Book Review: The Lies That Bind

Synopsis:

At 2:00 a.m. on a Saturday night in May 2001, twenty-eight-year-old Cecily Gardner is alone in a dive bar on New York City’s Lower East Side. She’s questioning her life choices, and wondering if it was a mistake to break up with her longtime boyfriend, Matthew, a lawyer. Cecily is lonesome and homesick for her Wisconsin home and family, and questioning if she will ever make it as a reporter at a newspaper with more clout than The New York Mercury, where she is currently employed.

Just as Cecily is about to give in to the temptation to call Matthew, a stranger in the bar says, “Don’t do it — you’ll regret it.” For some reason, she takes his advice. And over the next several hours — and shots of tequila — they forge an unexpected connection.

They agree that should be the end of it. Cecily does not want to risk getting entangled in a rebound relationship. And their timing is horrid. Grant is preparing to quit his job in the financial industry and move overseas.

Despite the obstacles, Cecily and Grant can’t seem to say goodbye. Grant seems to be impossibly perfect, so for the first time in her carefully-orchestrated life, Cecily lets her heart lead, rather than her head.

But in the chaos of September 11, Grant disappears. When Cecily spots his face on a missing person poster, she discovers she’s not the only one searching for him. Her investigative reporting training and instincts compel her to search for the truth. How well did she really know Grant? Did he ever really love her? Is it possible to love a man who wasn’t who he seemed to be?

The Lies That Bind is an exploration of Cecily’s search for love and truth — in her relationships, career, and deep within her own heart.

Review:

Author Emily Giffin has published nine bestselling books, including Something Borrowed, Something Blue, First Comes Love, and All We Ever Wanted. Her tenth novel, The Lies That Bind, ponders how to recognize the person one is meant to be with, the consequences of choices, and the power of forgiveness.

Set in New York City against the backdrop of the events of September 11, 2001, it’s an exploration of two deeply flawed but well-intentioned people who, against all odds, manage to find each other and fall in love. And the ways in which their relationship is tested by timing, circumstances, and their own mistakes. Giffin says her writing is inspired by the power of major events like 9/11 “to cause us to sort of pause and step back, reflect and consider what we really want for our lives, from our lives, and what really matters to us.”

As the story opens, Cecily Gardner has just broken up with her longtime boyfriend, Matthew, because he refuses to take their relationship to the next level. She wants a commitment, promises, and a mapped-out future as a couple. Alone, sleepless, and second-guessing her decision, she ignores the advice of her best friend, Scottie, and ventures out to a grimy dive bar on the Lower East Side for a drink. Having left her cell phone in her apartment, she asks the bartender if she can use the land line and begins dialing Matthew’s number. But a voice behind her says, “Don’t do it.” She turns to see an extremely tall, attractive man with an amused look on his face. He repeats, “Don’t do it. Don’t call him.” As they strike up a conversation, he tells her, “He’s your ex for a reason. Onward.” They continue talking and by the time the bar closes, they have agreed not to exchange names. She nonetheless invites him to her apartment. It’s a reckless, out of character maneuver. “He could be a serial killer for all I know,” she reminds herself. “Didn’t they say Ted Bundy was good-looking? But for some inexplicable reason, it feels right.” They sleep together that night — fully clothed, never doing “the things that people do when they go from a bar to a bed together.” Rather, they just sleep with “my cheek on his chest, his arm around me, as if we’ve known each other forever.”

The next morning they exchange basic information, agree that they want to see each other again, and Cecily gives the enchanting, intelligent Grant Smith her telephone numbers. When she finally hears from him several days later, they begin spending time together, taking the physical aspect of their relationship very slowly. Grant insists he isn’t deliberately trying to be mysterious, but “I’m just going through some things right now . . . and I don’t want to bring you down or chase you away. . . . I mean, don’t they say timing is everything?” He tells Cecily he’s a Wall Street trader but is leaving his job to take his gravely ill twin brother, Byron, to England to participate in a clinical trial. They lost their mother to familial amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), better known as Lou Gehrig’s disease. His brother inherited the gene; Grant did not. And now he plans to devote himself to supporting his brother in the hope that the progression of the degenerative disease can be slowed. Cecily promises that she will wait for Grant, knowing how important it is that he spend time with and care for Byron. She even makes a trip to London with Scottie to visit and meets Byron. Grant returns to New York on September 10, 2011, and spends that night with Cecily, who still, despite all the conversations they have had and all the time they have spent together, does not know the name of the company where Grant is employed, the location of his office, or many other salient details about his life.

Secrets always turn into lies when they’re kept from the people we love.

Readers old enough to remember 9/11 may find Giffin’s portrayal of that day, from Cecily’s vantage point, painful reading. She is awakened by a frantic call from Scottie as he watches news coverage at his home in Wisconsin. As so many people did that horrible morning, he frantically asks Cecily, “Oh my God! Are you watching?” Cecily’s first-person narrative reflects the confusion, shock, disbelief, and utter despair that people around the world experienced as they observed two planes hit the World Trade Center, watched in stunned silence as people leapt to their death from the upper floors, and struggled to comprehend that those two 110-story buildings did, in fact, crumble before their eyes. Cecily joins her colleagues reporting the story on the streets, talking with survivors and gathering first-hand accounts as New Yorkers frantically search for loved ones who worked in the Towers. As the hours tick by, she becomes increasingly convinced that Grant must have worked there, too, because she is unable to reach him.

Cecily is assigned to cover a candlelight vigil the next evening in Washington Square Park, and it is there she discovers Grant’s fate. “Everywhere we look there are makeshift memorials – bouquets of flowers; burning candles and incense; chalk messages on the street and sidewalks; and endless placards with names and faces of the dead and missing. They are affixed to street signs and lampposts and construction fencing and the base of the statue of George Washington and the iconic stone arch itself. . . .The scene is as haunting and devastating as a hundred funerals in one public square, yet it is also one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen. . . . Love will win, I tell myself. I will find Grant, I tell myself. And then, just as Jasmine and I decide to leave to get a much needed drink, I see him. His face. His gorgeous eyes.” On a flyer with the word “MISSING” beneath his photo, along with a telephone number and a request for information about his whereabouts.

From there, the story’s focus is on Cecily’s quest for the truth about the man she loved. She employs her skills as reporter to investigate, crossing ethical boundaries in the process. She never stopped caring about Matthew — they remained in touch after breaking up — and after what she has been through, she reevaluates her choices yet again, and assesses her goals and priorities in the aftermath of losing Grant. She questions what matters most to her in a relationship, as more details about Grant come to light and she concludes that she never really knew him at all. She becomes obsessed with learning everything about Grant, her instincts telling her that there is still more to the story and, in the process, tipping precariously close to destroying everything she has worked for, even as her colleague and friend, Jasmine, reminds her, “The truth is the point. The truth is always the point.”

Giffin’s impeccable pacing propels the story forward as she injects shocking revelations and complications with dramatic effect. Cecily is forced, at every juncture, to make choices that will have far-reaching consequences for all involved. And she doesn’t always choose wisely. She keeps explosive secrets. In her quest for truth, she is frequently not truthful. Giffin observes that her “characters mess up, but I like to think that they all have within them this resiliency and this grit to do better and to get it right.” Cecily does mess up, but despite her shortcomings and limitations, she is inherently likable, even when employing a reprehensible approach to finding the answers she seeks. Her desperation is palpable and credible, and she is wracked with guilt about her tactics and the consequences. Grant and Matthew are revealed to be equally fallible — in starkly different ways. Cecily turns to her parents, brother, and Scottie for unconditional guidance and support sans judgment. In the process, Giffin believably illustrates how Cecily comes to terms with her own behavior. The different ways in which Giffin’s characters express love, and their individual capacities for growth and forgiveness feel authentic and keep the story interesting, even as Giffin’s over-the-top plot twists strain credulity. Through plot developments worthy of any great soap opera, Giffin challenges readers to ponder their own capacity to forgive. Does forgiveness depend on the nature of the act? The number of instances of bad behavior? The extent of the harm the behavior caused others? What kind of behavior is unforgivable? And how many lies are too many? Does lying about certain topics or events make the deceit unforgivable? Redemption also figures prominently in the story, as do the freeing power of atonement, and the blessings that flow in the form of second chances.

Giffin believes “you really have to find your authentic self before you can be happy and fulfilled in a relationship.” The Lies That Bind is an entertaining examination of Cecily’s search for genuine satisfaction, and her journey to becoming an empowered, confident woman who has learned much from her past, including that nothing is perfect but sometimes, despite all their imperfections, people really “are better together than we are apart.”

Excerpt from The Lies That Bind

chapter one

May 2001

It is sometime between one and two in the morning, and I am sitting alone in a grungy, graffiti-covered dive bar in the East Village. The vibe is mellow, the crowd as eclectic as the jukebox—a blend of rock and metal, punk and hip-hop. At the moment, Dido is crooning “Thank You,” the ballad I loved, then overplayed and tired of, which now just fills me with aching lonesomeness.

As I finish a pint of stout, I make eye contact with the bartender, a middle-aged, gray-haired man who is pleasant but not chatty. “Would you like another?” he asks with a hint of an Irish accent I didn’t notice before.

“Yes, please,” I say, then, against my better judgment, ask if they have a pay phone.

He tells me they do, but it’s out of service. I feel a wave of relief, until he hands me a cordless phone from behind the bar and says I’m welcome to use it if it’s not long distance. I stare down at the receiver, thinking that this is precisely why Scottie, my best friend since the first grade, told me to stay in and not drink. Batten down the hatches, he had coached me from our hometown of Pewaukee, Wisconsin, explaining that I wasn’t ready to be tested by a buzz.

I initially followed his advice, hunkering down on my secondhand slipcovered sofa to eat Thai takeout and watch the shows I’d been videotaping all week: Will & Grace and The West Wing, Frasier and Friends, Survivor and The Sopranos. Television, I’d discovered in the week since Matthew and I had broken up, had the numbing effect of alcohol without the obvious pitfalls, and it eventually lulled me to sleep, one step closer to the elusive promise of time healing all.

But sometime around midnight, after transferring from my sofa to my bed across my four-hundred-square-foot studio apartment, I snapped wide awake to a disjointed but decidedly R-rated dream featuring Matthew and Jennifer Aniston—or to be more precise, Rachel Green, who also happened to be cheating on Ross. Staring up at a water stain on my plaster ceiling, I told myself that it actually wouldn’t be cheating in our case—we were broken up, not “on a break”—but I still felt irrationally pissed, imagining Matthew with someone new, moving on before I could. Of course, the opposite could also be true. He could be staring up at his ceiling, missing me, too. Maybe he’d even caved and called me.

I reached for my cellphone on the nightstand, flipping it open, checking for a voicemail or even a missed call. Nothing. I got up, stumbled over to my desk, and stared into that damn red eye on my answering machine, taunting me with the reminder that I had No. New. Messages. The last step was to turn on my computer and check my AOL email and Instant Messenger—the portal where Matthew and I once communicated throughout our workday. Still nothing. That’s when the panic set in. Panic that I’d never be able to fall back asleep; panic that even if I did fall asleep, all that awaited me was a lonely Sunday morning; and most of all, panic that I would look back at this fork in the road as the biggest mistake of my life. That Matthew would become my One Who Got Away. The one I pushed away simply because I had no guarantee of a future with him.

Like an alcoholic holding a bottle of vodka, I ran my fingers over the keyboard, craving the familiar, asking myself what it would really hurt to say hello. I told myself not to do it. Not only because of pride, but because I didn’t want to go backward. The first week was surely the hardest. It had to get easier. I had to be strong. And that’s when I made the split-second decision to leave my apartment, get some fresh air, move away from my electronic instruments of self-destruction.

Within seconds, I was brushing my teeth, running a comb through my hair, and stripping off my T-shirt and ancient plaid flannel pajama pants. I rifled through my open hamper, pulling on a baby-doll dress and a black cardigan. Both pieces were wrinkled and smelled faintly of the greasy diner on Lexington Avenue where I’d eaten earlier that day, but I put them on anyway, figuring there was no point in wearing anything nice—or even clean—for a late-night stroll. Strategically leaving my cellphone behind, I grabbed my purse, threw on my Steve Madden platform slides, then headed out the door, locking up with keys attached to my University of Wisconsin nylon Velcro wallet, a vestige from grad school that Matthew once told me was “cute” and “so you”—which I now saw as a backhanded compliment. A you’re-not-quite-good-enough-to-marry kind of comment.

I walked down the narrow gray corridor, past neighbors I would never know, bypassing the claustrophobic elevator that I took only when carrying groceries—and almost never without imagining being trapped inside and slowly suffocating. The thwaps of my footsteps echoed as I descended four flights of the concrete stairwell to a doorman-less lobby so hideous that it should have been a deal breaker when I was apartment hunting. Three of the walls were covered in a trippy orange wallpaper; the fourth was smoke-mirrored—and not in a cool deco way, but in a depressing, dated way. I caught a glimpse of myself, the word frumpy coming to mind, a tough feat at age twenty-eight. But I looked on the bright side: My current appearance would serve as an insurance policy against “running into” Matthew—say, at the doorstep of his apartment.

Then I was outside, in the no-man’s-land between Gramercy and the East Village. As I inhaled the warm night air, I felt the slightest bit better, almost hopeful. After all, this was New York, the city that never sleeps. The possibilities were endless, and summer was coming. It was the feeling I’d had when I moved to the city four years ago—before I’d become jaded. How was it possible to be jaded in your twenties?

I headed east, in the opposite direction from Matthew’s Upper West Side apartment, but with no destination in mind. I considered stopping by the bodega on Second Avenue, which has the best selection of candy and magazines, but kept going, past Stuyvesant Square, then onto Fourteenth Street. Along some of the sketchier blocks, I contemplated digging into my purse for my pepper spray, but there were too many people out and about for me to really worry. It was a concept my parents didn’t grasp, their view of New York rooted in the seventies, back when the city apparently turned into a gauntlet of criminals after nightfall.

When I reached Avenue B, I couldn’t help but think of Rent, the musical that takes place in Alphabet City. It is an impossible ticket to come by—and ridiculously expensive—but Matthew had made it happen for my birthday. I felt a sharp pang of nostalgia and the beginning of a downward spiral, but I told myself to stay the course, literally and figuratively, just as I spotted a bar on the corner of Seventh and B, with Tudor-paned windows and a red castle-arched doorway. It looked promising—soothing even—and I ducked inside, taking a seat at the horseshoe-shaped bar.

And that’s how I got to this moment, staring at a cordless phone, nursing my second pint, listening to Dido go on and on about the best day of her life. My willpower crumbling, I pick up the receiver and begin to dial Matthew’s number. I get through all the digits except the last before I hear a deep voice behind me saying, Don’t do it.

Startled, I look over my shoulder and see a guy about my age, maybe a little older, staring down at me. He is tall—basketball player tall—with a five o’clock shadow and strong, dark features.

“What’d you say?” I ask, thinking I must have heard him wrong.

“I said, ‘Don’t do it.’ Don’t call him.” He is stone-faced, but something in his brown eyes looks amused.

Too dumbfounded to issue an outright denial, I say, “What makes you think I was calling a him?”

He shrugs, takes the stool next to mine, and says, “Well? Am I right?”

I shrug, fight a smile, and tell him yeah, he’s right.

“Who is he?”

“My ex.”

“Well. He’s your ex for a reason. Onward.”

I stare at him, speechless, thinking that it’s almost as if he’s a secret agent hired by Scottie to spy on me. Or maybe he’s my personal guardian angel, like Clarence in It’s a Wonderful Life.

Meanwhile, the bartender returns, and my new stool mate orders a Jack and Coke while gazing up at the wall of liquor partitioning the bar. “And . . . let’s see . . . two shots of Goldschläger.”

“Goldschläger?” I say with a laugh. “Didn’t see that coming.”

“I’m full of surprises,” he says. “And you look like you need it.”

I shake my head and tell him I don’t do shots.

“That’s a lie right there,” he says, smiling at me.