A Lie Someone Told You About Yourself by Peter Ho Davies

Published by Sceptre Books

Available from All Good Bookshops and Online

A Lie Someone Told You About Yourself by Peter Ho Davies from Sceptre Books is a novel that not many of you may be aware of, but I was completely captivated by it when I read it recently. When I started to read it, I thought I would write an Instagram review, but sometimes you read a novel and the limited length of an Instagram post is not enough to convey what it meant to you and why you think lots of people should read it.

It is the story of a married couple, and the road they take to having a baby, as well as everything that follows. It is unusual in that it is written from the male perspective, but for me that was the very thing that drew me to this novel. I have read (and loved) so many books about parenting and motherhood, but they are mostly written from the female viewpoint, and I suppose I wanted to hear the other side of the experience.

A Lie Someone Told You About Yourself is a brilliantly observed and insightful novel about the realities of parenting and the shared experience and competitiveness that are unfortunately part of the everyday life of someone who has a child. The thing that stood out for me undoubtedly throughout reading this book is that this is really truthful and real about the choices and issues that arise when you become a parent.

The novel starts with the couple making the decision to have an abortion, after they discover the baby could have abnormalities. It really resonated with me, because I had to go through that after my son was born, he had to have genetic testing, which determined he had chromosome abnormalities. I really felt for the couple, and completely understood everything they were feeling and going through, because we had been through it too. It is coming to terms with the fact that there is nothing you could have possibly done, but at the same time you now have to navigate a world that you could never have anticipated.

This decision impacts on everything that happens afterwards, and when the wife (we never learn the couple’s names) falls pregnant again, all the same thoughts and fears are always present, and the parents wonder if they did the right thing choosing to have an abortion for their first pregnancy.
I thought it was also interesting to see how when the wife falls pregnant again and has to have a C section, how the mother is prioritised and so the dad has to work out where his place is. It makes you aware how the Mother understandably is the focus, but that the father’s experience is very different.

Peter Ho Davies also absolutely understands and totally conveys the relentless grind and mundanity of parenthood, how you function on so little sleep and how the baby takes over every single part of your life as you try to carry on. As the baby becomes a child, and they start school, there is the daily routine of cooking, cleaning, school runs, school admin as well as trying to cope with your own job, and you feel that your own identity becomes subsumed as you are known as someone’s mum or dad. However, what makes it all worth it, are the moments of pure unadulterated joy, the times when you feel that emotional connection with your child, and you forget everything else, and that is what is so perfectly related in this novel.

I also found it incredibly moving how the father and mother realise that their son is not like other children, and vacillate between wanting to try and find out whether there really are any issues, but at the same time want to protect him from the labelling and prejudice that determining an official diagnosis will bring. Understandably they want to wrap them in cotton wool and protect him from anything awful in the world, but at the same time they understand in finding out they have a way to access the help and support they need for their son.

The narrative is short and sharp, and there are so many lines and paragraphs that I wanted to underline and read again, because they are so perfect. The story of a marriage and the impact deciding to have a child has is something that will resonate with many readers, but it is also such a brilliant novel because it is a story of a marriage, and what happens over the years as you become so familiar with each other. It captures the time when you realise that this is what the rest of your life is going to be like, and that is something you can accept and embrace, or decide to make a change. The couple in the novel are at times very close, at times not communicating well and seem estranged from each other, but what underpins it all is the shared history and life they have lived, and the unspoken bond that holds them together as their child grows up.

I truly loved A Lie Someone Told You About Yourself for so many reasons. It articulates so perfectly what it means to be a parent; the constant worry, the small victories, the endless comparisons with other parents as to how they raise their children, and the fact that having children seem to entitle everyone to be able to publicly express their opinions about them. It is the most public and private, brilliant and difficult thing we will ever do, and we need more alternative narratives to broaden our understanding of what being a parent means for the fathers too.

Thank you very much to Sceptre Books for my gifted copy.