“Con Girl: Thirteen Years as a Serial Liar” by Karen Andrus
Finalist for memoir, 2020
I was quiet. I had not expected this.
“We need to talk,” I said, hearing my voice shake. Until this moment, telling lies was a way of life for me. I had invented a remarkable identity for myself. And now a man had fallen for that person and was proposing marriage.
• • •
My compulsive lying began in first grade when students were asked to stand in front of the class to describe their families. When my turn came, I claimed a family very different from the one I lived with, which consisted of an older brother, school teacher-parents , and a dog named Smokey. Instead I explained I had ten siblings, all but one of whom were older sisters. The names of the invented sisters spilled out without hesitation: Marilyn, Cherilyn, Eileen, Elaine, Arlene, Evelyn, Lee Ann, Shannon, and Sharon. I further noted that our back yard sheltered a giraffe, an elephant, a German Shepherd mix, and a goat.
I don’t remember ever being questioned about my fabricated history. It was thrilling to guide others’ perceptions of who I was. And I could be whoever I wanted to be.
In third grade I decided, for instance, to call myself a Catholic. In fact, no religion was present in my home. My mother was a non-practicing Jew, and my father, a non-practicing Unitarian. But after Catholic classmates shared that they were preparing for their first communions, I ached with envy. At slumber parties, I lusted after the first communion outfits on prominent display. The dresses were frothy with white lace, shrouded in protective plastic, and weighted with meaning. Before long, I began to offhandedly mention that I too was preparing for my first communion. And in case I was ever actually invited to a Catholic service, I carefully practiced the motions of the cross, and on Ash Wednesday, I smeared a little of my mother’s eyebrow pencil on my forehead.
In middle school I lost the bravado to lie, but in high school the behavior resumed. My new best friend was Anastasia, an even more accomplished liar than me. As freshmen we cut school to hitchhike to Santa Cruz. We masqueraded as European tourists. At fourteen I applied for a summer job at a cheese and wine shop, writing on my application that I was eighteen and therefore old enough to sell wine. The trusting owners nodded appreciatively in the fall when I explained that I was no longer be available during the day. My other job, I said, was at the community college, working as a TA in the philosophy department.
At seventeen, I left for Denmark to study art. After several months there, I was inspired to invest my Cheese Shop savings on an overland trip to Africa. In Kenya I met and fell for a fellow Californian. He was older than me, finished with his college education and rich in life experience. Unable to imagine he might be interested in me for my true seventeen-year-old-self, I spun an impressive autobiography which included that my father (a high school English teacher) was a professor of Medieval History at UC Berkeley, and that my mother (who taught English as a Second Language to adults for the county) was department chair of Linguistics at Stanford University. I modestly revealed that I was traveling during my ‘gap year,’ trying to decide between three schools courting me: Stanford, Yale, and Amherst. (In fact, I hadn’t even taken the S.A.T.)
My eminent back-story appealed to the Californian, and I celebrated my eighteenth birthday with him on the Indian Ocean. We spent the next year together traveling south of the equator before reaching South Africa, where we found work to pay for our passages home.
As it turned out, South Africa was the setting for a payment and a passage of another sort, and it was dispatched in the form of a wedding proposal.
• • •
“Will you say yes?”
“I am not who you think I am,” I repeated. My legs trembled as I felt blood drain from my face. I surrendered to the truth, regurgitating every lie I could think of having told him. For each disclosed deceit, another fabricated story powdered to dust. A residue of shame, regret and violated trust pooled into a stain of dishonor. By the time I finished, I was exhausted. Empty. There was nothing left to purge, nothing left to offer, nothing left of me.
I didn’t know then that nothing provides an opening to everything.
• • •
Forty years have passed since that cleansing moment. And while I can’t claim my life since then has been one of unadulterated honesty, my transgressions are no longer intentionally devious. I am still inclined to exaggerate. When numbers are involved, I usually round up. I may employ restraint to preserve a friendship, and in my career, I’ve learned diplomacy often trumps direct opinion. Sometimes things are best left unsaid. By and large, however, my important relationships are trusting and open. When clarity is the goal for everyone involved, I feel at peace. In forty years, I have not been compelled to fake it, and interestingly, I am astonished now when someone lies to me.
I’ve often thought about that fabulist time in my life, and have met others who’ve gone through something similar in their youth. I have considered that, since we were unpracticed in life, we may have lied to try on a persona or two. Or three or four. Maybe we did it to impress, to appear more important than we felt we were. Or maybe it was just to satisfy some devious appetite for watching unsuspecting listeners take us at our word. Did we need to see what we could get away with? Or, more likely, were we simply craving attention? I’ve lived long enough for some distance to fill the space between my lying self and who I am today. I’ve concluded that my lies were partly motivated by some combination of the factors I listed above. But mostly, I think I began to lie because I was born into a family of story-tellers who valued accomplishment. Great deeds and events were told and retold. I felt a certain pressure to be someone remarkable, someone about whom stories could be told. That meant I needed to make up something. The accounts that follow fill in the thirteen years I spent as a serial liar. Surprisingly, some bare truths surfaced now and then, which ultimately paved a bumpy road to an honest life.
Karen Andrus 