, she edits the series, and she ends it by calling Josie evil. Erin and Roxy are each telling the story of their own family.
Lisa Jewell’s Q and A helps. She calls the Roxy revelation the thing that made sense of everything, and says she saw it through Josie’s broken mind. So the author seems to read the final chapter as the closest we get to the truth.
But the text leaves a door open. The reading group guide asks whether we should believe Josie, or whether she is deluding herself. The title is the answer to that question.
My Verdict On The Ending
My verdict, also an opinion draft. I give the ending four out of five. I like that the ending turns the whole structure into the twist. Once you chart the tape against the documentary, you can see how Josie built her story.
What did not fully work for me is the final memory. It is a big reveal told through the least reliable person in the book, so it feels more like a shrug than a solution. Still, it fits the title.
For more, read the book page and the full guides on book explained dot com. And tell me below: do you believe Josie’s last memory, or Erin?
