The Fake: a person with a story too tragic to be real?

The Fake by Zoe Whittall is a story of a con artist who explodes into someone’s life with an amazing story and leaves once the jig is up. After the death of her wife, Shelby feels so alone. Then she meets Cammie, a charismatic woman who lives uncaringly about the opinions of others and has her own tragic story. As their friendship grows, something about Cammie’s story doesn’t add up. Gibson is fresh from a divorce and deeply depressed as he faces his 40th birthday. One night, he meets Cammie and instantly falls in love. She brings a brightness to his life that has been lacking. Unfortunately, his friends are very wary of Cammie and even Gibson starts to realize that Cammie’s story could be too tragic to be real. When Shelby and Gibson discover that Cammie is a pathological liar, they struggle to understand why they believed her story in the first place and struggle with how to proceed. Do they help her heal from whatever causes Cammie to be such a liar? Or do they truly want revenge? 

The Fake is set up in an interesting format where we get 3 points of view: Shelby, Gibson and Cammie. We see the story upfold from Shelby and Gibson’s eyes and Cammie interjects to “defend” herself. It is an interesting look on how quickly we often take someone’s word for the story they tell us. It is also an interesting look into how people react, even after learning they have been lied to, they still want to help and befriend. Generally, people believe in the goodness of others despite evidence to the contrary. It is a situation we all have been in. Maybe not to the extreme that Shelby and Gibson experience, but how many times have we heard news stories of people defrauding the public for money with a sob story of extreme illness? As someone who has been taken in by someone’s sob story, only to discover some details aren’t exactly true, it was frustrating to see Shelby and Gibson so easily taken in. Understandable but I wanted to scream “be careful!” Overall, I enjoyed and recommend The Fake. 

The Fake is available in hardcover, eBook, and audiobook