What Is Tell Me Lies
This is a full summary of Tell Me Lies by Carola Lovering, and it contains spoilers from start to finish. Watch my review first if you haven’t read the book.
The short version: it’s a novel about a toxic first love. Lucy Albright, a college freshman in California, falls for Stephen DeMarco, a charming junior who is already dating someone else. Over four years and forty-five chapters, told in turns by Lucy and by Stephen, he keeps coming back and she keeps letting him.
Content note: this story includes cheating, drug use, an eating disorder and depression. If that is hard for you, skip ahead to the timeline or save it for another day. Either way, take care of yourself first. I’ll go through it carefully.
The Numbers
First, the book in numbers. Forty-five chapters and an epilogue. Twenty-three chapters belong to Lucy, twenty-two to Stephen, and the epilogue to Lucy. Each chapter is dated, so you always know the month and the year.
Four of those chapters, plus the epilogue, are set in one weekend in August twenty seventeen. Everything else walks forward from the fall of twenty ten to the fall of twenty fourteen. That’s four years of college and a year in New York, framed by a wedding. It’s a lot of ground, so I’ll keep it moving.
The Cast
Before the timeline, a quick cast list, because there are a lot of names. Lucy is from Cold Spring Harbor, Long Island, studies English, and dreams of being a travel writer. Her mother, CJ, is the person she cannot forgive, and her older sister Georgia is the one she envies.
Stephen is from Bayville, a few towns over. He studies political science, wants to be a lawyer, and has a mother with bipolar disorder who no longer lives with the family. His on-off girlfriend is Diana Bunn.
Lucy’s best friends are Jackie, Pippa and Bree. Stephen’s are Wrigley and his roommate Evan. And the book’s frame is Evan’s wedding to Bree, in August twenty seventeen.
Stephen’s Chapters
One thing you should know before the plot: Stephen’s chapters are not a mirror of Lucy’s. She tells us how it feels. He tells us how it works.
He gives each girl a nickname, Princess Diana, Alice in Wonderland, and Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds. He carries a handkerchief for crying girls. He writes handwritten letters because they work like magical charms. He studies what a girl wants to hear and says it.
He also tells us what he lacks. As a child he felt nothing when he accidentally killed a cousin’s pet turtle. He learned to copy the right reactions, and he says guilt does not apply to him. That’s the engine of the book: Lucy narrates the damage, and Stephen narrates the method.
It also explains why readers argue about the book. Some find Stephen unbearable, others find him fascinating, and the book wants you to feel both at once.
Freshman Fall
Lucy arrives at Baird College in the fall of twenty ten, a small school near Los Angeles with palm trees and mountains. She has a secret from high school that she calls the Unforgivable Thing, and she plans to leave it behind.
In October, Pippa takes her to Lake Mead on a houseboat weekend, and Lucy meets Stephen. He nicknames her Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds. He calls her; she turns him down. Then, at a birthday party, she drinks too much, throws up in his trash can and falls asleep in his room.
They kiss in the library. In December, at the Ugly Christmas Sweater party, he finds her crying outside, and she tells him the secret she has told nobody: she once walked in on her mother with another man. The next morning they sleep together for the first time. Stephen, in his own chapters, tells us none of it was an accident. He sizes up the girls he wants, and decides early that Lucy will trust him.
The Other Girl
Here is the problem. Stephen has been with Diana since his sophomore year, and he sleeps with other girls on the side. He tells Lucy he and Diana are done, and tells Diana he and Lucy are nothing.
In the spring, Lucy sees what’s missing. Stephen takes her out to dinner, but he won’t go to parties with her. Then comes Hawaiian Luau, the last party of the year in May twenty eleven. Lucy sees him kissing Diana upstairs, falls down a flight of stairs, and ends up in the back of the campus safety van. Stephen and Diana climb in right in front of her.
Meanwhile, her body has started to change. She stops eating, runs every morning, and uses cocaine when it’s offered because it suppresses her appetite. By the summer, CJ is begging her to see a nutritionist.
Sophomore Year
Diana takes him back, and for most of Lucy’s sophomore year Stephen barely speaks to her in public. He’s studying for the LSAT and applying to Columbia Law School. He has a DUI on his record, and he’s terrified it will matter.
Lucy hooks up with a short lacrosse player named Topher, and hates it. At a Gatsby party in November, Stephen finally apologizes, and a few weeks later he walks into her dorm room at midnight and says he misses her.
That begins a secret affair, and it lasts the rest of the year. Lucy uses the side staircase at his house so his roommate Evan won’t see her. When Stephen forgets to pull out, he asks her to buy the morning after pill.
The Trip She Skipped
Spring brings two decisions. Lucy is accepted into Writers on the Riviera, a six week course on a sailboat in France, the reason she picked Baird. She declines, because it would make her miss Stephen’s graduation party. And she tells her friends she was rejected.
Stephen is rejected by every law school he applied to, including UVA, so he takes a job at a small brokerage in New York, BR3 Group.
In June twenty twelve, he picks Lucy up on Long Island, takes her out to his friend’s boat, the Kiss Me Kate, and says he could love her more than he ever loved Diana. They spend the summer together in New York. Then Diana calls to say she has someone else, and in the same week, Stephen’s brother Luke gets engaged. By August, Lucy flies back to Baird without a real answer.
Alice And The Low Point
That fall, Stephen starts dating a woman named Alice Edwards, whom he met at a dinner party. When Lucy calls over Thanksgiving, he tells her he’s seeing someone. She spirals. Her friend Jackie finds out she lied about the Riviera trip, and the roommates fall out.
In the summer of twenty thirteen, CJ sends Lucy to a psychiatrist, Dr. Wattenbarger. He diagnoses clinical depression and starts her on medication. In therapy, Lucy hears Stephen described as narcissistic and sociopathic, and she promises to stay away.
That same summer, in a dark moment, she takes her great aunt Marilyn’s jewelry collection to a pawn shop, sells the best pieces for twenty thousand dollars, gives the cash away at a church, and throws the rest into the East River.
Big Bear
Stephen moves in with Alice and starts law school at NYU. In March twenty fourteen, he flies to California with his sister Sadie, supposedly to visit Baird, but really to see Lucy. She is dating a kind guy named Billy.
At a weekend in the mountains at Big Bear Lake, with a concert, glitter and ecstasy, Stephen kisses her, and they end up in bed in the same room as Sadie. Afterward, he says he is moving out of Alice’s place by June. She believes him.
New York
Lucy graduates and moves to New York, where she gets a sales job at a travel website called The Suitest and an apartment with Bree. Stephen meets her at a bar called, of all things, Lucy’s. And then he says he can’t move out until August.
He eventually dumps Alice in Washington Square Park and shows up at Lucy’s door with groceries. For a summer it looks like she has won. They spend weekends in the Hamptons. Stephen compares her to a BMW. He meets her friends. She skips her family dog’s final goodbye so she can go to his grandfather’s dinner.
Then, in October twenty fourteen, Stephen stops answering her texts, takes another girl to dinner, and breaks up with her in a bar.
The Frame
Between all of that, the book keeps jumping to the wedding in August twenty seventeen. Lucy is twenty-five, living in New York, still working in sales at The Suitest and still hating her boss. She is also seeing Dane, a surfer type who calls her babe and never pays her back for a hotel room.
She takes the train to New Jersey with a wedding gift and a size two dress she has to make work. Bree has moved in with Evan, the bridesmaids gather at his parents’ ivy covered house, and Jackie and Pippa fly in from Los Angeles.
All weekend, Lucy dreads seeing Stephen. At the ceremony, she finds him in the fourth row with a fiancée.
What Lucy learns from her mother after the breakup, and what she works out about a girl named Macy, I’ll leave for my ending video, because it deserves its own explanation.
Why It Works
The pattern repeats for four years. He apologizes, she forgives, and he finds a new reason she should wait. Each time, Lucy believes the next version of Stephen will be the real one.
Here is my opinion, and treat it as a draft: the book works because it lets you see both sides of a manipulative relationship, and Stephen’s chapters are chilling because he never thinks he’s the villain.
You can read the full timeline, and the book page, at bookexplained.com. Thanks for watching, and I’ll see you next time.
